The woman is the stronger sex, and she has to be

The Indian scripture of Manu, which has dominated the Hindu mind for five thousand years and still dominates it, says that when the woman is a child she should be dependent on the parents, protected by the parents. When she is young, she should be dependent on the husband and protected by the husband. When she is old, she should still remain dependent – on the boys, her children, and be protected by her own children. For her whole life she has to be protected by somebody. If for thousands of years you protect somebody in this way, you are bound to create weakness, dependence, fear.

And it has been almost accepted as a scientific fact that man is the stronger sex. It is absolutely wrong! The woman is the stronger sex, and she has to be, because she has to produce children. She has to be pregnant and go through all the troubles of pregnancy.

Not a single man could stand one pregnancy. Just think of yourself being pregnant for nine months: You cannot eat, you vomit; you go on carrying a weight which is growing bigger and bigger within your belly. And then the final stage, the baby comes out of you. The passage is so small, the baby is big; it is painful. The woman passes almost through death when the child is born. And you think she is weaker than man?

Women live longer than men all over the world; the difference is of five years. If man lives on average seventy years, the woman lives on average seventy-five years. Strange, the weaker sex lives longer.

Man is more prone to sicknesses, diseases, infections, than woman. And the difference is not small, it is double. Women are prone to sickness in comparison to man just half as much; if they get sick, it is only fifty percent as often. If man has to be considered, he gets sick and is available to any infection twice as often as women, and more.

What is the cause of it? The woman has more resistance power. The man is very weak against small bugs – and yet he becomes Muhammad Ali the great! He cannot fight small bugs, he is incapable of doing any boxing against them. But the woman does.

It is a very strange thing that the suicide rate of the man is double that of the woman – and woman is the weaker sex? She suffers more, her whole life in the past has been of suffering. Women have been treated like cattle.

In China for thousands of years the woman has not been believed to have a soul. So if the husband murders his wife, he commits no crime. The woman was a possession. Without a soul, so much resistance against diseases? And man has a soul, but the resistance is only half that which a woman has.

The man becomes frantic very soon, carries thousands of worries in his head, is almost on the verge of falling into anxiety, anguish, suicide. It starts even in the mother’s womb.

An experienced woman who has given birth to one or two children can tell whether the child in her womb is male or female. How can she guess it? Very simple guesswork, which is absolutely certain. The boy starts kicking in her womb; the girl is calm and quiet. And the mother can feel that difference. The boy is becoming tense, worried already, already trying to learn boxing. The girl is very silent in the mother’s womb – creates no movement, is more stable, more centered, more grounded.

Women threaten that they will commit suicide, but they do not do it. The difference is again the same: men commit suicide twice as often as women do. And it has to be understood that their suicides are also different. The woman commits suicide because the man forces her to commit suicide. Man commits suicide because of his own anguish, worry, despair.

If the woman were not forced by man to commit suicide, no woman would commit suicide. In fact, the woman’s suicide is really a murder – murder by the man: man’s society, man’s rule, man’s power. And the woman has survived all along without any complaint. That is strength. Man forcing the woman to commit suicide should be punished – it is a murder. But behind the word suicide he is completely free of any crime.

Your question is that women are becoming juicier here every day. They would become juicier all around the earth every day; they just have to be given the opportunity. It is their intrinsic nature to be juicier. The woman has to nourish the child – she needs the juice. The woman attracts the male – she has to be juicier. She is certainly more beautiful, more proportionate; her body is an artwork.

I do not believe in the bogus Christian story that God created man first. The story must have been created by a man, because what use is man? And then he created the woman, taking a rib out of the man. This is simply to insult women: “You are nothing but a rib taken out of man. You are not human beings.”

If I have to write the story, I will say God first created Eve, not Adam – because the woman is creative, she is going to give birth. In fact, there was no need for Adam to be created by God. The story is, that God made love to the first woman he made. If that is true, then Adam is simply superfluous. The woman, and God making love to the woman… Adams will follow of their own accord. Adam need not be created, he will be born. But you need the woman first. Without her there is no possibility of anything getting born.

But for thousands of years, if you go on hammering the idea that woman is a weaker sex…. The woman has shrunk, she has accepted the idea. She has lived according to the male chauvinist’s philosophy.

Here in this commune it is totally different. The woman finds herself absolutely free from all the jargon that man has been teaching her. And we have given all the opportunities to women that no society anywhere has been able to give them. All societies have taken away opportunities – and things need opportunities to grow, to reach to their potential.

The woman has somehow survived because she is so strong. But she has only survived – no nourishment. Here she is nourished, here she knows she is accepted on an equal basis. In fact, the women in the commune have more responsible posts than men. This is just a compensation – small, but it may become the model for the whole universe.

Osho, From the False to the Truth, Ch 27, Q 1 (excerpt)