Misogyny Swallowed

By Shefali Mehta

We’d like to think that the present youth has moved away from age old orthodox traditions and increasingly become liberal. But that is what we’d like to think. Violence against women has existed in several forms. Misogyny is present in our way of thinking, which not only develops from the usage of language that we have internalized, but also reflects back in what we speak.

It is pleasing to see that increasingly, many young people are careful about replacing the universal pronoun ‘he’ with ‘s/he’ and collective noun ‘man’ with ‘humans’. But there is a terrible undercutting of the same by those very people. One guy jokingly said, “Who says girls don’t use abusive language?” The new age girl- no longer trapped in the accepted and expected norm of being polite sweet talker- feels emboldened. Now she can straighten a boy with a few abuses, but without noticing that she is indeed being disparaging towards her own sex, referring to the mother or sister of that person as existing in the state of a sexual object.

For several centuries, women were not allowed to receive serious education, reason being that women were considered naturally incapable of much serious thought. Today, women share space in all fields of study but yet the label of being foolish has not been washed out from the female sex yet. Everyday several pictures are uploaded on Facebook illustrating how ignorant girls are. One picture went so far as to show a girl who doesn’t know how to upload a photo on FB. She pastes the address of the photo as it is in her computer. And this is when the reality is… and we all know it – girls do upload photos. What’s there to say!

Casual sexism is the norm. It is a joke. I heard an RJ on the International Women’s Day asking all men to say ‘thank you’ to the women in their lives and to make the day special for them. Then he asks his listeners to call him and tell him the status of traffic. A man calls and says that the road where he was driving at the moment has smooth traffic, then adds that since it is Women’s Day, women are celebrating it at home, so there’s less traffic as they with their slow driving habit are not there to cause jams. To this the wonderfully feminist sounding RJ gave a raucous laughter.

We all know how the market for cosmetic products for men is booming. It’s no longer just about shaving creams and deos that turn men into machos, there are separate talcum and fairness creams too. Yet it seems that chauvinists of present day haven’t got enough of the jokes on women’s vanity. They have been told, retold, passed on to present generation till they have become extremely bitter. An eternal joke – that is what it seems to be.

In a campaign, young people were asked to complete the sentence:

Real men _________. A sensible looking young boy holds a placard which says: Real men protect women. Protect against whom? Even in the state of harmony, where violence does not define the woman-man relationship, is it necessary that the man has to be the protector and woman the protected. Is that the ideal relationship between the two sexes? Can’t there be a state of things where the threat against which protection is needed is itself non-existent?

In my literature class, dominated by a huge population of female students and huge amount of feminist talk, a male student sitting on the last bench raises his hand to ask, “Is not feminism a hegemonic discourse?” He is right. If discourse is simply about shouting at highest possible decibels then feminists have actually talked themselves hoarse. It doesn’t help as masculinists develop a thick skin like thick muscles which makes them immune to any accusation. Feminists end up being stereotyped as unhappy middle-aged divorcees. All we need is a low whisper, emanating from the heart – “No more now, misogyny is damn boring!”