The benefit of privilege, the bane of prejudice

When she was 20, my grandmother tried killing herself. One of a handful of women at Calcutta Medical College in 1951, she couldn’t cope with the grinding poverty and the unending cycle of sexual harassment and gender oppression. Eighty now, her Alzheimer’s-stricken haze is sometimes interrupted by blinding rage that her daughter has to face more of the same. It is as if sixty years haven’t passed by.

The benefit of privilege makes it difficult to be bothered with gender prejudices. One’s brush with bias and its consequent oppression is often tangential; like when my mum said categorically she wouldn’t have let me live alone in Calcutta had I been a girl. Male privilege translates to my having no stake in either the struggle or any subsequent removal of bias.

There are plenty of instances of the patriarchal matrix keeping entrenched power structures alive in society, such as the recent instances of victim-blaming in rape cases or the notion of “women are their greatest enemies”. The mentality that hinders truly equal pay for men and women, that promotes gender binaries and false equivalence notions of male strength and female vulnerability blights even “enlightened” society.

But while one can take the right stance on these issues, for one to be truly bothered, some amount of personal investment is required. That, precisely, is what I don’t think I can offer.

My parents separated when I was 24 days old. For the next seventeen years, constant social stigma and hounding compounded with custody battles ensured that my mother lived a harrowing life, free of financial difficulty, yes, but alone and socially ostracised, taking on “well intending” patriarchy.

When I was four, her boss told her that single mothers always bring up delinquent children who subsequently abandon the mother.

I remember once when I was seven and mum came back home crying. I had never seen her cry before. She had had a meeting with the board of directors of the company and the first question they’d asked was, “Where is your husband?”

Growing up, maternal relatives were always at hand with helpful adages like, “You need a male presence in your life, beta.”

Beaten and tortured at her in-laws, my mother was constantly vilified for not living up to her traditional role of the docile wife, asked why couldn’t “adjust” especially since my father was magnanimously willing to “take her back”.

Leading a wing of India’s largest petrochemical company wasn’t enough. For anyone to talk to her at a dinner party, she had to have a husband to make her a legitimate lady. Otherwise, she was just too forward to be treated respectfully. More than once she was propositioned sexually by her subordinates.

Most of this would seem mundane if read in a newspaper; I probably would reserve a sad chuckle before moving on. But since it happened to my mother, I have to care. I probably would have cared more had it happened to me.

What did happen to me was quite different. Born and brought up by women, I was quite unaware of the gender binaries that society creates and peddles; I was even more clueless about the specific behavioural and performance sets that are assigned to people society deems ‘male’.

As an adolescent, I was told that my voice would soon break. And that I would develop uncontrollable attraction towards women.

Neither happened.

In college, after a performance, a friend brought members of the audience backstage to meet the actors. Introductions went around, with a friend volunteering, “And this is the woman.”

I always had problems conforming to gendered boxes, not because I was particularly self-willed, but because I had no idea what to conform to. Most men receive training in this performance from their fathers or brothers; I had neither.

This is particularly emasculating since the only thing that could redeem my parents (and I am not referring to the biological ones) in society’s eyes was the appearance of a strong man. An effeminate, armchair-y, “pansy” hardly fits the bill. A man who can drive, is physically strong, and has no sense of physical danger amongst ruffians is the kind every parent wants.

Every time I go out in a group I am reminded that, come a crisis, a girl would probably have to come save me. I am socially awkward in any male fraternisation situation. The fact of not being straight pushes me further away from the normative box of manhood. For, though possessing the biological characteristics, no fag is a real man, right?

So there it is. Effeminate, gay, vocal, pansy; perfect to be boxed into a neat little category on the outer fringes of man-dom.

What is deeply upsetting are movements against oppression refusing to engage with any other kind of privilege than the pervasive male kind. While trying to break down traditional gender roles for women, would it be too much of an effort to break down the ones for men as well?

I have only sketchily read Judith Butler, having never ventured into the “darker” world of radical feminism. But for a lot of women, there is anger, probably justifiable, against the men, succinctly summarised in a Marilyn French quote: “All men are rapists and that's all they are.”

For the past year, I have been with the Slutwalk forum in Calcutta, witnessing a multitude of opinions from all sections of society. While my occasional discomfort with confrontationist tactics can be traced to my not having a stake in the fight, what bothers me is the constant failure of such movements to take major demographics of victims along. While it is not mandated that they fight for everyone, when one makes a humanitarian argument and accuses others of not taking off the lens of male privilege, they themselves account for caste, class, and sexuality and race privileges.

This is probably too simplistic a reading of movements and probably an erroneous one, perhaps a consequence of my ignorance. Alternatively, this might simply be frustration at not having anyone to fight for me. For you see, the fight for gay rights stops at marriage; no one cares that gay people hate the “girly” just as much as the straight.

(Dhruba studies at ACJ, Chennai.)

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