My best friend S isn’t particularly fond of political debates, online or offline. Last weekend, however, as we searched for answers at the bottom of a whiskey bottle, she loudly told off her partner of 10 years: he had just offered his two bits on #MeToo 2.0, and his words amounted to a kind of genteel tone-policing. S was having none of it. Just shut the f**k up and listen. For once, your opinion is not important here, she said.

I am mindful of the irony of a cis-het (cisgendered, heterosexual) man opening a #MeToo Op-Ed with this nugget. That I do so anyway is because men, especially men of privilege and/or social capital — often polite, soft-spoken, old school men of a certain vintage — appear to be more than a little bewildered these last few weeks. What does this mean for ‘us good guys’, they wonder. Isn’t it scary how a tweet can get my friend fired? What if he is proven innocent ‘eventually’? Should serial offenders be ‘clubbed’ with one-off cases, especially when the ‘mistake’ happened decades ago?

These are panic-stricken questions. The answers, I admit, are not nearly as interesting as the reasons why these questions are voiced in the first place. They tell us why #MeToo was long overdue in India — and how the movement has the potential to be more inclusive in the long run.

The primary reason for the collective male panic is the speed, strength and scale of MeToo 2.0. Law student Raya Sarkar’s pioneering LoSHA (List of Sexual Harassers in Academia) effort last year gave Indian men the first taste of the power of #MeToo. But — and this brings us back to privilege and social capital — most of the alleged harassers on that list faced little or no institutional consequences. Even after a guilty verdict from its Committee for the Prevention of Sexual Harassment, Delhi’s Ambedkar University did not sack its law professor Lawrence Liang, but merely removed him as dean. Sarkar, a Dalit woman, and the voices backing her unconditionally found little support.

This time around, (relatively) privileged women are speaking out and it has led to a minister stepping down. Editors, writers, artists, filmmakers, admen and entrepreneurs are facing professional consequences. On one hand, these are all welcome changes. On the other, this accountability was glaringly missing when a Dalit woman asked the tough questions. Sarkar herself, in a recent interview with journalist Rituparna Chatterjee, acknowledged Bhanwari Devi as the true pioneer of India’s #MeToo movement. Devi, a Rajasthani woman belonging to a family of kumhars or potters, was raped by a group of upper-caste men in 1992. There is no escaping the fact that Devi failed to get justice — by 2007, when the Rajasthan High Court finally heard an appeal against the initial ‘not guilty’ verdict, two of the accused were dead.

Another reason why men are panic-stricken is that, for the first time ever, a spectrum of unacceptable male behaviours — ranging from online harassment/unsolicited sexting to rape — is under the scanner, and the prevailing mood is to take no prisoners.

I know of two long-term couples who broke up in the aftermath of #MeToo, simply because the women realised they had been in inherently skewed relationships all these years.

Men no longer have recourse to the Good Guys v Bad Guys binary. Left-leaning, liberal men (of those outed in #MeToo 2.0, most identify as exactly that) are finding out that they do not really belong to a separate ontological or moral category, that their offences arise from the same sense of male privilege and entitlement they are fond of lambasting in other men, particularly conservative men they love to label ‘less evolved’.

At this point in time, Indian men who identify as left-liberal (like this writer) can do a lot worse than talk to the women in their lives. Nobody expects years of conditioning and privilege to evaporate overnight — but that doesn’t mean swift, visible change cannot be achieved, as the #MeToo resignations/ousters bear out.

There are two things most Indian parents are great at — shopping for weddings and reinforcing normative gender roles. The latter has cleaved a huge schism between the lived realities of young Indian men and young Indian women. It is not entirely inaccurate to say that these are parallel universes, connected only via binaries. Ladka - ladki , science/arts, reason/emotion, provider/nurturer.

The only way to bridge that gap as best as possible is for men to have level-headed, honest conversations with women — conversations about their fears and motivations, their trials and triggers, and, yes, conversations about consent.

And if hysterical (yes, I’m going there) men claim they now feel ‘afraid’ to talk to a woman, well, try this for size — fear itself has brought you closer to the lived reality of an Indian woman. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Aditya Mani Jha is a commissioning editor with Penguin Random House

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