He used to touch her inappropriately, at office parties, until she decided to take up the matter with the management. This case of sexual harassment, at my previous workplace, became the centre of joke among our male colleagues. “Well, I guess we better stop joking around you girls, in case you press sexual harassment charges against me,” said one colleague jokingly. Initially, the company was reluctant to accept the complaint, but after much pressure from some women in senior positions, the management relented and the accused was fired.
Will we ever see a day when men stop picking a bone with the feminist movement? I doubt.
Take for instance this article, ‘10 Real Reasons Why Men Don’t Trust Women Anymore’ (read here) published on MensXP. This story is now getting shared on social media for all the wrong reasons, because many women have taken offense.
Not only is the headline calculated to cause outrage, the writer has also outlined 10 instances where injustice has been meted out to men. Let’s dissect this.
“The laws are horribly biased towards women. Dowry is a criminal offence but demanding alimony is not.”
For starters, alimony is generally awarded in cases where women have to support children after divorce. Or when the woman, on her husband’s insistence, was until then a housewife and is now left with no roof over her head or means to live. Ever heard of an independent, working woman demanding alimony to support herself, unless there is a child involved in the case? And what is wrong in paying your ex-wife money to help raise YOUR child?
There’s not been a day without news reports of dowry deaths. We’d like to ask-ever heard of a man being burnt, starved or tortured to death because he did not pay alimony/child support to his wife to help raise his child?
The writer goes on to state: “A ride in the public transport is incomplete for us men without hostile glances from female passengers.”
This is akin to, ‘I know thousands of women get groped and molested without their permission in public transport every day, hundreds of women get raped and mutilated every day, but forget that, lets instead focus on how uncomfortable your hostile stares make me feel.’
We’d like the writer to travel in public transport and make some close observations. He will find that most women don’t look directly at men. They fear that the men may presume her mere glance to be an invitation from her! Sure, it doesn’t apply to all men, but how does one make such a sweeping judgement when it comes to strangers?
He further writes: “Indian men have also had enough of hypocrisy. It has become a fad to rant about how women are objectified all their lives by men, conveniently ignoring how an Indian man is insensitively reduced to his family wealth, bank balance and the company he works in.”
Well, he kind of missed the bus of rationality with this point. We women would love to be judged by our education, bank balance and the company we work for! Instead we are judged by the shape of our body, the size of our nose, breasts and buttocks and our baby-making abilities, like cattle being bought at a fair. And these are not just women in remote in remote villages, but even educated, independent women-the feminists that the writer seems to hate so much.
If we can’t make babies, we must be harassed, tortured and then abandoned. But then the writer’s problem of being judged by his bank balance is more shocking! Of course, he doesn’t say that in many cases the ‘bank balance’ is augmented by a sizeable chunk of dowry demanded from the girl’s parents.
And then there is this little piece of beauty written by him:
“It disappoints to see how the world is getting biased towards them every day while our problems are not even considered genuine. Do you ever see people talking about crimes against men?”
Yes, there are crimes against men. There is a small group of men and some women who stand solidly in protest against the Dowry Harassment Act for some wrongful suits. But has any crime committed by a woman against a man reached the extent of his body being mutilated, his internal organs pulled out and beaten to death for no other reason than that he happened to just be in that place at that time?
Here’s a little more perspective. Today I read about a minor girl who was raped before her Class X examination, using a date rape drug and consequently had a baby too. Her parents were threatened against taking any action. After a seven-year-trial, by which time her parents passed away, this lone woman got her verdict – “Find a means to mediate and settle this rape matter out of court,” declared the judge. (read here)
In another case, a 33 year-old-woman has already given birth to 14 children because of family pressure to produce a male child. She is weak and exhausted, but now pregnant with her 15th child, because the family now wants another male child to support the 13 girls she gave birth to. (read here).
And yet the writer rants that ‘We can’t understand women, they friendzone us, they give us hostile stares in buses for fear of being raped’
Does the writer know of any injustice meted to men or any serious concerns that come close to what several women in rural and urban set-up face every single day?
All this is mentioned with an added ‘assurance’ that he doesn’t mean to demean women or deride the feminists, just put forth his voice. If the writer agrees that the number of men who rape, murder, mutilate and harass women are small in number and others must not be tarred by the same brush, then he must also agree that the number of women who ‘friendzone’ and file ‘false’ dowry cases are small in number, as well. It would be nice if the feminist movement, which fights for the right to ‘live equally’, be treated as human beings and not as a chattel of goods.
We hope the writer realizes that his article is also going to hurt men who genuinely support the equal rights movement.
When gender equality happens, any such hostility towards men that the writer alleges would have evened out. After all, when women have put up with hostility, misogyny and physical torture for centuries from family and society for so many centuries, surely the men can put up with hostile glares for a few more years.
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