Woe-man or Wo-Man?

Women can be roughly divided into two categories( pigeon-holing again) - Woe-men ie. those who love to suffer or live to suffer (god knows which) and wo-Men those who decide that the only way to outwit men is being being men and doing what they do. Right from the time of Mother India(movie) or much before that women believed firmly that their lot in life was to shed tears, "To Suffer". That was the only" ring" they had the right to wear. Suffering in silence was supposed to be the sign of strength. To provide them the moral compass required to steer their lives. A woman incapable of suffering was no woman at all.

 Tears was their weapon- to cajole, manipulate and swing things in their favor. Then came a time when women decided to change the scenario. If men could do it, so could they. Anything men did they did better. Climb mountains, fly planes, smoke, swear, cuss, drink, have indiscriminate sex. These are the wo-Men out to prove that they are in no way less than their male counterparts. The 2018 woman? She's an amalgamation of the two. Sometimes veering one way; sometimes another. Sometimes the victim who gets raped and brutalised. Sometimes the force that topples governments. But has she changed so much from what she was in the past? I was reading One Indian girl by Chetan Bhagat. Yes. I'm always late to the circus. And I was shocked by the so- called successful heroine. A Goldman Sachs VP with crippling self esteem issues she gets drawn into two affairs with two men, both equally unsuitable and her only worry is whether they want to marry her or not. Whether she is attractive enough or not. Her emotional dependency on them is pathetic. She cries buckets when her first boyfriend discards her. She is hurt because her  older boyfriend doesn't see her as a successful mother. For a super successful career woman she ticks all the boxes of the stereotypical woe- man. And though in the end she sends both men packing deciding to take off on a world tour she continues to look for approval of her third man- her arranged boyfriend/ ex-husband. Is that who the modern woman is? Is that who we are inside that so- called sophisticated successful exterior? Then all the education and empowerment has not wrought any change. We are right where we started.