Are men the only problem? We need a feminism that critiques both genders
In the ever-proliferating culture of internet feminism, it is interesting to look at the portrayal of men. Men are predators, liberal feminist men are the most dangerous kind, men are unable to read non-consent, men are brutes, men are insensitive, men are clueless, men are claws, men are nasty, men are sex-obsessed and see women only as sex objects, men are douchebags, men are unwilling to accept their fault, men are unwilling to change. The list could go on. To put it succinctly: men are the problem.
By contrast, women are pure victims, clueless about men’s intentions, perfectly aware of what is acceptable and not acceptable, perfectly aware of the rules of dating and relationships and sex and love yet simultaneously completely out of any control over situations with men, weaker, historical victims of social conditioning and therefore accepting of violation, unable to have any position/opinion or have that position/opinion taken seriously yet vocal on the internet. To put it succinctly: women are all-knowing beings who, nevertheless, given their powerlessness, can do nothing with that knowledge but go online and talk about it.
If only men would realise that they are the problem, the world would be a better place. If only men introspected, sexual harassment would not happen. If only men agreed to change, all would be well.
Women do not need to realise anything, women do not need to introspect, women do not need to change. Women are not part of the problem at all, they are not complicit with this violence at all, they do not need to do anything but complain about men. It makes one wonder: if men are so resolutely awful, why do women engage with them at all?
What do men do with this dual burden of being endowed with absolute power and accused of being flagrant abusers of it on the one hand and assailed with the imperative to become aware of this power and give it up? Let’s take each of these dualities and examine it.
Do men have absolute power? Clearly, they do not. If they did, the feminist response would not exist. Do they have relatively more power than women? Yes. Patriarchy ensures that they do. Does this relative power mean that they wilfully, self-consciously and systematically wield it to subjugate women? No. Their power is precarious.
Men’s engagement with women is marked by protocols they are schooled into by a battery of social mechanisms. Their engagement with women is hampered in structural ways: from the lack of sex education when young to the segregation of genders till adulthood in most contexts, from the codes they learn from cinema, television and all forms of popular culture to the institutions of family and marriage they are trained to eventually replicate.
Do women have the same experiences and same training with just different roles and subject positions? Yes. Does this mean that they are pure victims? No. Do women also use whatever powers they get from their doubtless structurally unequal positions in whatever ways they can? Yes, they do. Does this make them wilful, self-conscious and systematic abusers of those powers? No.
Therefore, to come to the second duality: do only men have to take on the imperative to change? No. Both men and women do. Nobody likes to give up power and everyone must be taught that they have to if they believe in equality and companionate relations. Both men and women are meeting on a terrain where both have some pretty skewed understandings of themselves and each other. Both have precarious senses of self and access to power is a desire for both.
Feminism and the backlash to it means that a feminist language, the best language we have, to sort out that skewedness is itself very uneven and not up to the task. Caste and class, religion and region, all of these muddy the terrain further. The viciously unequal context of neoliberal India needs to be factored into the obstacles to the creation of a space where men and women might begin conversations about an equitable, transparent negotiation of power between the sexes.
In the southern states, there’s a term “love failure” that takes a great toll on the young (and not only the disenfranchised), producing great violence inflicted both on the self and the other. The rash of rejected boys murdering girls in broad daylight in all parts of India is a symptom of this larger malaise.
The suicide of a Dalit girl recently in Karnataka when Hindu rightwingers accused her of being with Muslims shows a relation between shame, caste, sexuality and suicide that is far from explored. IT folk taking their lives and the lives of family members over loans and financial bankruptcy and the violently broken marriages involved litter newspapers. This is the tip of the complicated field of the sexes in India.
Men need to be worked with, yes, but so do women and the painting of men as pure oppressors is as harmful as the portrayal of women as purely oppressed.
The Indian internet has to be wrested from the endless emptiness of articles on Aziz Ansari and brought to bear upon the complex realities that mark the lives of Indian citizens across classes and castes.
Like US internet feminism, Indian internet feminism is a displacement of the real inequalities produced by late global capitalism. It is a smokescreen that does not allow any real debate on ground realities both there and here but also no real advancement of the power and possibilities of feminist critique.
Also read: How the courts failed in interpreting consent in Mahmood Farooqui rape case