No Need For Feminism
By Maanya Charu Kalra
As a fairly active social media user, I come across a range of feminist content everyday. Recently, I have seen some content on anti-feminism that glorifies the idea that feminism is a means to suppress men and seek undeserved privileges for women. Some even call feminism outdated. There are people in this world who think feminism is not required. They are often not the ones who think women are any lesser than men. Instead, they think that everything women need has already been granted to them. A fight that’s pro-women is often made up to be ‘anti-men’ thereby delaying the progress feminists aim to achieve for the little girls and boys who expect a bright world ahead. If they grow up in the midst of such debates, I believe we will lose another generation to the clutches of inequality and exploitation and a hard-earned chance to better ourselves.
A young girl on her way to school in Manipur, India
May 2019/Agenzia Info Salesiana
Is there really no need for feminism?
A minor girl was raped inside a police station in Odisha in June 2020. Oath of office would be a logical second after humanity in the list of things those policemen spat in the face of by becoming ‘rapists in uniform’. How many such bullets do we need to bite before we recognise the pressing need for a change of mentality? Rapists are not born, they are engineered in societies that choose to not support advocacy aimed at female rights.
As high as a 1000 minor girls are forcibly converted to Islam in Pakistan annually. These girls are abducted and taken into sexual exploitation merely because they were born into one religion and not the other. When you see the mother of an abducted daughter beating herself and falling to the ground, as she exclaims in anger and shock, you know what else reflects in her voice? Helplessness. And why is she helpless, you ask? Because, newsflash, it’s a man’s world.
Men in India have repeatedly used women as objects of revenge. Look out your window, you’ll find two men having an altercation, what’s the first insult they choose to utter out of their mouths? “Bh*nch*d” or “M*d*rch*d” So, that means you hate the man so much that you’d want to rape his sister or mother? This is what boys learn to speak as they grow up. As of 2018, over 35,000 rape cases were reported in India annually, out of which 93.9% were cases where the victim knew the accused.
However, I guess as a consolation, girls are at least getting educated, right? I mean most girls, or some girls or maybe a percentage that is always lesser than the male literacy rate or an employment statistic that always has more men in the C-suit. Women’s huge contribution to the household is ignored, their unpaid work as homemakers does not make it to the national income. On the other hand, girls are often forced out of education and pushed into marriages rendering them with little or no access to careers let alone one with family support. Women are discriminated against at the hands of Hindu rituals even in today’s times. These range from the ‘Karva Chauth’ where women observe a day-long fast without food and water for their husband’s long life, the concept of ‘Kanya Daan’ where a father ‘gives away’ his daughter who now ‘belongs’ to the husband and calls his home hers, going into the visual aspect of looking like a married woman clad with sindoor (vermillion applied on the parting of the head), mangal sutra (a necklace) and the chooda (red bangles). Limits are pushed when rituals that are banned by the law, are still conducted, often forcefully by the men in a community. One such ritual is ‘Sati’, banned in the mid-19th century, where the wife of a deceased man was made to sit on his funeral pyre and burnt alive. The last suspected incidence of Sati was as recent as 2015.
A graphic representation of the Sati ritual
Oct 2018/Feminism in India
Time and again, women have been perceived as objects of rage, revenge and sacrifice. She did not become an object overnight; she was one back in the 2002 Godhra riots in Gujarat, she was one in 1984 when the Sikh community was under attack in northern India, the Partition in 1947 and many such historic and tragic incidents that made women bear the brunt of political, religious and communal disagreements. There is a dialogue from the 2001 Bollywood drama based on the Partition of India, Gadar, that often rings in my ears. These lines were said by an Indian man, “They (Pakistanis) have stripped our women naked on the streets and made them praise their Lord, we will do the same '' As much as I run away from dark films, this is true, isn’t it? This really happened. Such words were spoken as heinous crimes took place at every nook and corner in August 1947, on this very land.
Women in 1947, India/Pakistan
March 2018/89 Indians
You think this is a tale from 70 years ago? We can revisit such disgrace year on year. Nothing reflects the defeat of our society more than the fact that even today when a young girl turns a certain age, she is taught in clear words or indirectly, that she has to keep safe from this predator of a world. This little girl will grow up in a time when the cries from partition would be long gone and faded, but will we be able to hide from her the notion our world holds true? Will we tell her that when clashes begin and the ‘powerful’ step on the road with the motive to defeat, she will act as the object of our revenge?
Amid the pandemic that has shaken the foundations of our current times and unleashed a series of gender inequalities in most communities, a lot of the achieved progress has been lost. After all, in times of turbulence and scarcity, no one wants to be lectured on why his female counterpart is an equal. A large number of girls are forced to leave school due to lack of access to technology and a gender bias that dictates families to prefer their son’s education in times of lack of resources, domestic abuse is on the rise, more women are joining the ‘unpaid caregivers’ group as most of them juggle between unshared household chores and professional duties and female frontline warriors are often paid lesser than their male colleagues. But hey, we don’t need feminism, do we?
A picture of the notorious ‘anti suffragists’ in the United States in the early 20th century. This movement against women’s suffrage was mostly led by women themselves backed with reasons such as domestic idealism that dictated that women belong in the home and prevention from ‘overburdening’ women by giving them a say in politics.
1911/Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division
By slamming the door on feminism we are letting a community of sexists mute us out. We are falling prey to the ways of this world that regard men to be ‘better’ and more significant than women. As the trendy mantra goes, wear a mask not just to protect yourself but also to protect others. Well, I would say the same thing, don’t support feminism just for yourself, support it for the female community around you.
It is a long struggle and the world owes us a victory.