After Khap Panchayat’s comment on ‘eating chowmein can cause rapes’, Bihar Panchayat ‘banning cell phones for girls’ and Akhil Bharti Hindu Mahasabha prohibiting wearing short skirts, dresses and tight clothes for women, we now have a meme titled ‘A Bad Girl’ getting popular on Facebook, Twitter and Reddit.
This meme looks like a chart or a poster from young children’s study books and mentions 12 characteristics that define a ‘typical Indian bad girl’. And yes, you will be shocked to know them!
Look at the picture below that ridicules the supposedly ‘bad’, nefarious qualities in an Indian girl. Looking at this meme, it seems all modern girls are ‘bad’, rather all girls are ‘bad’. The picture purports that being a girl is bad because according to the picture, if you have breasts, you are bad. There are some other characteristics that define such women according to the meme that though appears as a spoof but supports a probable chance of being propagated by people believing in such hypocritic blather. Making a pout in front of what seems a camera mobile phone in the picture, inability to make round rotis, roaming around in open hair, eating more or eating less, all is categorized under this picture as the attributes of ‘a bad girl’ or ‘ek buri ladki’.
Bad Girl Meme
This comes after St. Stephens college, Delhi University made a move to offer a course to make Delhiites better citizens of the country! What an irony!
India is already a witness to massive gender discrimination and here comes more spice to add to the mixture. Though the source for this meme is not known till now, however it seems that the picture/chart is part of children books and is prescribed by the present education system.
The patriarchal society has already dictated rules and terms for female behaviour and attributed a certain kind of behaviour to being ‘bad’, ‘spoilt’ or even ‘characterless’. This meme is another proof of the male hegemony or rather a corrupt mind-set that cannot see women being at par with men.
The characteristics in the meme that is probably being meted out to children as part of the education system may put to shame the idea of feminism itself, let alone the people who have raised liberal movements and the like. The picture identifies ‘a bad girl’ to any activity from watching porn to visiting Goa to ‘letching’ at guys, (which can’t be even possible as there is no such word in the dictionary) to even smoking and drinking and wait, even falling in love in the park-how would anyone come to know if a girl is falling in love in the park or has fallen in love in the park? Or would a girl and a boy meeting in park be termed as falling in love in a park?
It couldn’t have got any more ridiculous than this!
The tweets are surely amazing where some have said that ‘all girls are good….until they are caught’ and ‘Good girls make round rotis.’ Bad girls make botis of those who don’t make round rotis.’ One has even gone to claim that most Indian boys are good girls as they don’t have breasts and can’t make round rotis.
If this is what the education ministry is dishing out, what more can we expect from the citizens of the country, the law and order system and at the end of it, the political leaders when it comes to rapes and women-related crimes!
What a shame!
