Women Vilification Essay

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This year’s teej -- when we deck up, sing, dance and fast to forget our tribulation -- is behind us. However, women’s vilification by men – and some manly women – is not. Absurd as it is, it also stands against the basic tenets of democracy and free market.

This year, absurdity reached a new height. A manly woman minister exhorted women to tamp down teej and sell their jewelry to invest in power projects. The anti-graft body, CIAA, warned women to curtail teej parties or face the consequences under the Social Conduct Reform Act (SCRA) 2033 BS. Police advised women not to wear or show ornaments in public, rather than promising them security.

People wear ornaments to show, not to hide.

That is not all. Even the Pashupati Area Development …show more content…

It is sexist, because those vilifying women are mostly men, the very men who shamelessly party and gamble round the year. You don’t demonize men who rape, murder, gamble, or engage in corruption. Why do you humiliate women for celebrating teej to forget their sufferings for a while? Don’t they have right to enjoy, as men do?

It is anti-democratic. In a democratic society, government has no business interfering in the private life of individuals and families until a crime or threat of crime has taken place. Spending money on your daughter or son’s marriage, on your teej celebration, on your children’s education and treatment as much as you wish, do not constitute a threat of crime or a crime for government to poke its nose.

It is also anti-human rights. Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says, government should not arbitrarily interfere with the privacy, honor and reputation, among other things, of anyone. Article 18 of the Declaration says, everyone should have the right to freedom of thought and religion, including in teaching, practice, worship and observance in public or …show more content…

Some spend their fortunes on education, health or festivals, while others don’t. However, my marriage was simple, even though my parents and my husband come from the middle class. We invited much less people than the 51 guests allowed by the law. We spent only a fraction of what others spend on their marriage. We didn’t imitate others.

Therefore, the Social Conduct Reform Act should be scrapped. Our leaders don’t obey it and others, who live within their means, don’t need it. The Act is a legacy of the feudalistic Panchayat days, when you could not build a house taller than the royal palace around it, could not ride better cars than the royalties, and could not spend more on weddings, teejs and other festivals than the royal family did. It should have been abandoned with the monarchy itself.

In a normal free-market democracy, government does not tell people how much they should spend on teejs or weddings, what they should wear, which cars they should ride, and where they should send their kids to school. Such prescriptions are redolent of the authoritarian North Korean government, not of a democratic

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