Female medical students not wishing to talk to a man about menstruation.
The fatalistic, egotistical and selfish attitude epitomised by women being unconcerned about losing their uterus. And of course, if you don't care about your own uterus, you're unlikely to care about litter, the environment, or pretty much anything.
(ps, as someone who has spent a lot of time in India and whose parenta are Indian, this fatalistic selfishness isn't a gender based issue. It is, however, one of the corrosive elements of Indian culture that worries me).
But menstruation itself is a very big taboo in most parts of India. It's a subject only discussed among women for many reasons.
In many traditional Indian families, the women are not allowed to many daily household tasks while menstruating. This includes cooking, cleaning, performing religious rituals, etc. In many cases they aren't allowed to enter certain parts of the home at all.
To me, that belief system has to change, and it is a gender based issue.
I grew with Indian parents and now I have two daughters. The thought of them growing up with these taboos and feelings about their own bodies is something I'm strongly against.
My female friends (and girlfriend) are all okay with saying they need to pee. However, they will never say something like "I need to change my tampon". If they do, it will be directed at 1 person in hushed tones and because they're out or something.
Isn't that just courtesy? I've found the topic tends to really gross guys out (much as uniquely . . . male things gross out girls), so it's best avoided in mixed company.
The fatalistic, egotistical and selfish attitude epitomised by women
I wouldn't be so quick to judge. If you're a woman in India and a strange man asks you to try something weird that could potentially harm your body, I think you have every right to be suspicious of that person.
this fatalistic selfishness isn't a gender based issue. It is, however, one of the corrosive elements of Indian culture that worries me
I agree that Indians are incredibly selfish in certain ways, especially when you look at their actions through the lens of western cultural practices, but this is probably not a good example of that.
"According to Sumathi Dharmalingam, a housewife who runs a napkin-making business based around the machine, rural women [snipped] have a devil-may-care attitude about their health. "When I caution them that they might have to have their uterus removed because of reproductive infections, they just say, 'So what? How long are we going to live anyway?'
She's basically asking these women to use napkins instead of "dirty rags, newspapers, dried leaves, or even ashes".
I'm looking at it through the lens of someone born in India, who has lived in India, whose parents still live in India, but who no longer does. It's certainly possible that I'm displaying some of the reverse-racism and cultural arrogance I've seen in other NRI / PIOs when discussing India.
It is ignorance not selfishness. You are looking at these women from the lens of someone who can probably not fathom the level of ignorance amongst the poor uneducated folks in India. If they really understood what it is to lose a uterus, and they believed this random stranger that this would happen, they would be much more open to the idea of using a napkin.
As things stand, these women and all generations before them have been using rags. They really can't imagine why they need this new fangled thing called a napkin. Worse, it is very likely a choice between this new fangled thing they don't think they need, and having a bit less food tonight. In that context, it's obvious why they choose to go with the rag.
People don't care about the environment when they've got more important issues like food, shelter and safety to worry about. Fuck the environment! Help the people.
My dad grew up in Bangladesh (a country of many rivers). When he was young, fish were plentiful in the waters around where he lived. Americans eat maybe a few kinds of fish, but in his culture they had dozens of different kinds as part of the cuisine (because of its abundance). As intensive farming practices took hold in the 1970's and 1980's, the fertilizer run-off got into the rivers and killed many of the fish, and destroyed the diversity of the fish stocks. When talking about the success of the agricultural methods, of course, nobody ever accounts for the loss of that important food source in the overall calculus.
The point of the story is that yes, people should care about things like food, etc, before the environment. But at the same time, environmental degradation dramatically affects your ability to secure food, shelter, and safety. E.g. it is thought that the Indus River valley civilization declined because of ecological collapse. The costs of environmental degradation on human well-being are diffuse and often indirect, which means it's easy to completely discount them, whereas a rational analysis would factor them in fully into cost-benefit analyses.
This is particularly true at a time when clean water is becoming a crucial resource world-wide. The western world can afford high-tech solutions to clean up water, but the developing world cannot. For their own well-being, people in places like India would do well to be deadly-serious about keeping their water clean to begin with.
The fatalistic, egotistical and selfish attitude epitomised by women being unconcerned about losing their uterus
I agree that it's fatalistic. But it's the opposite of egotistical and selfish. People with healthy egos generally care a lot about whether they will their lose organs, or their lives. The women in question apparently don't. From the article: 'So what? How long are we going to live anyway?'.
And maybe their lives suck so much that this attitude is understandable.
When there are so many worries in the present, many people would not really care about problems that might come in the future. You can call it a kind of de-sensitivity to worries due to over exposure to them.
Female medical students not wishing to talk to a man about menstruation.
The fatalistic, egotistical and selfish attitude epitomised by women being unconcerned about losing their uterus. And of course, if you don't care about your own uterus, you're unlikely to care about litter, the environment, or pretty much anything.
(ps, as someone who has spent a lot of time in India and whose parenta are Indian, this fatalistic selfishness isn't a gender based issue. It is, however, one of the corrosive elements of Indian culture that worries me).