
Why the Vast Majority of Women in India Will Never Own a Smartphone - skybrian
http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-vast-majority-of-women-in-india-will-never-own-a-smartphone-1476351001
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r00fus
Having a smartphone is not a right, but the article does highlight a bunch of
stuff that we in the Occident take for granted in terms of equality of rights:

"In parts of rural India, village councils, which effectively dictate
community norms, have issued decrees barring unmarried women from possessing
cellphones"

"In India, millions use smartphones to find jobs, bank, study, order train
tickets, interact with the government and more. Offline options require
freedom of movement not available for many women, and extra time and cost in
traveling, standing in lines and filling out forms"

It would be unthinkable for modern western countries to segregate as described
in the article.

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M_Grey
Yeah, we're all about the more subtle behaviors, such as not bothering to
study female animal models for a majority of pharmaceuticals over decades, or
fighting various aspects of reproductive rights.

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nyolfen
i'll take the subtle over the overt any day

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M_Grey
I reject your false dichotomy.

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mikeash
And I reject your false equivalency.

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M_Grey
Could you possibly identify it first?

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mikeash
The original comment said: "It would be unthinkable for modern western
countries to segregate as described in the article."

You replied with: "Yeah, we're all about the more subtle behaviors...."

There are two possibilities: either you think that these more subtle behaviors
are at least as bad as the overt segregation discussed in the article, or
they're not as bad. If the former, then that's the false equivalency. If the
latter, then your reply was pointless.

~~~
M_Grey
I think it's different, but I think if you have to waste part of your (I
believe) only life fighting for basic human rights, it's wrong. It's
especially wrong when those issues so often touch on matters of health, with
contribute to an early and unnecessary exit from that life.

Not surprisingly, this has more nuance than the silly black and white options
presented by people who have issues.

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rabboRubble
When a country is missing about 60,000,000 women [0], weird stuff comes about
to control the ones that remain.

[http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/07/20137281411...](http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/07/201372814110570679.html)

~~~
cbanek
On the other hand, look at the dating "markets" in China, which stemmed from
the one child policy. It's certainly interesting to see how different
countries handle the same problem (more men than women). In China women have
gotten a lot more "negotiating power" in that women can be choosier and pick
from the men with the most money/car/house.

~~~
emodendroket
[http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n10/sheng-yun/little-
emperors](http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n10/sheng-yun/little-emperors)

This piece, which I found interesting, argued that the One Child Policy
actually had a sort of "feminist" effect and was not exactly to blame for the
gender imbalance:

> Besides, there were benign aspects of the one-child policy, especially for
> girls. Traditionally females were used as domestic help, birth machines or
> clan assets to marry off or trade. Women didn’t go to school, and were
> encouraged to internalise the saying that ‘a woman without talent is
> virtuous.’ Illiteracy was their proper condition: they were there to clean,
> farm, and above all to give birth to a male heir. They could not dine with
> men at the same table. Even today in many rural areas, all the family
> resources are invested in the male heir. The one-child policy forced people
> to review many of their assumptions, and at least try to treat girls as they
> would boys: parents, after all, were not able to choose their child’s sex,
> and had to come to terms with whichever they got. The policy also ended the
> nonsense that having a girl put paid to the family line. I have only one
> male cousin on my father’s side (regarded as the precious ‘trickle’ of the
> family bloodline), but when he had a girl, our family promptly abandoned
> their absurd talk about the male line. Cheers.

> Western scholars and human rights activists are inclined to blame the one-
> child policy for forced abortions, female infanticide, the under-reporting
> of female births and so on. These issues were deadly serious but they
> resulted less from the policy than from the nature of Chinese patriarchy,
> which the policy threw into sharp relief. People were willing to break the
> law, to pay a fine to have a second go at having a boy, even to murder or
> abandon female babies. Paradoxically the one-child policy undermined the
> atavism of tradition, even while seeming to encourage it. I grew up in
> Hefei, about 500 km west of Shanghai, where I remember a striking young girl
> from the countryside who attended a private violin class; she was the
> daughter of peasant parents who spoke poor Mandarin. Without the one-child
> policy, her father would have tried fanatically to conceive a second, third,
> fourth child, until the family produced a male heir. His daughters would
> have led miserable lives. Instead, he invested in his only child’s violin
> lessons.

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andrewvijay
Don't have a subscription to read it. Would be glad if anyone can summarize
the article here.

~~~
realo
One of the sentences at the beginning:

==== “They start talking and the next thing you will have a love marriage or
she will run away with a boy,” said Mr. Balbi. ====

Oh the horror! A love marriage? No no no... we cannot have that here...

And then the last 2 sentence of the article say it all, really:

==== Lakhan Singh Arya said it was a father’s duty to protect his daughter
because someday she would marry into another family. “A daughter is someone
else’s asset,” he said. “They must be more cautious, and we have to go an
extra mile to protect her honor.” ====

I have trouble imagining a human being as an "asset"... but maybe it's just
me.

~~~
Ericson2314
The key to understanding many traditional cultures around the world is that
men are valued as agents, but not assets, and women are valued as assets, but
not agents.

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zubat
Agent/asset also explains related attitudes including homophobia(blurring
lines between agent and asset), culturally accepted abuse(instrumental to
asset control), and honor culture(no room for expression outside the agent
hierarchy).

~~~
Ericson2314
Yes, I beleive too often abuse is described in the language of violence, which
either ubjustly narrows the definition abuse or expands the definition of
violence in ways that illicit confusion or resistance.

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Avshalom
'Never' is fucking long time.

~~~
plorkyeran
It may be that in ten years _no one_ owns something called a "smartphone".
"Never" here merely requires that technological advancement outpace social.

