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Ranjha, have you ever stopped to think why a girl’s place in the world is so small, why a woman’s work is constantly belittled or why she is considered inferior to men, even though she is the one who gives birth to them and raises them? I’ll tell you why. Because if she leaves her father or husband’s house she might be physically harmed, she might be dragged into a field or an alley and raped, she might be sold to a brothel, she might be carried off by bandits or by enemy soldiers and kept as a sex slave. So she learns, like generations of women have done before her, to trade her freedom for security, her dignity for physical safety. She chooses to live with a hundred little insults to her spirit every day instead of the threat of that one big assault on her body. In the end it all boils down to not being helpless.’ ‘And carrying a sword makes you feel less helpless?’ ‘Not just feel less helpless. It makes me less helpless.
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