My Impression on Backlash of Disappearing Daughters

After reading the part, Backlash, of the Disappearing Daughters by Gita Aravamudan, it is clear that the story and all the information were told very well. It gave me a distinct insight into the living of people in some part of India. I can see that lives there were full of discrimination and prejudice towards females, and, consequently, those females lived a very unhappy and miserable life no better than one of a slave, oppressed by all kinds of unfair practices. Apparently, the woman who was seen as a wife, in reality, was just an absolute slave—a sex slave and a ‘son-producing machine’.

            The early part of this chapter mentioned about a woman who was killed by her husband for not agreeing to sleep with all his brothers. To me, this sounds totally disgusting; nothing can be justifiable about this repugnant act at all. It seems like marriage was not in the least based on love; there was simply no emotion or sentiment the man had towards the woman besides his desire for mere sexual pleasure and for male heirs. How could he share his wife with others? How could he kill her? This is just unbelievable. Besides, I really wonder whether that man was brought to court and ended up in jail for his crime or not. If he was not, it is just too barbaric of that society.

            Later in that chapter, it is more obvious that the reason of men sharing the same wife in many Indian societies is that the number of males very far outnumbers the number of females and thus it can be very expensive for poor families to afford a wife for their son. And this leads to the buying and selling of women to get married into male families. To me, it is already extremely unreasonable to sell their own daughters for money; daughters are human, too. In fact, the crisis of not having enough women results merely from the inhuman practice of sex-selection abortion. Many female fetuses or newly-born baby girls has been killed. They think having a daughter is a burden, and the daughter, although kept until fully grown-up, would never live a happy life.

            All in all, it is both repulsive and sad to learn that a woman in those Indian societies has been treated this badly. She is regarded as no better than an animal which, after marriage, no longer has control over any part of her body, “let alone her womb”. This shows an extreme inequality between different genders, which is nothing but unfair for women. Anyway, it has been clear that the solution is not impossible. I think, as long as sex-selection abortion and female infanticide stops, there will be appropriate number of women to marry men, and the cost of getting a wife will not be as difficult and expensive. As a result, there will be no more need to share a wife with other brothers and this will put an end to the living death of the women.