When respect is missing

Bickering at best while kayaking in Tangalle 

 I recently witnessed something that I absolutely detest. I was just a guest of a guest, so it wasn’t my place to intervene. And because it was between a husband and a wife, I felt it wasn’t my business to interfere anyway.

They were in their mid to late 60s, already grandparents, which means almost four decades together. The husband wanted the wife to handwrite an official letter. I was in the background, minding my own work, but I could still see what was happening.

She sat down to write, and from the very first line until she finished, the man criticized everything. He commented on her handwriting, her wording, and her language. Some of his comments were painfully harsh, such as: “Have you not been to school? Do you not know how to write a letter?”

It was incredibly awkward. Arguments and disagreements between partners are normal. My partner and I bicker all the time, and that is just part of life. But putting your partner down in front of another person for something so trivial is unacceptable. My mind was raging, but I avoided making eye contact with the woman because the last thing I wanted was to make her feel even more embarrassed. I pretended to stay busy and unaware of the conversation. It felt like the most respectful thing I could do at the time.

This incident stayed with me the entire day. It still makes me angry when I think about it. And it reminded me of how often women, including myself, get mocked for our skills even when nothing is wrong. Some men, and even some women, criticize women without ever considering the impact.

I used to think this was mostly an older-generation problem shaped by patriarchy. Millennials and younger generations seemed more aligned with equality. But society still carries leftovers from the past, and they show up in small and unpleasant moments like this.

I remembered something from my first real job at 21. I was the only girl in a group of men. One boy, just a couple of years older, was friendly enough, but every now and then he would make comments that put women down. One ‘joke’ I still remember was when he said he would not ask me to take a screenshot because I might try to put the monitor on the scanner and that it’s how girls do it. At that age, I already knew that arguing with someone who talks like that was pointless.

Luckily, the boys and men from my childhood never made me feel less because I was a girl. My cousins did not enjoy playing cricket with me only because I could not survive even one over with their bowling speed, which was fair enough. My father was the only one who slow-bowled so I could actually hit the ball. Other than that, they always treated me as an equal, let me join whatever mischief they were into, and never made me feel like I did not belong. I am still grateful to them and to the women and men who raised them to think that way.

But that same confidence they gave me became a disadvantage later. In my late teens and early twenties, a lot of women could not stand me because I was considered too manly. And many men did not find me attractive because I was not girly enough. Apparently, society taught all of us that independence and confidence are masculine traits. Thankfully, by my mid-twenties, I found my people, both men and women who did not care about masculinity or femininity and respected me simply as an individual.

But every now and then, I still run into people who do not know how to respect someone, whether a woman or a man, for who they are. And it frustrates me every single time. I am still unsure whether it is worth fighting people with that mindset, but silence is not the way forward either.