Friday, September 23, 2016

The Mindless Misogyny

We go off to colleges and universities to study right? to learn what's out there, to get first hand knowledge from our teachers.

But there's just so much pressure on us by our parents or the society, that we are just constantly trying so hard to please people or trying to live upto their expectations.
I personally have seen alot of people pursuing fields they are not fond of, there are musicians I know who are just idk doing BBA for the sake of it, so many talented artists pursuing medical cuz well their parents wanted them to, but when some of us even have enough guts to stand up for ourselves and pursue what we've always wanted to do knowing all the consequences, and all we expect from our teachers is to respect us and believe in us when the rest of the world doesn't. 
And this stereotypical mindset of our Pakistani awaam nevers seems to change no matter how well anyone does in their field. 

Nowadays girls are going for careers that are mostly considered to be pursued by boys. There goes civil engineering, software engineering, animation, film-making, app developing and the list goes on. But then again why is it that we've labelled every profession in terms of gender. This gender segregation of occupations is really disrespectful at times, especially when you see it coming from your very own teacher.

And here I used to think teachers were supposed to motivate you more and more. 

Tell me one thing what amount of confidence would you be left with if your teacher who himself is in that very same field tries to pass on misogynistic comments in the class. 
No offense to all the teachers at all. I've come across some very good teachers as well and m more than grateful for having them in my life.

But well being someone who's really eager to learn animation, which involves alot of softwares and alot of technicalities, there's this mindset in people that girls aren't competent enough to learn all that. 
Take software engineering as an example, it involves coding, so this teacher said "aur larkion se toh coding hoti nai hai". I mean why on earth would a teacher pass on a misogynistic comment like that one. If that's how we are dealt with in classrooms what can we expect from the people in that very industry.

Then there is another teacher I recently encountered, so while taking introductions there were 5 girls from animation, when we told him our majors, he retorted "oh acha *in a judgmental tone* tou animation samajh ajati hai aapko? *asks sarcastically*

Another teacher from the business department once said "what would the girls do with a business degree other than get married and cook gol rotis".

I'm an entrepreneur who happens to run a home-based online bakery and an animation student and trust me when I say this, nowadays most of the homebased businesses are being run by females.
Varah Musavvir, the girl behind the brand Firefly,  holds 3 successful craft exhibitions every year in which more than 100 brands participate, most of which are run by young girls and women.

And this is not the first time and I'm not the only one who has felt this way. At times you don't look up to your parents for motivation because there's just too much pressure, you look up to your teachers every morning when you pull yourselves out of your bed in order to learn something new in the class. And when you get to hear all this it really leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
I mean you are in the 20th century for god's sake, open your minds a little bit.
If that's the kind of teachers we will now be seeing in our classrooms then I don't know where are we heading to. 
   

No comments:

Post a Comment