EMPOWER Malaysia organised a writing competition to encourage the wider public to "Break the Silence", for themselves & others. This is one of the top entries, written by L.Y. Rinn.
dress appropriately and cover yourself up and
do not walk alone when the sun sets and never
step foot in bars and pubs and clubs and – the list is
endless.
why is it that the world we have a birthright to
does not belong to us?
i was fifteen when i was first catcalled: confusion
ensued. i upheld ‘dress appropriately’ like the gospel,
so why me / why fifteen / why but i was wearing
long sleeves long pants / why? i did not understand
i do now. to them, attire is nothing but an excuse
and catcalling is nothing but a rite of passage into
womanhood and woman’s only purpose
is to be passive audience to her objectification.
(i was not woman, i was child. many of us were.)
the senile leaders of our beloved, backwards nation
are too busy formulating a guide on how to be a perfect
woman: wife equals doraemon equals husband-pleaser;
and frivolous, fancy concepts like sexual violence
and assault are but mere inconveniences. behold malaysia –
land of child marriage and female circumcision, land
where rape jokes are just jokes and where police mock
victims for how they were dressed when harassed.
(if you are not a perfect victim, then you are not a victim at all.)
but let us rejoice, and bask in the comfort of our
puritanical beliefs as we’ve always done. let us
continue to glorify ‘suci hingga berumah tangga’
like we always have, because non-virgin women
are dire threats to fragile, glass-frail masculinity –
and god forbid we make men’s strawberry hearts shatter.
from the way the boys at my university demonise non-virgins,
you’d think the vagina of a non-virgin woman is an
eldritch horror: abyssal maw gaping, sopping wet
in hunger, lurking in wait
to devour its next innocent victim.
we have failed to protect women when the body count
of a woman in bed holds more weight in discussion than
the body count of women dead to violence. we are
complacent in the prevalence of victim blaming when
crop tops and butt shorts are the target of witch hunts
more so than rapists and assaulters. we have
failed, failed, failed.
my question still awaits an answer that lies
under your tongue, courses through your veins
and slips through the spaces between your ribcage
to rest
in the hollow of your heart:
why is it that the world we have a birthright to
does not belong to us?
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