By Yudhanjaya Wijeratne β. One of them is a work colleague who helped me pick out a shirt for a wedding the other day. She could barely make it across the road to Liberty Plaza without two men following her. A woman is raped every 90 minutes? To test this, a friend and I walked for about a kilometer along Thimbirigasyaya. Then we backtracked, with her walking about 50 meters ahead and me following, and I watched.
It was disturbing. It is the look you would give when you could either eat someone or kill them, and not necessarily in that order. None of this is normal. And the worst part is that this comes from not just the drug addicts and frustrated schoolboys and random seedy tuk drivers; it comes from almost everyone β from that man who looks like he stepped out of the CEB to that boy who looks like he works at a tech company.
Put it this way: if it was us guys in that situation, every single street in this would have at least a couple of fights breaking out across. What gives? Consider our public education system, which basically involves thousands of boys cooped up with other boys for twenty years and suddenly let loose upon the world.
Interaction is usually limited to a homogeneous gang of hormonal schoolboys making weird noises at an equally homogenous gang of schoolgirls. I wish. I was just busy leeching chemistry notes off them. The girls I knew had better handwriting than the boys and I was damned if I was going to spend hours trying to decipher rushed scrawls. Thus, the men have free license to ogle this strange species of object that they must someday take to bed and provide for, and the women resign themselves to their fates without once questioning their mothers and fathers and all the ripe idiots who feed them this tosh.
Sexual admiration is part and parcel of society. People looked and went on. But it is true that within a small community, you get much less of the leering and the rapey faces. It will take a couple of generations of determined protest to upend this state of affairs.
