A lot of men react to this column almost as if writing it makes me some sort of three-headed monster. They are not quite sure how to talk to me, what jokes to crack. Most of it is because they have mutated the word ‘feminism’ in their heads as that dirty F word that stands for anything from lesbianism to militancy to bra-burning to man-hating fanaticism. ‘Feminist fascist’ is one of the popular phrases used to address women with views on women’s rights.
This kind of hostility is a convenient reaction to anything that disturbs your mental peace because once you have labelled someone or something as ‘freak’ you don’t need to take the subject seriously anymore. You can treat the whole thing as a joke, which removes the need for reasoned argument or considered change.
But, and I am tremendously glad to say this, increasingly there are right-thinking men out there who are beginning to realise that feminism is not about women but about human beings. Just as you don’t have to be a black person to rail against racism, you don’t have to be a woman to be a feminist. You just have to be human. Last year, British Prime Minister David Cameron finally declared in public ‘Yes, I am a feminist’, a huge step forward for men everywhere who are still worried that they might be thought of as being wimpish or less than macho or having gone over to the enemy side if they admitted to something so drastic.
And that is really a big part of the problem. Men’s self-image. For millennia now, men have created and become used to an ecosystem that sees them as ‘tough’, the hunter-gatherers who must demolish everything in their path, including women. And they are not quite sure now whether saying that they support the idea that women too can have rights makes them less masculine somehow.
But, honestly, what is feminism? Forget the militancy of its roots (the dramatic, OTT postures of some of those pioneering women without whose courage we wouldn’t have had a movement) without that, feminism just says that gender does not and must not dictate how we treat fellow human beings. Just as colour or caste or religion must not. As feminist writer Marie Shear put it, “Feminism is simply the radical notion that women are people”.
Just as, finally, there are several people (yet not enough) among our acquaintances who would be ashamed to give a man a different glass to drink from because he is Dalit or insult a neighbour because she is from Nagaland, so too will we finally reach a stage when enough people will be ashamed to offer someone a lower salary because she’s a woman. Or touch someone without their permission because they are women. Or take it for granted that wives must serve husbands because they are women.
When crimes against women are seen as human rights crimes, then feminism will cease to be a battle fought by women alone.
