Feminism revisited

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Feminist 2011

I am revisiting feminism with Aqseer, a good twenty five odd years later.

The strange thing is that neither of us had an orthodox, conservative upbringing. My childhood was nearly as progressive as hers. I can think of only one difference. I grew up as three, two sisters and a brother while she had only Asawari for company. You would have thought the permutation alone might have kept her immune from shades of gender bias. Not that I suffered any at home. Truth be told, it was probably my brother who felt sisterly weight pinning him down when we were growing up, poor 'bhai'. Dad and Mom were equitable in their treatment of us three, if anything. They in fact, tried to even out the family adrenalin rush that comes on in typical Jat Sikh families at the birth of a son.  

 Money, Honey, Ruby

My brush with gender based favouritism would take place on our visits home to Moga during the summers. I would see the milk tumblers that went to the boys in the family, the larger portion of curd pushed their way, the fussing over them on their return from the farm while the girls in the clan worked round the clock, invisible and unacknowledged.  Try as I might, I cannot forget one particular night in my Dad’s maternal village called “Burj Harike”. Kamal was working on some Punjabi to English translations with my help around 7 pm or so. I remember the low voltage, the oppressive air over the turbid paddy fields and the cloud of moths hovering over the books. As we pored over the text in Gurumukhi, Amarjeet Taiji rudely snapped off the solo bulb over us, “Stop it girls, the boys are back and need to sleep.”

With the immediate home ruled out as a plausible cause therefore, where and why did Aqseer and I get coloured with feminism ?!

Feminist 1986

In retrospect now, feminism is not bad but it is reactionary in spirit and thereby a costly consumer of precious personal resources such as time, energy and emotion. Why should a gender feel the need to contest established norms? Why should half the human race have a gulp of bile forever lurking on the rim of their throats? Why should one lot be pre-occupied with placating, manipulating, acquiescing, pleasing the other? Even all those years ago there was that look on the streets, a tone on the radio and TV, a thought expressed in print that made women feel devalued, disrespected and disdained.  

There followed of course the marathon and mandatory circuit of Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex”, Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar”, Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues” and Germaine Greer’s “The Female Eunuch”……

I feel Aqseer’s inner turbulence in short. I shudder when she insists on driving home alone at midnight because, “my male friend’s parents would be as worried over him as you are about me.” I wince when a colleague says her son is comfortable having the girl pay for the meal because "is he not giving her his company!" I double up with alarm when boys refuse to give up seats marked for girls because “are they not asking to be equals?” It scares me when two equally qualified young professionals, batch mates in some cases, decide to tie the knot and a month later the guy is beating up the girl. I don’t know what to make of girls wanting to do everything a boy seems to be able to do. This is your fault Freud !

Should I have factored in her gender while parenting her? Is feminism becoming defunct, seeing as there are generational leaps over mere two to three years today? Do girls feel any more valued, cherished, safe and filled with a sense of dignity and self-respect for the mere fact of having been born a human being today? Or is it the boys gearing up over “masculinism”…the new phenomenon in vitro !