Myth: Women Are the Weaker Sex

By Anita Moorjani

“Can you sign this book to ‘Samirah’?” asked a beautiful olive-skinned woman with large dark eyes looking out at me from under her hijab (the traditional covering for the hair and neck worn by Muslim women). She was the final person standing in the book-signing line at a Hay House event in Pasadena, California, where I had just finished speaking.

“Sure,” I responded. “That’s a beautiful name!”

“Thank you. It’s my name,” she said with a smile, proceeding to spell it out to ensure that I wrote it correctly.

“I loved your book,” she continued, as I inscribed a message for her on the title page. “I related to so much of your life story, especially some of the cultural challenges.”

“Cultural challenges can be so tricky!” I responded. “I’m so glad I don’t have to deal with most of that anymore!”

“You’re so lucky,” she said. “In fact, do you have time to talk? I waited to be the last in line just to see if you could give me a few minutes of your time. Let me buy you a cup of tea or coffee.”

I looked at Samirah’s perfectly chiseled and smiling face, her lovely silk hijab falling softly around the shoulders of her dark floral dress, which reached below her ankles. Instinctively sensing the potential for an extremely interesting conversation, I accepted her invitation. I then glanced over my shoulder at Jennifer, the Hay House employee who helps make my life easier at all my speaking engagements.

“I’m fine from here, Jen!” I said. “Thanks for all your help!”

“You sure you’re okay?” she asked. “Do you want me to walk you to the authors’ lounge?”

“No, I’m fine. I’m going to have a cup of tea with this lovely woman,” I responded, gesturing at Samirah and then reaching over to give Jen a hug to show my appreciation for all her help.

“There’s a quiet café just down the hallway of the convention center,” Samirah mentioned. “I had my lunch there earlier.”

“Everyone’s gone into the auditorium to listen to the next speaker,” I said,“so I think we’ll have the place to ourselves.”

We made our way there, and after we sat down and ordered our tea, Samirah jumped right in with her first question.

“When you talk about being in the other realm, you always say that you were without your culture, your gender, your religion, and so on. Are you sure about this?” she asked intently. “I mean, are we all really without our gender, our culture, and our religion when we die?” She seemed desperate for assurance.

Heaven Has No Gender

“Yes, absolutely!” I responded. “We have no physical bodies in the other realm, and gender is part of our physical bodies. It’s part of our biology because in this realm, we are expected to procreate—so we must have reproductive systems. But when we are without our bodies, we have no need for a reproductive system. We have no biology, as such. We are pure spirit, just beings of light—pure essence, pure consciousness.”

“I completely believe you. But the problem is that I live in a culture that is run by men. We women are invisible. It doesn’t matter how smart I am or how much knowledge I have. I have to give in to men on every issue, just because they are men, regardless of their position, their personal experience, or their education,” Samirah shared.

“In order to be valued in my culture, I have to be subservient and dim my light! The more invisible I am, the more I make myself small, the more the man in my life can be big—and then the more valuable I become! I have to do the opposite of what you say we have come here to do. To be valued, I am expected to have all those traits you used to have before you got cancer! They are seen as positive traits for women in my culture.

“One time, I completely locked horns with my husband on an issue having to do with our daughter and some problems she was having at school,” Samirah continued. “She was struggling, trying to fit in, but my husband didn’t want her to integrate into a foreign culture, even though he was the one who made the decision to move out of our country and live here because of his business! It broke my heart to see her struggle so much, trying to negotiate cultures. My son didn’t have the same problems because my husband allowed him to integrate into the local culture, making friends with the local boys at school and doing the things they do. My husband is much more lenient with him than he is with our daughter.

“He wouldn’t budge on this issue, and I was certain that what I wanted to do was best for her. So I went to see a well-respected man in our community whom we often go to for advice. I thought he would understand the issue because he has lived in the U.S. for a long time and has raised a family here. I was hoping he would help me to speak with my husband. But after I told him the issue, his response was, ‘You must listen to your husband, because after all, he is the man of the house. It isn’t right to go against his wishes, and it’s not right to encourage your daughter to go against his wishes. You have to explain that to your daughter, otherwise how will she ever learn that this is our culture? Since we are not living in our home country, she is not learning about her culture at school. So it’s your responsibility to teach her. She will have to adjust to her own husband someday. It’s better that she start learning now, or she (and you) will have problems when she is of marriageable age! It will be difficult for her to find a suitable husband if she strays too far from our traditions.’ Can you imagine my frustration when he responded in that way?”

“I can completely understand how frustrating that must have been for you!” I answered, remembering many of the cultural issues I had faced, trying to fit in with my school friends and wishing that I did not have to deal with trying to stay within my cultural restrictions. I had been given the same warning—that if I strayed too far from our cultural norms, I would have a very hard time finding a husband!

“I’ve read your book, as well as the accounts of many others who have had experiences like yours,” Samirah continued. “So for me, the proverbial veil has been pulled back. I feel I can see the truth. Your experience in particular really hit home for me because of the cultural issues you had faced. I know what you say is true. But knowing that, how can I ever fit in again? I now struggle seeing the blatant gender disparity that takes place all around me. I recognize how women have been silenced and overpowered in my culture, and how in our silence, those with the loudest voices have taken control. It’s not that anything around me is different or has changed. It’s me who has changed. My world has blown wide open because I now know that this is not how God intended it to be for us women. We are all equal in the eyes of God. All our voices matter just the same. And it’s the louder, more aggressive male voices among us that have created this false perception of women. But why does it feel as though only I am seeing it this way? A part of me wonders: Was I better off not knowing?

Gender Roles Are Cultural

What Samirah was telling me was so raw and so powerful. I really felt for her, and her words deeply resonated with me because I totally related to them. The timing of this encounter was interesting because I had recently been thinking about the gender disparity and how it affects our society. I had been watching the coverage of the 2016 presidential race on television, and it struck me as very unusual that until this election, no woman had ever before become a serious candidate for nomination in a country much of the world considers to be one of the most progressive and freest on the planet. To top it off, the candidates’ debate I’d been watching most recently (the first Republican debate) featured 10 men but not a single woman (although one woman relegated to a secondary debate improved her polling numbers enough to be included in subsequent main debates). The candidates had been discussing sensitive issues, such as whether a woman should have the legal right to abort the fetus if she were to become pregnant. They went on to discuss the topic of rape and whether a woman had the legal right to abortion if she were raped. I found it disturbing that an overwhelming number of these candidates declared that they were against abortion under any circumstances, even if the pregnancy was caused by rape!

What was even more disturbing was that their decisions directly affected women’s bodies and women’s lives, much more so than the men who impregnated those women, yet no woman was being consulted on this issue.

As I watched this, my mind was flooded with memories of growing up in Asia and being indoctrinated in a culture where all the dominant roles were male. And I was now hit with the realization that it wasn’t just my culture that was this way. It was largely the same the world over. Some cultures are just more overt about this than others.

Although no one actually verbalized this, it was clear to me from the time I was very young that women always held roles that were subservient to or in some way served men. It seemed almost normal for men to dominate. This myth, like any other, informed my thinking well into my 20s because this seemed to be true in real life as well as on television. All the senior roles in the corporate world, in government, in politics, in the armed forces, and so on were held by men; and if women were in the picture at all, they had supporting roles such as a junior clerical assistant, stenographer or secretary.

Doctors were more often than not depicted as men, and their nurses were women. My kindergarten and elementary school teachers were always women, but as we went higher into our senior years and college, they were mostly men. This went on and on.

“Samirah, you probably already know from reading my book that I grew up in a culture where arranged marriages are the norm, and I spent my youth being groomed to be a wife,” I said after taking a long sip of my tea.

“Yes, I know, but I think the community I have been brought up in is much more orthodox than the one you were brought up in,” she said. “You have no idea how lucky you are that your parents still accepted you after you came back from running away from the arranged marriage all those years ago, and that you later married a wonderful man who understands and supports you and your ideals—especially after having such a life-transforming experience! My situation is similar, yet very different! My father was very strict and very proud. We couldn’t go against his wishes, no matter what the reason!”

Although my parents were very loving as I was growing up, their gender roles were clearly defined by our culture. My dad went to work, and my mom took care of our home and the kids. Dad always had the last word on all the major decisions for our family, and even though my mother knew how to get her way sometimes, she had to be really creative in finding ways to make my father see her point of view. Creativity and timing was everything for her, and getting him to agree with her was a victory, whereas we all took for granted that my dad had ultimate power to veto anything. In other words, their relationship was not built on mutual trust and equality but on traditional cultural roles for men and women.

It is a myth that women are the weaker sex.


This article is an excerpt taken from the book What if THIS is Heaven? by Anita Moorjani. It is published by Hay House and available at all bookstores or online at: www.hayhouse.com.

Anita Moorjani was born in Singapore of Indian parents, moved to Hong Kong at the age of two, and has lived in Hong Kong most of her life. Anita had been working in the corporate world for many years before being diagnosed with cancer in April 2002. Her fascinating and moving near-death experience in early 2006 tremendously changed her perspective on life, and her work is now ingrained with the depths and insights she gained while in the other realm. She is the embodiment of the truth that we all have the inner power and wisdom to overcome even life’s most adverse situations, as she’s the living proof of this possibility. Anita currently lives in Hong Kong with her husband, and when she’s not traveling and speaking at conferences, she works as an intercultural consultant for multinational corporations based in the city. Visit her website at www.anitamoorjani.com.

 

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