Beyond What Is A Man And What Must Be A Woman

NOTICE: Yes, it is long for it wasn't meant to be a nursery rhyme. Do not read it if you are foolish or coward or obedient for it might cause your blood pressure to shoot to dangerous levels.  

We all grow up under a collective unit as children and get divided into a man or woman only in our adolescence. While the puberty widens our definition of our body,  the identification by gender narrows the scope of it. I grew up in an extremely patriarchal family but studied in a co-ed school, which I believe, was the saving grace of my life. Therefore in an ironical way my greatest friends are boys.

During the last year of my school life, when discussions over my future became a regular affair I realized how strong gender is and how strongly is it embedded in our minds. This hit me as a strong blow for before this I had never believed that the world can be unjust to me (we all live with myths about ourselves!) . Whatever I read or saw or heard, I could not help but notice sexism. To me the world had suddenly become an awful place to live in. I felt that there are not only two major divisions in humanity but two entirely different worlds coexisting on the same planet---one so idealized… so dominant that the other has been pushed to the periphery! My newly gender conscious mind, noticed for the first time that all ad films show women standing by the dining table while their family members ate. This standing by the side phenomenon no matter what brilliant digestive reason one attributes it to was a revolting sight for me. As the days passed, the fact that in spite of being able bodied, I was immobile like an invalid started to haunt me. I have already told you that I think hard, and therefore wrung my grey matter for next two years to make sense of gender. Like many beginners, for a long time, I revolved around that preliminary protection clause that has justified belittling of women since centuries. If you are a good reader you’d have come across sentences like he took her into his protection.  

One fine morning while putting clothes over the line, it occurred to me that to protect means to say that the protected is vulnerable and therefore, can be exploited. Protection implicitly declares a potent possibility of exploitation. And this is not just a semantic inaccuracy but I believe a philosophical shortcoming. Textbooks define gender in different but insufficient terms and since I do not beat about the bush, I’d be very exact in its definition: Gender is a philosophy. And like all major philosophies of life affirmation, it draws sanction from fear. Fear that you’d be destroyed if you choose to be otherwise than what is espoused. Alternative will be frowned upon, threatened and excommunicated. That explains 377.

My heart soon overflowed with disgust against the whole world. Since there is no alternative world where I can live in, my hatred against the existing one made me to increasingly withdraw from all social conventions. I remember how at nights I had found it hard to sleep and stared at walls up till dawn. Happiness includes positive thoughts. I was entertaining none of those. I  was sad and convinced that life is beyond repair. Marquez says that everyone whether satisfied or dissatisfied has a secret life. If I have to tell you what was mine at that time, I’d use three words: distrustful, cynical and hateful. Ya! I was melancholic. In the mornings the newspapers would be full of instances of violence against women and that only made the world more hateful for me. Violence against women has always existed in large measures in the society but it had never been so much discussed nor so greatly reported. In a way, this has been the best of times for women. Anyway, protection question was bound to stay with me for a long time. I even read an article that described the paranoia over sexual violence by saying that we live with rape schedule (that our lives are guided by the fear of being raped). One morning I began to think what if men were similarly under the threat of castration? Will they be confined to their houses and think of themselves as an invalid as I did?  That something can be destroyed is a reason enough to not to let it grow?

Time eventually provided answer to my ‘protection’ question but in a very tragic way. It relieved my mind greatly but I shall always be sorry for the medium in which some peace was restored to my troubled heart. It so happened that a friend's brother had been missing since days. He had gone to a relative's and in spite of being warned took a bus at night. After informing his parents on phone that he was coming back, nothing was heard of him. His body was finally found on a route that the bus wasn't taking which implied that he had fallen prey to those gangs of highway thieves. He was a man and yet was exploited. 

I realized that 'Protection' is a fancy word. It might fan the vanity of one in power and saves the vulnerable the trouble of looking over her shoulders, but it is fundamentally flawed. Self-defence is what we are born with and anything that promises more than that is making a fool of you. Have you ever tried to raise a toddler into air? If yes, you’d have noticed how tightly he grasps your hand so that he doesn't fall. Self-defence is our innate tendency. When you do not defend yourself or are denied of that birth right, the result is, quite naturally--lawlessness in the society, as is the case with India. This self-defence argument is in fact the basis of gun laws in many nations. The state can’t protect every citizen. The family can’t protect an individual. And therefore I concluded that ‘protection’ is a misnomer. But this was just the beginning for me for when you try to reason with something as invasive as gender making inquiries is rather a lifelong phenomenon. The more I thought, the more miserable I became. I suffered. It was the days when I stopped maintaining a journal. My entries became irregular for my heart was full with despondency so great that I could not talk of myself truthfully and for the record, I’d die before being dishonest with my pen. 

"The world has always been divided into masculine and feminine", said I to myself. This is ancient but since I do not believe in eternal recurrence, there must’ve been an origin. Therefore I examined many prevailing philosophies with which we tend to make sense of our existence to understand how it began. I discovered not surprisingly considering the state of the society, every single one of them to be greatly sexist in their concepts. This necessitates a short discussion over religions. All Abrahamic religions glorify the status of the obedient wives while warning that when women are left to themselves they err like Eve who led to the Fall. The Bible even says that the Satan approached Eve because she was weaker of the two sexes. This was as bad as Manusmriti. As a teenager, I had asked my father as to why some Islamic states believe that the statement of one man equals that of two women.  To this he had replied that women are emotional. I would not get into those debates of supremacy of heart over mind, but in this case, what I deduced was that it sugar coated the fact that it held women as dishonest. Abrahamic religions mention scores of prophets. In Islam the figure is above lakhs and then there are four esteemed prophets-Moses, David, Jesus and Mohammad, but none of those lakhs of prophets was a woman. It seems like God has been partial to a particular sex for making all divine revelations. Once I sneaked into a philosophy class where they were discussing Descartes. The professor said that we have vision of an ideal supreme self. That ideal self is God. They say, God is projection of human ego into the Universe. That ego is invariably a male.

Every marginalized community has always looked back to history, dwelt in its facts and tried to ascertain the causes of the social injustice done to them. Similarly as my abhorrence for gender roles increased, I began to look into history to understand the exact origins of this philosophy. I began with this premise:  the Noble Savage wasn't a chauvinist. This is supported by the fact that the tribal societies always had greater gender equality. Many tribal societies living in India had been unknown to sexual violence until independent India introduced them to it. That means they never had those foolish ideas of 'protection'.  Let's not forget that the great river Amazon was named after seeing women warriors on its banks. I went for Marx too. The Marxist History which claims that history is progressive and would culminate at a point, says that the primitive society was the society of Mothers' Rights. It remained a mystery to Marx as to how that ideal primitive society was converted to that of Father's Rights. Marx believed that sexual monopoly had its origins with that of private property. When a piece of land was owned, its master demanded that it must be his children who should reap the harvest. Therefore the woman must belong only to him. So, sexual monopoly was an important event in the history, and perhaps the single greatest contributor to the eventual domination of the philosophy of gender. And then not to mention, these confined ladies bore children by scores. As nurturing increasingly became job of mothers and only mothers', little time could be devoted to anything else. Virginia Woolf rightly aims at this in her classic essay A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN when she asks women to have babies by twos not tens. (Read it and I give you my word you’d be give a feast to your mind.) I remember, I wrote somewhere that birth control has been single greatest contributor in women’s movements.

As a thinker, I have been greatly influenced by postmodernist studies but I do not deny that the grand tradition of which T.S Eliot talked of is a potent force if not in our literature then definitely in our psyche. The figures that attract us-of whom we talk of—aren’t they gender stereotypes? Think please. What does our history and our culture and, the dead part of it—the literature offers us? We as Indians have no heroines who left their husbands or took many lovers. Since I believe marriage as an institution represents the most concrete form of philosophy of gender, I have only searched for instances where women walked out of their marriage. And I must tell you we have no significant examples of it. One of my Hindu friends was of opinion that Draupadi was what I have been searching for. Draupadi is definitely one of the mightiest achievements of our culture but she, if you read the Mahabharata well, carries within her the seeds of that sexual monopoly I’ve talked of. She is in a way the best example of what I am trying to establish. Draupadi though took different husbands in turn, was an eternal virgin. That’s the material point. In cultures of virginity like ours, this is important to note that are heroines have always been sexually pure. We live still in that centuries old ideals of sexual purity and this can be gauged in phrases that we use like ‘outraging her modesty’. In one of those many readings it occurred to me that Paganism has been more liberal to women than any of our monotheistic faiths. We grow up with tales about sexual monopoly over women. You take a wife. I have to yet come across a sentence that said she took a husband. 

 On a journey on a train, I saw a man sitting at the door of the carriage. I was tempted and wanted to similarly sit at the edge. This sight has been produced in motion pictures umpteen number of times. But there has always been a man at the door, never a woman. As a child, I was so fascinated with adventure tales that I wanted to be a swords-woman and sincerely dreamt of putting down heavy weights in duels. When you reach puberty that difference between physical strength of a girl and a boy starts to show strongly. One learns to accept that the boys are strong. I only stopped dreaming of becoming a swords-woman in my late adolescence. This made me think: Were the earliest of women suppressed by that sheer superior physical strength? H.G Wells in his HISTORY OF THE WORLD tells about some other specie of genus homo who lived in tribes and as to how when one of these tribes would attack the other, females would be abducted so that victors have necessary mediums to increase their numbers. If Wells is factually correct then subjugation of women as an event in history was a very early occurrence. Is muscle strength a determinant of a sex’s supremacy? The answer came in a moment of inspiration. I smiled as I took my pen in hand and wrote this down: Elephants are any day stronger than humans but humans rule the planet.

Gender is abusive. To both the sexes. While it weakens women, it denies tenderness to men. Since the law of a nation represents the psyche of its people, it becomes necessary to see how law in practice has gender as its guiding force. Since men are believed to be aggressive and score low on warmth traits, the custody of a child is rarely given to the father. Last year while conducting a psychology experiment, I found that not even 30% of the sample attributed warmth traits to men. If you want to see how gender abuses men just take a look at divorce cases. I never believed in those grand tales about motherhood. Parents no matter what revered position they occupy in our Asian grand tradition see their children as an extension of their own selves. Psychologists have noted that notions of power have a lot to do with parenthood. I know I am digressing but the point I’m trying to make is that the motherhood is not divine. The philosophy of gender has glorified motherhood so greatly that father has been reduced to nothing but a material provider, and at hand security guard. 

No matter what divine status we attribute to womankind, the truth is that that none of those grand narratives that we grow up with treats them as equals. I have a high self-esteem and ardently in love with myself. If anything said, believed or practised belittles me, I'd discard it that very moment. When you question even one aspect of the system that you are born into, very soon you’d begin to question every other aspect too.  I never thought that taking the course of feminism would one day leave me as a borderline nihilist. The best part about thinking about a woman to be equal to a man in all terms is that you also begin to take a man equal to another, beyond the divisions of class, race, religion and caste. It certainly makes you a better person.

While crossing the I.T square, I saw a couple making queries to a tempo driver about a ride. While the man negotiated, the woman stayed behind. I felt a fire in the pit of my stomach and I realized how dangerously I had begun to hate gender. It was time to come to an understanding about the storms that had been raging in my mind for almost two years. What was that I sought to establish? The fact is that I hoped for a world beyond what is a man and what must be a woman, is because I want my identity to be exclusive of the many notions that comes with my biological capabilities. 

 A sensible creature once said to me: “Nida, gender is in the very fabric of the society. You may be the best of the specie but still you’d be defined in words as half-witted as a ‘woman’”. I hate to admit this but he was right. We all see the world the way it is and then think how it ought to be and finally are disgusted by the chasm between the two. This helplessness and disappointment over belonging to a part that is beyond repair is one of the greatest sufferings ever known to the mankind. I wanted to be argumentative not passionate in this entry, but let me tell you, as a friend, it has been a painful and lonely journey. I took it because I want to live a life stripped off illusions, and become a self-sufficient being. I want to be honest and just, and free. Gender doesn't let you to be any of the three. But for the record, I am fine now. 

Gender as a philosophy originated through some historical forces, and became dominant by grand narratives that led to foundation of monotheistic faiths. I conclude by hoping in good faith that a millennium or two later this philosophy with perhaps similar play of some historical forces would be supplanted by something that is inclusive of individuals not divisive into types.