Looking Beyond Physicality-International Women’s Day 2011 Plea

Women, for long have been a buffoon puppet of the media and entertainment. As a gratifying toy, women have mainly been recognized as an object of seeking pleasure by pulling their psychological and physiological strings. Women, more often have been recognized for their physicality and least for their inner beauty. The media portrayal of women today is nothing less than an active and passive eroticization that often leads to a desire for voluptuous figures and augmentations in young girls, an accession sadly not of their intellectual and emotional self, but more often of their physical self. Billboards, magazines, video games, music videos, internet and even sometimes in movies, people love to see women unclad. As a poster girl, physicality of a woman displays her audacity to bare it all in public, showing a gallantry for fame that’s not far away from shame. From a velvet image in the past, women today have been incited to arousals, real or fake, who cares? The fact of the matter is that women are being used and sometimes even violated to animate passionate emotions and media largely has been the impetus to it.  What then is the consequence of such consummation? Is it dignity alone that’s at jeopardy or does it hurt conscience too? Does this portrayal influence our value systems and family integrity? Or is it giving a wrong message to a docile child next door? Most importantly, is it in any way affecting our social systems? The answers to these questions may not have one possible solution, as many would have differing perspective on this issue. The idea of this post, however, is not just to seek solutions. But to raise concern for covert and restricted opportunity structure that women exist in and for the innumerable overt ways their talents are judged.  

Also, one of the many fall-outs of an inappropriate media message is abuse and sexual violence against women that inadvertently leads to annihilation of positive emotions. In the pursuit of objectification, how different is the sex trafficking trade that causes illegal physical gratification and immoral manifestation? To what extent can the brothel businesses that so graciously put an innocent girl on sale be ruled out from their glooming, yet ever growing flesh trade? Moreover, is objectification of women concoction of a stark expression that lacks subjectivity? These are few stances that need to be uncovered and emphasized as we usher into a new epoch marked by the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day 2011. To achieve the goals of equal access for women in  science & technology, education and training, and providing decent work requires United Nations to uplift women in general, including the one's trafficked and those who have suffered turmoil in trenches, so that tomorrow when we look at a woman, we can look beyond her gender and her physical appeal. 

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