A Wife is..
A Husband is...

It's natural to want to be accepted. In our efforts to do this, we twist ourselves and our children into unnatural states of being, which are usually enforced by the ruling class.

In my culture, from the time a girl is a toddler, she is groomed both mentally and physically for her future husband. She is taught every version of self- hate and self-doubt. She is told she is impure. Skinned of her dignity, folded into submission, and deprived of the right to control her own body, a female child is conditioned to become a feeble, dependent, robotic entity, incapable of expression or argument. Boys, on the other hand, are taught to equate strength with brutishness, responsibility with dominance, and masculinity with a remove from all tender emotions. Male children are too often starved of parental nurturing, and exposed too early to cruelty on the absurd pretext of ‘manning up.’ Marriage binds these two warped natures together. When we look at how traditional cultures like mine measure the suitability of husbands and wives, we find little room for mutual understanding or respect—or love. Unless she is of high status, a girl’s only value is her ability to reproduce. She waits to be chosen by a stranger to whom she owes absolute self-sacrifice, blind obedience, and loyalty. Men are taught that infidelity is an affirmation of manliness, to be accepted and expected by his wife. Marriage comes with a shopping list of demands, a series of boxes to be ticked, from physical appearance to attributes, to skills. If a man asks for a wife that is a good cook and he is disappointed, this is a breach of contract, valid grounds for harsh punishment or termination of the agreement. In this body of work, I ask why so many cultures not only accept but encourage men and women to treat each other as objects—as tools to be used to satisfy our own selfish needs (often thrown aside when a new or novel instrument is found).

I address this issue because if marriage creates the building block of society, then what kind of society are we building?