Worst Time To Be A Man?

A not-so-great man (read Donald J. Trump) once said that this is a really scary time to be a man, the worst time to be a man. Women? They are doing great. Dr. Christine Blasey Ford could talk about her ordeal, right? So what if the men had the last laugh decades ago, and in 2018. When I received a notification regarding Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation, that feeling of hopelessness which no man ever, even in the “worst period” of the elitist, entitled and entrenched “male institution” can ever feel, gripped me. It got worse when I googled Brett Kavanaugh last night (and just now) and in the list of “people also search for” Dr Ford’s name didn’t even show up. That can’t be possible right? Anyone searching for the man and not searching for Dr. Ford sounds difficult to believe, till you realise that that at the end of the day truth is not absolute. Initially, I had my reservations on #MeToo or #TimesUp, not in terms of the power they wield, but in terms of the threat they faced from within by getting diluted by trivial and/or sometimes false accusations. But as the movement unfolded and the more I thought over the matter, I realized I was mistaken.

Since #MeToo has finally reached Indian shores, it won’t be long before the American response creeps up: a response which, as Trevor Noah trenchantly summarises (please watch his video), offers victimhood to people who have the least claim to it. As Hannah Gatsby rightly said (for straight white men but holds true for the average “entitled”  male across the planet), you guys are the canaries in the coal mine. If you are not doing fine, we are all fucking dead. So far, we have seen generally mature responses and apologies. As the claims bundle up, it is extremely probable that men come together, as they often do, to cry about being falsely accused and feeling insecure. Already, the common folk (who aren’t scared of voicing their opinion because they think, and rightly so, that it doesn’t matter) are talking about how men are going to feel “threatened” and this will only have an adverse impact on women empowerment.

First things first. I like how the average Indian male feels that they laid out the red carpet for women and were standing with the pooja thaal to welcome women in all spheres of public life. Do they realize that at almost every turn, the average guy has only made it more difficult for women, the lewd stares, the lecherous comments, the condescending sexist remarks or the “O you think you’re good? Prove it.” attitude that they hold. Consequently, I don’t think this “backlash for women empowerment” argument (that men will be scared to recruit women) works because Indian women were working their way up not because of but in spite of male interference. I can’t recall a single instance of a man doing a favour to me or to any of my female friends for the noble purpose of empowering us, it was always on merit and in the unfortunate cases #MeToo. A colleague at my erstwhile workplace once confided in me that his team did not have a single female and the all engineer, 100% IIT blood, “gang” were resentful about an IIT looking workplace; so when the next batch of new recruits came, his team was almost on non-cooperation mode unless he got a “good looking girl on board.” Objectification of women? The problem is not this per se. The issue is that when you get a girl on board with this mentality and have in your head already treated her as an item of interior decoration for your office, you are going to treat her as such. Not surprisingly, that girl had a very tough time and finally left the firm and corporate sector for good, no sexual misconduct, but life is quite difficult for women even without it, is my point. You need to hear an average Indian boy’s (read engineer) idea of a woman to get a sense of how distant their constructions are from real girls and women. So this whole women emancipation and empowerment being adversely affected narrative sounds a bit ridiculous because women had to prove their mettle to get what little they were getting from the system. If the world out there is snake and ladders, then to the “threatened” males I wish to inform that while their board was about ladders, ours was about the snakes. Point being that neither was or is a fair game, the male board was rigged in their favour, the female against them, and if you happen to belong to any other gender then you don’t even get a board, as yet.

Now to the “threatened” aspect. This whole argument about men feeling insecure about anyone falsely accusing them tomorrow is disturbing on multiple levels. Firstly, it has a guilty conscience ring to it. Secondly, what the fuck do you think is the judicial system for? What is the basic premise of having a Rule of Law? Innocent until proven guilty, right? If false accusations are the reason to brush aside the #MeToo movement then lets burn the Constitution and shut the Courts. If I accuse you of murder that’s it, we don’t need any further validation. To give a bizarre example to prove my point. Suppose all the tribals and forest dwellers who have been adversely affected by the rampant corruption that plagues India’s mining sector decide to start their own #MeToo and the bureaucratic response is “it will become impossible to function because we will be scared of false accusations.” Sounds ridiculous right? “If you are an honest official you would not be scared,” would be the response. That was precisely the response when a few years ago (under the “policy paralysis” of UPA 2) bureaucrats responded to accusations of policy paralysis by stating that the media activism regarding unearthing corruption had scared them into not signing any documents and hence the policy paralysis. The average Indian male (those that consider reading newspapers or their digital equivalent a part of their daily routine) was shouting about the absurdity of the excuse then, shout about it now. It’s the same thing in a different context. What’s so different with the actual #MeToo. The accusations are just ACCUSATIONS. Nothing has been proven as yet. Given the male bias in Indian judiciary and the entire system, it is unlikely that the woman is eventually going to come out on top, except in a few cases where media takes up the cause. The recent Kavanaugh – Dr.Ford saga being a case in point. The system is still in your favor, don’t start crying about injustice that might happen to you in the future if a woman manages to get her point heard and produces enough evidence. As far as arguments surrounding media trial and private lives being thrown off the road are concerned, the latter is true for the accuser as well, and the former is largely irrelevant in the long run if you are not found guilty.

This brings me to my final point, the feeling of hopelessness when I read about Kavanaugh’s confirmation. The news was heartbreaking. It might have been my biased exposure to the Liberal American media that made me feel that surely they won’t do it, I forgot that I had felt exactly the same about Americans in the buildup to November 8, 2016. Hopeless optimist! But just to think of being in Dr. Ford’s shoes makes me shiver. For all the guts and courage, the moving testimony notwithstanding, all you get out of the affair is the President making punchlines out of your ordeal? To give an average Indian male a sense of what an average urban Indian female goes through, firstly, there is the pressure to perform, else you deal with “girls are supposed to be dumb” rhetoric. You face “Wow! You can do maths.” Hit puberty and comments on your body start pouring in which have the potential to distort your sense of self worth for life: a “that’s a nice butt” here or “you have a flat chest” there can have a deep impact that I don’t think a man can even begin to comprehend. Onset of teenage brings the whole “When a boy asks you out” chapter that accompanies you till you’re “taken.” Given how often I have had to deal with this trivial but ubiquitous bullshit, I would like to get it out of my system once and for all. The sense of entitlement with which “ankhon ka tara, humara beta” has been raised, makes him feel entitled to a “Yes.” Given that I used to have a lot of male friends till we mutually jettisoned each other, I had to deal with statements such as the following quite often: “Do you even understand how difficult it is to ask a girl out? Like we put ourselves in such a vulnerable situation?” Umm, on the former, yes I do. I did ask someone out once and was friendzoned. I felt scared about ruining our friendship but never vulnerable. I understand it wasn’t easy but what I understood then and what I understand now, you don’t approach a person you claim to like with a sense of entitlement. The other person is a free-thinking individual and should not feel obligated and/or traumatised by the experience of having to say a No. Can you respect the other person’s choice? May be the hugely inflated male ego comes in the way. Learn to take a No. I don’t know how it works with men, but when I expressed my feelings, it was more of an FYI than anything else. His no was taken as his FYI for me and we have stayed friends. Was it so difficult? Initially may be, but eventually NO. The personal story was to prove the point that dominant male narratives about something as teenage as the “asking out” process is deeply problematic and oozing over with deeply entrenched sense of entitlement.

While I don’t claim to have any personal idea about the ordeal of the average rural female beyond the grim reports I read in the newspaper on a daily basis, I do have disturbing personal encounters with the semi-rural. I am told that my second and third cousins, who belong to a semi-rural setting in Bihar and are much younger to me, are married with kids. Occasionally I happen to hear stories of how they get beaten by their husbands with educated people in my family justifying it on grounds of “those girls are stupid and deserve it.” Sensible arguments like “the use of physical violence is unacceptable” is met with “you are educated and sensible, these girls are extremely dumb, they don’t understand till they are beaten up, you lose patience with them.” I have heard this in multiple contexts and I can’t understand why nobody seems to understand my point when I say that irrespective of the level of stupidity, you cannot use violence in a domestic setup. While men are fearing false accusations, I am unable to do anything about these genuine ones because those girls will simply not speak a word against their husband, they have internalized their own beating so completely. As far as their stupidity is concerned, I doubt those girls got a chance at being smart. Their education was basic at best, they were married in their early 20s, had no say in the process and had babies within a year. I doubt these girls have even a semblance of control over their own lives or understand their rights or notions of marital rape for that matter.

It might be the worst time to be a man but for a woman, it is as bad as any, the only difference being that the current era is offering some hope, but life isn’t Shawshank Redemption. While Hope might be a good thing, it isn’t sufficient. It isn’t the first time that these issues have come up. In the 1990s, a similar narrative started with Anita Hill’s case in the United States. Read about the case or watch John Oliver’s take on Workplace Sexual Harassment to experience a good dose of Deja Vu. While I would appreciate men to come out in support of the current movement, I would like them to keep to themselves the male perspective on harassment. I’m fed up of the male perspective pervading and dominating every fucking mainstream domain. When the average Indian man talks about feeling insecure or victimized, I feel like asking them if they have an inkling of how a woman feels when she is forced to “wash dirty linen in public.” In a society that doesn’t look at a woman with favour if she comes across as “flamboyant” or “outgoing” do you, as men, understand what cost-benefit analysis the woman has done before having decided to resort to #MeToo. In all probability, the entire burden of proof is going to be on the woman. It’s not a pleasant thing when you are ambivalent about the consequences.

Having “overheard” enough cooler talk among male colleagues to know that Indian culture, the patriarchal system and the entire setup can be very toxic for a woman, I do not believe that slow, incremental changes can make a dent. We need to overhaul the system, the dominant male perspectives that make a woman unsure of her talent, her competency constantly under scrutiny based on her sex, her confidence to navigate through the world that is as much her oyster as any male’s. #MeToo provides the force to upset this inertia. Putting emphasis on raising sons better rather than fretting over rules to ensure that our Red Riding Hoods don’t encounter a wolf (curfew times, covered from head to toe…) is a long term solution that we simply can’t escape. The daughter isn’t the problem, stop wasting all your energy on restraining her. The problem, if at all, is going to be your son, focus on him. I had once read a very interesting essay on this issue: Sultana’s Dream by  Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, where she talks about a utopian land where all men have been confined to a mardana since letting them out made society unsafe. To think that this essay was written in 1905!!!

Finally, on Amitabh Bachchan’s insensitive statement where he was asked about Tanushree Dutta’s accusations. Sorry Sir, but on issues such as these, you don’t get off by saying you aren’t the protagonist involved. You have had issues with Bofors and I can understand your desire to be politically correct at all cost but you need to know when prevaricating or evading isn’t the politically correct thing to do. There are issues in which there are no innocent bystanders and this is one of them. By not commenting on it or not doing anything about it, you are implicitly a participant of the rot, the whole system that never spoke up and victimized those that did. When Donald J. Trump talks about women doing great, may be he could find out more about the winners of this years Nobel Peace Prize? It was conferred to Congolese gynaecologist Dr. Denis Mukwege and Yazidi human rights activist Nadia Murad for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict. The Nobel Committee has acknowledged that women aren’t doing great. Women’s bodies continue to be viewed as instruments of war and the International Humanitarian Law, which is the law that regulates the conduct of war (yes, such a law exists, all is definitely not fair in war), continues to remain silent on gender based violence as a war crime. The Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions, the customary law, the subsequent treaties, nothing talks about gender-based sexual violence during times of war, a fact of life for women during all wars/conflicts in history. In peace or during war, women aren’t doing great. #MeToo is giving us a chance to introspect as a society and make changes that makes it more civilized and better. Let’s not waste this opportunity. It’s a sincere request to the men out there: don’t drown this movement over irrational fears of your fake victimisation. Please come out in support of the movement, which essentially means let’s support a fair investigation into the claims, thereby providing a secure framework for all parties concerned. Not too much to ask for, is it?