Anti-female astrology

Astrology has become a very popular topic in Sri Lanka since National Television commenced telecasting 'Isuru Yogaya', a Sinhala teledrama based on an astrologer, telecast over SLRC on Sunday night, prime time. Here it is not necessary to discuss the teledrama. But it is very important to discuss Sri Lankan astrologers who discriminate against women in public, misusing this subject.

According to traditional Sri Lankan culture most of Sri Lankans are concerned about astrology at least on one or more occasion during their lifetime. Therefore astrology is somehow connected to their lives. But no one can approve the way most of the `professional astrologers' use this subject to discriminate against women as a community.

It is very pathetic to see some astrological newspapers, some women's newspapers, and astrological articles that appear in general newspapers and some television programs state that some women who have wrong planets in the wrong place in their horoscope fail in every respect throughout their lives, face hazards all the time and create ill effect on marriages and 'future' husbands. It's hilarious how some 'astrologers' speak about women who possess certain features in their bodies!

Time to time when a female public figure dies those `astrologers' bring their `available' horoscope in focus and begin to justify what has happened to that person. Most of the time what those `astrologers' do is kill the dead woman for the second time by assassinating her character.

There is only one occasion on which they discuss astrological aspects of males. That is when a male public figure dies. Apart from that they rarely discuss how certain body features and wrong planets in wrong places affect men and their wives. They do discuss those things but not very often.

It is not known on which grounds some newspapers publish those discriminatory astrological articles on women and the television channels do the same. The only task those articles and television programs perform is promote bad images of all women who have certain body features such as birth marks in certain places, certain types, shapes and colours of hair, eye lashes, eyes, nose, lips, teeth, neck, chin, breasts, fingers, nails, styles of walk, way of laughing, speed of moving eye lids, the time and day of birth and puberty, wrong planets in the wrong place in their horoscopes, etc.

It is very important to see what these 'astrologers' do when some other astrologer predicts the same things about their daughters or wives. Astrologers are the people who strictly believe in our cultural heritage and rituals but what they do is entirely different from what they believe. That is they talk about the ill shape of women's breast which fed them with milk when they were infants and which feed milk to their own children and the children to be born to them.

But the same people rarely talk about the body features of men. If you want to say something why don't you talk about both men and women? They rarely talk about men because men are too sacred to discuss? Some `astrologers' are `disciplined' enough to predict certain things about women in public. Especially when they walk through corridors and streets.

But those `astrologers' do not have backbones to predict things to the face of women. They do it only in teledramas! It is not known whether all those astrological predictions are true or false, therefore, no one can deny those astrological facts but the crime is using them to discriminate against women as a community.