Feminism - Hyper Feminism or Misandry?
And before anyone starts with the “you don't understand feminism” argument, I want to make something very clear: I understand feminism. I understand why it exists. I understand why women had to fight for basic rights. I understand centuries of patriarchy, discrimination, restriction and inequality. I understand that women today are able to do many of the things we take for granted because women before us rebelled against the systems that told them they couldn't.
I am grateful for that.
But I don't understand why, after finally earning equality, the instinct is to use that equality as revenge.
Why does the moment we get a seat at the table have to become a competition about who gets to sit higher?
That is not feminism to me.
There is a girl in my class who I would describe as a hyper-feminist. Once, she objected to something in a textbook because a sentence said “his” before “her”. Her problem was that “his” had been written first.
And I genuinely don't understand this.
I am not saying language doesn't matter. I am not saying representation doesn't matter. But feminism is not about making sure “her” comes before “his” in every textbook sentence. Feminism is not about creating a perfectly symmetrical world where every single thing is divided 50-50 between men and women.
Feminism, to me, is equality of opportunity.
It is cerebral opportunity.
It is the right to study what you want, work where you want, build something for yourself, earn your own money, make your own decisions and pursue whatever you are capable of pursuing.
If I am capable of doing something, give me the opportunity to do it.
That is it. I don't need to be told that I am better than a man.
I don't need a man to be worse than me for me to be equal to him.
And I certainly don't need to pretend that men and women are exactly the same in every possible way in order to prove that they deserve equal opportunities.
Because they aren't.
Men and women are biologically different. Cerebrally, there are differences too. That does not mean one is superior to the other. It means they are different.
And I don't understand why acknowledging difference has suddenly become an attack on equality.
If a woman has the mental capacity, skill and ability to work at the highest level of the world's biggest MNC, she should be given that opportunity. I don't care whether she is a woman. I don't care whether she is a man.
Give the opportunity to whoever is capable of doing the job.
And if the woman is better at it, give it to her.
Don't tell her she can't handle stress because she is a woman.
Women have biologically endured an enormous amount throughout history. Pregnancy, childbirth, menstruation, hormonal changes, all of it. If a woman has demonstrated that she can handle the demands of a particular job, why are we still sitting around questioning whether she can handle stress because of her sex?
If she can't handle it, then she can't handle it. If she can, let her do it.
That is equality.
I am not asking to be 200 pounds and beat the shit out of somebody to prove that I am equal to a man. If I want to build a body like that, I can. But that isn't what equality means. Equality means that if I want to run a business at 60 and pursue a degree in writing or psychology or law while managing my family, nobody tells me I shouldn't because I'm a woman.
If I want to run a company, nobody tells me that leadership is inherently masculine.
If I want to have children, nobody tells me that my ambitions are over.
If I don't want children, nobody tells me that I am failing as a woman.
If I want to work, let me work.
If I want to stay home, let me stay home.
If I want both, let me figure out how to have both.
That is feminism. Not “men are bad.” Not “women are always right.” Not “everything wrong with the world is because of a man.”
That last one is where I completely lose the plot.
Because when did we forget that grey areas exist?
Everything has become black and white.
Man bad. Woman good. Man oppressor. Woman victim.
And I think that is one of the most intellectually lazy ways of looking at society.
Men are not a monolith.
Women are not a monolith.
There are exceptions everywhere.
There are good men. There are terrible men. There are good women. There are terrible women.
There are men who have been victims.
There are women who have been perpetrators.
There are men who are more emotionally intelligent than women. There are women who are more physically capable than men. There are men who are short-sighted. There are women who are short-sighted.
Sometimes your girlfriend/ a girl as a friend can explain something to you, and you understand it.
Sometimes your boyfriend/ a boy as a friend can explain something to you, and you understand it.
Sometimes a man will see something that you don't. Sometimes a woman will see something that he doesn't.
That is life.
You cannot go into every interaction thinking that because you are a woman, you automatically have the moral or intellectual upper hand.
You don't.
And neither does he.
And then there is this argument I genuinely cannot understand: “A man exists because of a woman.”
Yes. Obviously. A woman carries and gives birth to a child. But does that somehow mean the man has nothing to do with that child's existence?
Basic biology says otherwise.
A child is not created by a woman alone. A child comes from both a woman and a man. A woman provides the egg and carries the pregnancy; a man provides the sperm necessary for fertilisation. That is literally how reproduction works.
So when somebody says, “You exist because of a woman,” as though that somehow proves that men are unnecessary, I genuinely don't understand what point is being made.
You exist because of both.
Your mother did not create you alone. Adam and Eve also probably had crazy sex to birth their three sons.
Your father did not create you alone. You exist because two people contributed to creating you.
And if the argument is that women are somehow superior because men exist because women give birth to them, then by that logic, we could just as easily say women exist because of men because a woman needs to have her world rocked from a man to bear a child and get pregnant.
What exactly are we trying to prove here?
That women are more important than men?
Why?
What does that have to do with equality?
This is exactly where I think feminism is confusingly close to misandry.
Feminism, when taken to the extreme, can become nearly indistinguishable from misandry.
And if patriarchy historically existed alongside misogyny, then what are we doing when we replace “women are inferior” with “men are inherently bad”?
We are not fixing the problem.
We are doing the same thing in reverse.
Take a relationship.
Suppose I want to go to Spain and my significant other wants to go to Norway. We discuss it.
Maybe we go to Norway. Maybe next year we go to Spain. Maybe we compromise and go somewhere else.
That does not mean I have lost my identity That does not mean I am dependent on him. That does not mean I am not an independent woman.
It means I am in a relationship.
Compromise is not oppression. Having another person's opinion matter to you is not oppression.
Sometimes you don't get your way.
That's life.
You cannot have the upper hand on everything.
Sometimes women are wrong.
Sometimes men are wrong.
Sometimes both people are wrong.
And sometimes the person you disagree with is simply right.
I think hyper-independence has also completely fucked with people's understanding of relationships.
I absolutely believe women should be financially independent. Actually, I believe everybody should be financially independent.
You should be able to support yourself. You should have your own identity. You should be capable of surviving without somebody else.
But that does not mean you have to construct your entire personality around proving that you don't need anybody.
There is a difference between not needing someone to survive and choosing someone because you want them in your life.
Those are completely different things.
And I think we have forgotten that.
I also think this generation has forgotten what it actually means to work towards something.
We talk. We talk constantly. We talk about the world we want. We talk about equality. We talk about feminism. We talk about justice. We talk about how terrible men are. We talk about how society needs to change.
But what are we actually doing?
Because it is very easy to sit in a classroom and talk about how you would change the world.
It is much harder to actually stand up when something happens in front of you.
If you genuinely believe that women are being mistreated, then go help the woman standing next to you.
If you see somebody being harassed in a metro, at a railway station, at an airport, wherever, have the fucking gall to step up.
If somebody is being discriminated against, say something. If a girl is being prevented from studying, help her study. If someone is being abused, help them find safety. If a woman doesn't know her rights, teach her.
Do something. Anything.
Because if all your feminism consists of is reposting things, making sweeping statements about men and arguing about whether “her” should come before “his” in a textbook, then what exactly have you accomplished?
Talk is easy. Action isn't.
And I am not saying one person can change the entire world.
One person can't.
In a country of roughly 1.5 billion people, you are one person. Do the math. I am terrible in the subject, but I sure as hell understand this.
You are not going to wake up tomorrow and abolish patriarchy.
You are not going to fix every village, every family, every institution, every workplace and every social attitude in India.
And you especially aren't going to do it while you're seventeen and sitting in a classroom talking about how the world should work.
If you can genuinely step up and do something meaningful, then fucking kudos to you.
Seriously.
If you have the gall to actually stand up for somebody when it matters, I will support you.
But if you're not willing to do anything beyond talking, then don't pretend you've changed the world.
And this is where I think people misunderstand patriarchy itself. Patriarchy has existed for centuries.
You don't erase centuries of social structure because women have achieved a certain level of equality in some sections of society.
You don't just announce that patriarchy is over.
There are still women in parts of society who do not have access to the same education, independence or opportunities that many of us take for granted.
And yes, the government has a role. Of course it does.
But the government cannot be blamed for every single thing that is wrong with society.
People have to change too. Families have to change. Communities have to change. Schools have to change. Individuals have to change.
If we were going to blame the government for every problem in India, we'd have to go back generations and generations and ask who was responsible for everything that happened before we were even born.
And then people conveniently say, “Well, I wasn't born then.”
Exactly. You weren't.
So why are you personally responsible for everything a man did before you were born?
And why is some random man today responsible for everything a man did fifty, a hundred or five hundred years ago?
This is what I don't understand.
If you want to fight for women who are still experiencing inequality, then fight for them.
Don't just make personal attacks. Don't just say “men are bad.” Don't just make a performance out of being angry.
Go do something.
Because if you are unwilling to stand up for the woman who is actually being treated badly in front of you, then what exactly are you fighting for?
You are not fighting patriarchy. You're fighting an imaginary version of every man you've decided represents it.
And I think that is cowardly.
Not because women should be quiet.
Quite the opposite.
Women should be loud when they need to be. Women should be angry when they need to be. Women should rebel when they need to.
But rebellion without direction is just noise. And anger without action is just anger.
The world is never going to become perfect.
It wasn't perfect before. It isn't perfect now. And it won't be perfect when I am thirty or when I am breathing my last breath.
There will always be exceptions. There will always be unfairness. There will always be people who misuse power. There will always be women who think men are terrible. There will always be women who think men are terrible. There will always be people who disappoint us. There will always be things we cannot control.
And this is also what makes me wonder about the generation we are going to raise.
Because one day, we are going to be the adults.
We are going to be the parents. Some of us will have sons. Some of us will have daughters.
And what exactly are we going to teach them?
Are we going to tell our daughters, “Girl, you have to be completely independent. Girl, don't listen to anybody. Girl, you do whatever the fuck you want. Girl, you don't need anyone”?
No.
That isn't what I want to teach my daughter.
I want my daughter to be independent. I want her to be financially independent. I want her to know her worth. I want her to know her boundaries. I want her to be able to walk away from somebody who treats her badly. But I also want her to know how to listen. I want her to know how to compromise. I want her to be able to admit when she is wrong. I want her to understand that another person's opinion does not threaten her identity.
And if I have a son, I want him to know exactly the same thing.
I want him to respect a woman. I want him to respect her boundaries. I want him to treat her as an equal. I want him to understand that being a man does not give him authority over a woman. But I also want him to be able to tell her when he thinks she is wrong. I want him to be able to explain something she doesn't understand. I want him to have an opinion. I want him to respect himself too.
And I want my daughter to be able to do the same to him.
Because that is what equality actually looks like to me.
Not creating a matriarchal society to replace a patriarchal one.
What good would that do?
If patriarchy meant men having power over women and we simply reversed it so that women had power over men, have we actually progressed?
Or have we just changed who gets to be on top?
I don't want my son growing up thinking women are superior.
I don't want my daughter growing up thinking men are inferior.
I want both of them growing up knowing that neither is. Maybe that is the part that my dumb generation fails to understand.
I am not asking for the world to become perfect.
I am not asking for women and men to become identical.
I am not asking for women to stop being angry.
I am not asking for women to stop fighting.
I am asking us to think.
Because I genuinely believe there is a higher probability of changing yourself than changing the entire world.
Learn to love yourself. Learn to stand up for yourself. Learn your rights. Learn how to earn your own money. Learn how to walk away. Learn how to speak. Learn how to listen. Learn how to recognise when you are wrong. Learn how to recognise when somebody else is wrong.
And most importantly, learn to distinguish between an individual and an entire population.
Because I don't want to reach the age where I am ready to date someone and already have so little tolerance for men that I see him as an enemy before I see him as a person.
I don't want to enter a relationship carrying the weight of every woman's experience with every terrible man who came before him.
That isn't fair to him.
And it isn't fair to me.
I don't want feminism to teach me to hate men. I don't want men to grow up thinking they have to apologise for being men. I don't want women to grow up thinking they have to prove they don't need anyone. I don't want relationships to become competitions. I don't want equality to become revenge. And I don't want to spend my life trying to get even with history.
I just want people to be people.
That's it.
Maybe that's ridiculously idealistic.
Maybe it is.
But I would still rather believe in equality than superiority.
I would still rather judge an individual than an entire sex.
And I would still rather change myself than sit in a classroom talking about how I am going to change the entire fucking world.
That's what I think.
You don't have to agree with me. You can call it feminism. You can call it anti-feminism.
You can call it whatever the fuck you want.
I know what I mean. I don't want revenge. I don't want women to rule over men. I don't want men to rule over women. I just don't understand why equality has to mean somebody else has to lose.
Bas.
Itna hi hai.
I had a shitty day, and venting this out makes it a little better, I think? I just needed to. This blog comes from after I watched India's Got Latent, wherein that chick said she hates men and her father. I am sure there must've been some traumatic experience that she had, but I still don't think it's correct to blame an entire sex for it.
peace out.
As Ever,
Ambika
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