“You can at least learn to feed yourself, learn little cooking you have to feed the whole family.” Who does this sentence remind you of? Well, almost every mother of a daughter in any Indian household. “You have to be good at multi-tasking or just sit at home and cook rotis”. “Learn to respect elders, you have to take care of your in-laws.”
Indian parents never get tired of training their girl child for adjusting in a whole new family. Girl ‘child’ because the training starts just after she gets done with her primary education. That’s when the official training starts, the earlier stage consists of subtle ways to teaching her how to compromise and not be stubborn, while her brother might be roaming around the streets bullying others! This could be very generalizing and a lot of things have changed now but one thing that hasn’t changed is the difference between the upbringings of a girl child versus a boy child.
We as a society have made it so easy for the whole male community to prove themselves. Please don’t come up with ‘they have their own hardships’ because those hardships have been very well acknowledged and appreciated already. The point is something else here. Here we are not talking about women and their struggles, here we talk about men and their struggles. Men face judgments later in their lives because no one told them how to behave in a society where men and women are treated as equals. Men are also judged as being a good enough marriage material but the list of criteria is a bit too short.
Earns well, owns some fortune: perfect marriage material. Flirts around: disqualified! That’s it. That’s the list of tasks we have given to men to prove themselves at a very primitive age. A mother is known to have raised a gentleman if he respects women. If he allows his wife to wear anything she wants or at a very basic level, if he allows his wife to even go to work, he’s looked up to. Do you understand what’s wrong here? The word ‘allows’! Why can’t carrier choices, dressing choices, choices of opinions or even volume of laughter be as normal for women as it is for men? Also, why do men have to separately respect women, acknowledging the fact that she’s a woman? Why can’t this gender bias be nullified and respect be distributed equally regardless of the gender?
The whole mentality starts developing at a very tender age. Mothers never teach their sons that they can also keep the dishes inside once everyone is done eating. They never let their son help her doing the dishes but if the daughter doesn’t help, she gets a nice bashing. These boys have never seen their fathers treating their mothers as equals, their mothers never sat down to take the biggest financial decisions of the family. Their mothers ask the maid to cook in their absence but never teach her own husband or son how to even boil water! Then how can we expect the ever-existing patriarchy to dilute?
Honestly, there’s a feeling of pity for the male community that if their wives or mothers are not well, or just unable to feed them due to some circumstances, the poor souls have to eat from outside or just have half-cooked maggi. All they’ve learned in their lives is to sit around while their mothers and sisters keep running from the kitchen to serve them steaming hot food.
Now when the times have changed, they are judged for not being helpful. While being a respectful human is one’s own choice, there’s no denying that it’s not completely the guy’s fault. They have never seen their fathers sitting and carefully listening to their wife/mother. They have heard the male members of their family raise their voice on inconveniences as little as an unironed shirt. They’ve never seen their fathers iron clothes while mom is busy cooking. Also, their fathers never cooked or packed lunch while mom was busy ironing and sorting clothes. These small behavioral activities make a huge impact.
The men of our indian society have seen gender bias in their own houses. They are allowed to play longer than their sisters. They get to sit around and watch tv while the sister prepares evening snacks and tea. They definitely notice that there’s a stricter set of rules for their sisters which gives them a sense of superiority in some way. As they grow up, they develop a tendency to subjugate women. The problem is just with the upbringing and with the atmosphere they grow up in. It’s so easy, just keep the family rules exact the same for all children and the levels of respect equal for everyone, regardless of gender.
Someone rightly said, “as a culture, we perceive empathy, nurturance, friendships, and relationships as belonging only to women and less valuable than independence and other kinds of strengths traditionally associated with men. We have to believe that feminine strengths are valuable not just in women but in all humans. Then we won’t worry about feminizing boys.”
Why can’t we teach our sons from a very tender age just the way we teach our girls. They also have the right to learn how to share, how to care, how to put others before themselves and how to be respectful. Discrimination shouldn’t exist in any form right? Just by taking care of a few things, we can change the society to be a respectful place for everyone. Slight changes in the way of upbringing can do wonders.