Why Become a Woman, Why Become a Man?

Acharya Prashant: What if you were never, never trained in womanhood? How would you live? You can’t even think because right now, every bit of you is a trained bit. How do you know that a woman must have long hair? How do you know? That’s how it is! Nine out of ten do have long hair. And it has now, as I said, percolated right into the instincts. So, it becomes instinctive for a little girl to have long hair. So much so that it appears that it’s a part of her genetic code, that it’s written somewhere in her genes that she must have long hair. Left to herself, with no social intervention or occupation upon her mind, would she still prefer to have long hair? Maybe only as much as a boy would prefer to have long hair, maybe she would! But then boys too would probably prefer to have long hair, to an equal, more or less equal extent. But see how binary it has become. You can look at somebody's back and tell his or her gender. The hair! Not even the back is needed, just the bust from the behind.

Men and women are different. Their biology makes them different. But what we have is a hyper-genderization. What we have is a hyper-sexualization. The differences are there, but little. Society has hyper-inflated those differences. The woman has been turned into a hyper-woman and a man has been turned into a hyper-man. And you must know why, because when the differences are great, then the attraction is also great. And that gives more carnal pleasure. If there is not much difference, then sexuality is natural, healthy, not overblown, not hyped up, not very spicy. But when you create a huge difference between man and woman, then you know the extent of titillation it offers.

Now for the man, the woman is totally an unknown thing. She is so different as if she is from another galaxy and for the woman, man too is a very, very different thing. She has no idea of being what she is, being turned into what she has been. She just cannot know what the man- thing is all about because now the man is doing all the stuff that is outside the province of her idea. The result is a great attraction. Great attraction, and that gives you hyper-tantalization.

Don’t do that and let men and women be together. They would still be different but not so different; neither in their behavior nor in their looks, in nothing. Can you really tell apart male and female rabbits from this lot? Look at them! Look at them and tell me which one is a male and which one is a female. Tell me. Is it possible?

Had humans been allowed to live naturally, a similar situation would have been there. But if rabbits look this way, they would be clearly able to tell—"the male, male, male, the female, the female, the female". See, even the rabbits can see through our idea.

Questioner: In terms of desire and ambition, I feel they are the same. I don’t see any difference.

Acharya Prashant: There is a difference. But the difference is overblown. There is a difference. Because they are biologically different, so the directions of their ambitions are a little different. But to turn a woman into a homemaker and to ensure that her first priorities are the baby and the related stuff is to hack down a great part of her possibility. If ten things are possible to her, eight of them are hacked down. The remaining two are greatly magnified as if she is made only for those two tasks. Those two tasks are also there as a part of her life- possibilities but not only those two.

Nobody can deny that women want babies more than men do. Of course, they do, but then, that’s not the only thing they want, and no healthy woman is going to live only for the sake of breeding babies. But that’s how our culture looks at women. I’m exaggerating but you get the drift, right?

For a long, long time, there was no female participation in sports as if women didn’t want to play. As if they wouldn’t like to play soccer or they wouldn’t like to run or play tennis or badminton or wrestling or swimming, or whatever, or trekking or mountaineering! Don’t you see, all that was a part of the idea of femininity?

And don’t think that mankind has become emancipated, that we have been liberated from the clutches of that idea. It is very much in action still. Maybe the more gross forms of slavery have been defeated, but the subtler forms, they are still in action.

Unless you are living by heart, you are sure to be living by an idea. There is no other possibility. The heart is native. The heart is yours. The heart is original. The heart has authorship. And when you live by the idea, then you are living a borrowed life and that is what is called living by the ego; a second-handed life.

You must question everything; everything. Again, look at them (pointing towards the rabbits)! Look at them play. See how similar they are, males and females! Only a very, very sharp eye will be able to point out the females from the males. Because still, there would be some differences in behavior. But those differences are very minute, very subtle. Numerically those differences would be one percent, two percent, and five percent. Ninety-five percent, they are the same! The female rabbit is not saying that let the family eat first and then I will have the carrot. She is taking care of her interests—give me the carrot or I shall bite you. See! And off she runs away with the carrot: my carrot; my life.

Questioner: The moral codes also get defined that is of the hyper-man and hyper-woman.

Acharya Prashant: What do you think that men are merely the perpetrators of the injustice? Men have been equally victimized. Maya alone is the winner; in this case, both men and women are losers.

'Man’ too feels extremely suffocated in the cage of the idea of manhood. He too is supposed to live a particular life that just clutches his neck and he doesn’t know what to do with it.

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