She had a smiling face, which gave no hint of the cold, dark thoughts her mind harboured, or the bitter feelings her heart nurtured. 'Is a person individually responsible for what he or she becomes, or is this 'becoming' an outcome of all the interactions and relationships one enters into?' the question popped up for the hundredth time. She was inclined to take responsibility for the fiercely independent mind she had developed as an antidote to the parasitic tendencies (that went hand-in-hand with a lot of drama) that she'd been dealing with all these years. But her mind refused to accept responsibility for the icy hardness that had crept into her heart.
When a man can exercise his ingenuity in inventing excuses for shirking work and all that it entails, making himself totally insensitive to the woman's need for a decent life sans oppressiveness, can you wonder why the oppressed and exploited woman becomes cold and hard-hearted?
'All men, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favorite. They have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds into "willing" rather than "forced" slavery. The oppressed are silenced. A deeper level of silencing occurs through indoctrination - they are taught by oppressors that their role is normal and a fact of life.'
Do you think all oppressors are always strong, powerful people who misuse their strength over the weak? No. Today's oppressor, in the garb of husband, can be of a totally different kind – oppressing the woman through his dependence on her. Dependent, yet an oppressor? Yes – for the weapon such a man uses, is his imagined helplessness in which he takes comfort, targeting the weakness of the woman - her gullibility. Oppression is carried on through a mute stubbornness in not standing on his own feet to take care of himself; leaning on the woman and oppressing her through his sickening enactment of helplessness; through the matter-of-factness with which he takes the woman's services for granted, treating it as his right and expecting her to work for him till she dies. (After all, what can he do if she was unfortunate enough to make an entry into this world, and then into his life, with just such a fate?)
And so the icy coldness creeps in, hardening the heart...
Oppress me not with constraints on my attention and thought
Oppress me not with checks on what I ought and what I ought not.
Oppress me not with pleas for attention and pity
Oppress me not by crushing me with negativity.
Oppress me not by wallowing in the past
Oppress me not by spelling out intentions that do not last.
Oppress me not with an eye that follows my every move
Oppress me not by confining my movements to the groove.
Oppress me not with a check on my magnanimity
Oppress me not by curtailing each and every activity.
Oppress me not by depriving me of my dignity
Oppress me not by turning me into a means of utility.
