Refresh, and rethink woman’s identity

The recent reactions over leaked photos of Rafiath Rashid Mithila is not just about our faulty ideas of morality, it is also rooted in our distorted idea of womanhood that teaches women to reject their bodies and ignore their very existence.

We tend to over idolise women; we are comfortable in tagging them as a mother, a sister, a wife, a goddess, superwoman, anything but a regular person. A woman's pain threshold has to be higher and she has to excel in everything that she does.  

This is why it is so hard for us to digest that the perfect CGPA holder Mithila, a powerful actor, singer, successful professional and a mother can have a personal life, something she is entitled to completely.

To respect and understand her personal life we need to stop idolising the unreal concept of women as supernormal beings and accept her as a human being.

Despite severe backlash from fans, Mithila has taken legal action against perpetrators who hacked into the Facebook account and leaked those pictures.

The actual picture of how women are, what are their desires, their afflictions, ambitions or what they want to have never been supported.

Virtual social platforms are crucibles of unbridled as well as unkind transmissions. In the name expressing opinion some resort to sullying of images of people. What is worrying is that there is no one to put a stop to that.

Sometimes people who cannot do any harm to others in real life enjoy, what one may call, "cathartic pleasure" by expressing hatred through social media.

Probably this is why we are reacting ridiculously, and even unfeelingly, to whatever happened between two consensual adults and only judging the girl for not being the perfect woman and as always, penalising her for making a personal choice.

We can only hope that in time, our society learns to differentiate between what is private and what is public and that people can fall in love, be in relationships and even fall apart.

Holding hands, being intimate may come off as immoral to many, but it is most definitely not illegal. On the other hand, taking bribe, breaking traffic rules, mob lynching, raping, murdering and last but not the least, leaking someone's private photos is immoral as well as illegal.

It seems as if we have ample time in our hands to indulge social media gossip but we do not have the time to raise our voices against numerous social anomalies that take place every day.  

For many years, we have been normalising the habit of degrading women. So perhaps this incident will not be the last one. But if we want to the future generation to learn from our mistakes, it should be that it is extremely important to respect one's privacy and that women should not be victimised under any circumstance.

Moreover, that, a woman's identity is not limited to being someone's partner, spouse or friend, but as a human being, her choices are only hers and nobody else's.