Sexism and the male majority
For the first time in almost a year, I walked through to a marketplace in India. The kind of marketplace I’m talking about is a huge area full of high rises, with thousands of human males bustling about the place, along with a handful of females and about as many dogs. I’m so used to the sexist stares going directly to my chest here in Delhi, that the moment I got out of my car into that marketplace, I felt the air change around me, as though a female had stepped into a crowd full of male hormones. Perhaps that was partly my imagination, and mostly my wariness, but maybe some part of it was objective reality. As I walked through the crowd behind my father, noticing one odd female here and there, my brain went into overdrive. I imagined situations where a man might try to take advantage of the crowdedness, how I would call him out, I imagined my father go berserk, I wondered if the crowd would support me or stay uninvolved.
My brain created situations that didn’t exist, and worked to find solutions to them. And while so far this was all instinctive, when I consciously reconsidered these thoughts, I realized how disappointing humankind is. Because the brain rarely imagines beyond the realm of the possible, and it mostly imagines within the realm of experience.
A ridiculously relatable description I read somewhere was of a term called ‘rape schedule’. The article said that women live by a rape schedule, constantly aware of the time that they are going out, the articles of clothing they adorn, the company they go out with, the crowdedness of the area, potential escape routes, and other things that they consider but never consciously realize. And this schedule, these thoughts are so deeply ingrained in our brains that we don’t think twice about them, they come as naturally to us as erections do to men.
And the ‘rape schedule’, while absolutely accurate and a constant reality, is not the end-all and do-all of sexism. Men, and women, undergo and propagate sexism every single day. When you start thinking about it, there are so many factors to consider that at every point in the thinking process, you might end up realizing how you yourself are propagating sexism. Think about the word rape. Sadly, I have heard this word thrown around in conversations of highly educated, reasonably woke people, used in casual contexts like gaming. When I consider the concept of marital rape, I realize how many people refuse to believe in it. Some conversations end up with one point of view claiming that rapists can be pardoned for they are merely victims of their animalistic sexual desires. While these sort of conversations bring a sour taste to my mouth, and flare up the feminist in me, I realize that at times I have let things slide. And it’s taking me time to have the strength to call out my friends, and it takes me confidence to call out my family, and it will take me courage to call out my boyfriend, or my husband. But the days I let things slide are the days I remember how my loved ones were molested, and how I’ve been stared at, followed, touched.
And yet while these clear cut examples of sexism are pure red flags for me, the lower the intensity gets, the blurrier becomes the line. When I get down to the smallest things, I wonder if chivalry is sexism as well. Chivalry has a positive connotation, it’s good behavior of a man towards women, but if I consider it in a purely objective perspective, isn’t any type of behavior that can be defined as ‘from men towards women’, or the other way round, sexist? Isn’t anything that splits us apart, makes us see each other as different groups, sexist? If I truly believe in removing sexism, should I not also work towards removing those that benefit women in particular? If I encourage parts of sexism that benefit me, am I not directly promoting what I’m fighting against? So the way I try to define feminism is equality. Pure, objective equality. You do for me exactly what and as much as I shall do for you, regardless of your gender or sexual preferences. You are as much human as me, and for that reason we are perfectly equal.
