If a boxing match took place between a man and a woman, who would you side with?
Amid pulling hair, breaking bones, swinging left and right and turning black and blue, who do you assume would throw a hell of a right punch, kick the hardest or get knocked out first?
Regardless of who you’d bet your buck on, the winner of such a fight would ultimately prove one thing: Who had the upper hand in that particular contest and nowhere else.
Regardless of who you’d bet your buck on, the winner of such a fight would ultimately prove one thing: Who had the upper hand in that particular contest and nowhere else.
Knowing that each confrontation has its own premise, whoever walks out alive from any brawl, may it be man, woman, child or animal, says nothing about the group it represents. Thinking that the particular (a certain individual) would offer insight regarding the majority (a gender) and can thus be stereotyped is a serious generalization. Me losing a Judo contest to a male competitor does not make women inapt anymore than guys should be considered clumsy if I beat one of them at a round of Pool. Therefore, the virtual battle of the sexes is impossible; which man VS which woman? A trained soldier? An obese couch-potato? Who are we talking about?
Ultimately, winning comes down to the individuals themselves and their personal merit as opposed to their gender.
However, this by no means justifies the allegation and the use of terms such as “weaker sex”, simply because weakness is not a classification (as no classification can ever be made), it is an accusation. One woman is enough to debunk the theory that females cannot fight as ferociously as men or become high-ranking officials. For this reason, this appellation is discriminatory towards half of the earth’s population as it relies solely on unfounded claims to attribute certain characteristics to women. The worst part is, it is acceptable in our language.
Assuming that this discriminating speech is a rare occurrence nowadays gravely misses the point. A society’s language and colloquial terms are its mirror, they project its “un-thought” and the collective consciousness which binds it together; there’s more to it than what meets the ear, so to speak. Knowing that our reflections are encoded in the expressions we use and having these trait associated to women, testifies to this segregation, especially in the Arab World. The worst part is that these thoughts get transmitted via communication without being second-guessed and saying that women are “nawa3em” or “al Jens al Latif “denote a certain attitude which individuals may not have or want to have.
The tool in the hands of each and every one of us is the conscious step to challenge the baggage of words that we received from the generation before us and better monitor the adjectives we associate to one another. A word is never just a word. It almost always reveals more than we mean or want it to, regardless of who uses it.
Written by Haneen H / Edited by Mazen Zahreddine
