“Angry Brides” is a Facebook game that on the face of it is just pretty idiotically sexist: A ticked off woman chucks shoes at her annoying husband. Miss and you lose money. Connect and you gain money.
It all sounds pretty lame until you realize this is an Indian company’s idea of protesting women getting burned alive because their families didn’t give their husbands enough money to marry them. Then it becomes disgusting and horrifying!
A little background: Dowries were outlawed in India more than fifty years ago, which has done absolutely zip, zero, nada to stop the practice. Sometimes the guy will marry and then demand more money, which in extreme cases turns into relentless harrassment that drives the woman to suicide, or the man will resort to “stove burnings” — i.e. covering his wife with kerosene and setting her on fire. Granted, this isn’t something India or the Indian people approve of or encourage across the board, but it’s a little depressing that there were 9000 deaths related to dowries last year.
In what we hope was a translation error, the head of the games company, Shaadi, announced that:
“The Angry Brides game is our way of throwing a spotlight on the nuisance of dowry,”
“Nuisance?” Right. We guess the game did its job — we’re pretty thoroughly horrified at dowry abuse in India. We’re just also horrified at how sexist and stupid this game is. India: Fighting Abuse with Sexism!
(Image via Shaadi)