A recent video by Homi Adajania, starring Deepika Padukone, is supposedly made to empower women. Here Deepika with 99 other women, try and talk about how every woman feel about themselves.
The video reminded me of something that I read on Quora long back. There was a question, ‘What is the biggest irony in India?’ and a girl named Janga Vyshnavi answered, “When a woman says, ‘I am proud to be a woman’, then she is strong willed and fiercely independent, but if a man says ‘I am proud to be a man’, then he is, well a male chauvinistic pig, racist, anti feminist and what not!”
In this video when Deepika Padukone comes up and says,
“My choice to marry or not to marry
To have sex before marriage, to have sex outside a marriage, to not have sex
My choice to love temporarily or to lust forever
Remember you are my choice, I am not your privilege
My pleasure may be your pain
My songs, your noise
My order, your anarchy
Your sins, my virtues,”
It all sounds so motivating and inspiring. But if the same words would have come out of a guy’s mouth then he would have been a typical example of a male dominating society. This is my problem.
When you talk about gender equality then how can it be possible by favouring one over the other. Which is what basically feminism is all about. Isn’t the concept self contradicting? So what if it is the female gender which we are discussing about.
If bad things are happening against women, then yes, they do need to be dealt seriously. But doing unjust favors and elevating woman at the cost of suppressing the opposite gender is in no way going to bring any kind of balance. Even now, I know most of you must be having a feeling that I am a person of regressive mindset who has a problem with women empowerment.
The fact is, even I want every woman to get the same status as a man gets, but not at the cost of diminishing the sanctity of a man. Sounds weird? Can’t a man be termed as pure?
Of course he can.
Lets bring pre marital sex into this context as an example.
If I am a believer in the concept of sex after marriage and I have made sure that I will have sex after marriage only, then why is it so wrong of me to expect a girl with the same set of beliefs? Whether I get that kind of a girl or not is a different thing, but why am I labelled as a sexist just because I have this ideology? It definitely won’t be a problem for me if the girl I marry has a different view point, but what is so terrible about expecting it?
The biggest problem here is people misunderstanding the meaning of the word ‘freedom’. On Women’s Day I read an article on Scoopwhoop, it was something like this, ‘You are a free woman if you have sex before marriage and job after marriage.’ What can be inferred from this is only when you fulfil these two criterions, you can be a free woman and else not. This is what you call as enforcing freedom.
The way feminism is being looked upon by us is what brings in the concept of women being the inferior sex. Because what we are doing here is explicitly telling that women need help and then we are figuring out a way to support them. Why can’t we say in the first place itself that both genders are equal, instead of first pushing them down and then pulling them up.
Only when we do this, gender equality is possible. Diminishing men is as bad as diminishing women, and this is something which every individual needs to understand, be it a boy or a girl.
By Vaibhav Lall
Courtesy: Rise OF India
