Pressures of being a woman: Why Cynthia Nixon's video was necessary even today

In a recent video former Sex and The City star, Cynthia Nixon recites a poem about how women have always been told what they can or cannot do. The pressures to be the perfect women as shown in the video is immense with society sending out mixed signals. “Be a lady they said. Your skirt is too short. Your shirt is too low. Your pants are too tight. Don’t show so much skin. Don’t show your thighs. Don’t show your breasts,” are other some of the lines from the poem written by Camille Rainville. 

The video that originally released on Vimeo on February 23 talks about the nearly impossible standards society sets on how a woman should look and behave. “You need to lose weight. Fit into that dress. Go on a diet. Watch what you eat. Eat celery. Chew gum. Drink lots of water. You have to fit into those jeans. God, you look like a skeleton. Why don’t you just eat? You look emaciated. You look sick. Eat a burger. Men like women with some meat on their bones,” Cynthia recites. The actor who played the spirited and ambitious lawyer Miranda Hobbes on the TV show goes on to say how the onus of a woman's safety rests on her as well. “Be a lady they said. Don’t get raped. Protect yourself. Don’t drink too much. Don’t walk alone. Don’t go out too late…Just ‘be a lady’ they said,” she narrates in the video. The video was made in collaboration with 'Girls. Girls. Girls', a US-based magazine. But why was it necessary?  

Women undergo the monthly bodily function of menstruation every month. And yet, there have been absurd sayings and practices around the phenomenon. Menstruating women aren't supposed to cook; they should not touch the pickle jar or they will bleed more— these beliefs around menstruation are just the tip of the iceberg. Menstruating women are still given separate utensils to eat in, made to sleep in separate bedding, prevented from entering the kitchen or a temple in several villages in India.

While it isn't clear when the practice originated, women in nearly all cultures are isolated during their periods. In Hinduism, it was asserted as a period of rest. While Christianity called menstruation impure, it did not call for women to be isolated. While Sikhism viewed menstrual blood to be sacred, Judaism too, considered women to be impure during menstruation and were isolated.

However, with time and with inventions like sanitary napkins and tampons, these practices became obsolete and unnecessary even. But, communities around the world still practice them. It is one of the reasons why several women still sleep on their verandah or a hut outside the house for 'those days of the month'. This is why A 14-year-old girl in India died when a cyclone struck the town of Thanjavur. She was asked to stay alone in a hut as she was on her period, a coconut tree fell on her head and she succumbed to the injury.

Swami Krushnaswarup Dasji of Swaminarayan Temple in Bhuj on February 18 said that women who cook food for their husbands when they are menstruating will be reborn as bitches. The statement was in line with an ongoing controversy in the state of Gujarat, where women from the Sahjanand Girls Institute were asked to remove their underwear, so that authorities could check if they were menstruating. Upon further investigation, the police came to know that girls who were on their periods weren't allowed to dine with other students, were made to sleep in the basement and provided separate utensils for their meals.

If you think the restriction of movement during menstruation is weird, women from certain regions of Kenya wear skirts made from goatskin to trap the blood and wash it off discreetly with the help of ghee or clarified butter made from cow's milk. Some women in Zambia use dried cow dung wrapped in cloth instead of sanitary napkins. In another part of Zambia, women simply use cotton lint wrapped in a cloth to hold menstrual blood. In certain parts of Uganda, women dig a hole in the ground and sit on it till menstrual blood is drained for the day— this essentially lends her immobile for the entire duration.

It makes one wonder if men are merely using menstruation as a tool to denigrate women or 'put them in their place' as torch-bearers of patriarchy would have it. Why is society so hesitant to let women be and so keen to put them in boxes or try and tame them with absurd rules?

The message could not be more clear— women need to be a certain way so that the men around them do not feel threatened. According to the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) data for 2017-18, female participation in the workplace is a mere 23 per cent. According to Grant Thornton's Women in business: Beyond policy to the progress report, women in leadership positions had increased from 17 per cent in 2017 to 20 per cent in 2018. But even with this, India ranked among the fifth lowest when it came to the representation of women in top leadership positions.

The numbers are not promising globally either. In North America, 31 per cent of women held senior roles, in Latin America, it is 25 per cent and in the European Union, it is 28 per cent. So, while we might 'hurrah' leaders like Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel, former British prime ministers Theresa May and Margaret Thatcher; President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen or President of the European Central Bank Christine Lagarde, the road to gender equality is a long one.

For one, India has not seen a female Prime Minister since Indira Gandhi, The US has never had a female President, Kim Campbell, Canada's only female prime minister served only for four months in 1993. Brazil too had only one female president, Dilma Rousseff, who held office from 2010 -2014. Whereas Japan, The Netherlands and Belgium have never had a female head of the state.

Sure, change is taking place, but even then, society continues to put women around them down in numerous ways. Politicians and world leaders have time and again made sexist statements. In a June 2016 speech, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan likened a childless woman to “half a person” and said, “A women who rejects motherhood, who refrains from being around the house, however successful her working life is deficient, is incomplete.” In March 2017, a European Parliament member, Janusz Korwin-Mikke, asserted that “women must earn less than men because they are weaker, they are smaller, they are less intelligent.” 

In 2014, in the run-up to elections in the state, Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav opposed capital punishment for rape, saying "ladke ladke hain, galti ho jati hai (boys will be boys, mistakes can be made)." 

And so, even though a group of women in Delhi celebrated a small win on Tuesday by hosting a menstruation feast, lot more needs to be changed. Not just regarding menstruation taboos, but how, women on the whole, are subjected to wildly unreasonable standards to be perfect versions of themselves.