i recently had a striking conversation about mass suicide by women during war.
“Jauhar, sometimes spelled Jowhar or Juhar, was a Hindu Rajput practice of mass self-immolation by women and girls in the Indian subcontinent to avoid capture, enslavement, and rape when facing certain defeat during a war” (wikipedia).
The above quotation accurately sums up the topic of the conversation we were having. Through this discussion, another topic arose. the battle of the sexes. a few things became notable to me, there is still so much that we as a population need to do to change the current narrative. In recent years, it has quite literally become a battle between men and women, there’s an extremist presence on either side, I will not deny, but it led me down a steep rabbit hole.
every emotion, feeling, and sentiment from one side, has a counterargument from the other side, and as I’ve mentioned before, there is a disturbing lack of empathy present in our world. a disproportionate misunderstanding of emotion. it’s sad really. But after this conversation, my phone seemed to have listened to it all. almost every piece of media that was popping up on my phone was uncovering some new statistic, experiences and tribulations that women had experienced by men. One video that I went back to look at again truly horrified me. It was about a group/chat forum that was uncovered in a German investigation. 70 thousand men were found in the chat forum discussing and teaching each other the best practises of raping, drugging, and assaulting women. There are many articles about it online, but hearing this story terrified me, but there was a worse sickly feeling I had deep down, why wasn’t I surprised?
growing up, new stories surrounded us on the horrors against women from our youngest days. i saw another comment on a story which said, “death, is by far, not the worst thing that can happen to a woman”. this hit me deeply.
out of curiosity, I decided to go onto the men’s rights subreddit and read some posts there. What I found quite interesting was that in response to many of the posts, there were many responses that state the shared idea that men do not care about men’s rights enough. this was striking to me.
The world scares me, I’m scared to bring life into a world that is so angry and hurt. Often, I sit and ponder over how beautiful our world is and how much beauty it offers us. How just a walk in nature or sitting by a creek can completely change the course of our day. I am amazed by the beauty of our earth, from the mountains and the stars and the oceans and the sand and the animals and the fruits and every blessing we have been given. yet so much hate, there is so much hate here. and that hate has the possibility of burning and decimating all that we find dear. and that to me is terrifying.
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