Let's Spit On Men

The answer to an endless all-out attack can not be outrage as usual.

There is no cruelty.

A newly wed daughter in law is told to wake up at 1 AM, take a bath, then go and fill water every day. She is told, that she will sleep on the carpet when everyone else in the family sleeps on beds. She is told that she will only be given as much food as her husband wants her to eat. She will only eat when her husband permits her. She is not allowed to meet neighbours, talk to her family. She finally kills herself. Or, at least she is found dead hanging by the neck and the family claims she has killed herself.

The trial court sends the family to prison. The Bombay High Court goes in the opposite direction and acquits all of them. Why? Not because it believes that all accusations were lies and that the woman killed herself just like that. It acquits them, because it says that all of the above, is not cruelty.

There is no patriarchy

Union Minister Nirmala Sitaraman has declared that there is no such thing as patriarchy  (Pitr-satta, Purush-Pradhaan Samaaj in Hindi)and that it is a concept created by the “Left”. The murder of girls in the womb, child marriage, dowry deaths, sati, women wages drastically lower than men across sectors, women under-represented if not entirely missing from public services. Hindu women not having the right to divorce till 1956, even as Hindu men had the right to polygamy. Muslim women suffering triple talaq till the Supreme Court declared it illegal. Women not being allowed to decide who to marry, what to wear, whether to work or not. Marital rape being legal. Patriarchy? Imaginary thing created by the Left.

There are no women.

Recently retired Chief Justice of India said that the reason he didn’t appoint women judges to the Supreme Court is because there weren’t any senior enough in the High Courts. Let me share some names- U.U. Lalit, Rohinton Nariman, Nageswara Rao. All appointed directly as Supreme Court judges directly from the Bar. To explain-they went from being lawyers to being Supreme Court judges. As did Indu Malhotra, who was appointed before DYC became CJI.

There is no oppression.

Recently, I saw someone express outrage at how domestic workers were being paid 3k/month for a month of sweeping+mopping+utensils in a residential society, and countless people expressing approval- saying that if this person works 8 homes they can earn 25k a month, which is "good and decent". I do wonder if they would like to subject the women in their family to this good and decent life.

To understand how “decent” a life most domestic workers have, see this from Nivedita Menon’s Seeing Like A Feminist:

Violence Through Silence

Can I tell you a secret?  The fundamental bedrock of the social contract in large parts of India is twofold. 1. The powerful have a god given right to subjugate those with less power than them. 2. The powerful must collectively defend this right and protect each other, sometimes with violence but largely by silence.

In conformity with this, most marriages largely go through two stages. First, the wedding. The wedding is an opportunity for the groom’s family to achieve a substantial jump in their wealth. Discontent during this stage can be fatal.

Second is the marriage itself. Here, the woman is basically a lifelong domestic worker. She cooks, she raises children, she does “seva” for her in-laws. This is her key role. Any concession in this transaction, offered whether by orthodox conservative “right-wing” men or pseudo-enlightened, self-celebratory “”left-wing” men, is a favour. It is special. Applause and declarations of the man being evolved and not like those other bad men are expected.

Nirmala Sitharaman thinks that on Patriarchy, it is Right vs. Left. The truth is that nothing unites men, of all wings, like patriarchy does. It gives them power.

It is necessary to understand this conspiracy to understand the Bombay High Court’s decision. It is important to understand this to really get- how is all that not cruelty. Far from being cruelty, it is the ideal. A wife, a daughter in law, a mother who endures, all pain, all humiliation, all deprivation for her family. Do you see? If she is forced to walk through fire, it is not torture, it is a test.

If we deny the structures that perpetuate suffering, we are absolved from having to change them. The same argument flows when former Chief Justice DY Chandrachud claimed that there weren’t enough senior women lawyers to appoint as judges. It’s a denial dressed up as helplessness, a refusal to acknowledge that exclusion is not accidental—it is engineered.

Carla Lonzi¹ wanted women to spit on Hegel and Marx, the Left’s deities. In an essay titled “Let’s Spit on Hegel” she urges women to, as paraphrased by Elena Ferrante, “Spit on marriage, family, Nazism, communism.. to Rip inferiority from our brains” This will probably confuse Ms. Sitharaman. The full text is in the footnote, I’m sharing an excerpt from Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Series, which paraphrases the original essay:

Closer home, Stri-Purush Tulna, a marathi text was written by Tarabai Shinde in 1882 in Marathi. A translated excerpt:

“In fact, what does stridharma really mean? It means always obeying orders from your husband and doing everything he wants. He can kick you and swear at you, keep his whores, get drunk, gamble with dice and bawl he's lost all his money, steal, commit murder, be treacherous, slander people, rob peoples' treasures or squeeze them for bribes. He can do all this, but when he comes home, women are meant to think, 'Oh, Who's this coming now but our little lord Krishna, who's just stolen the milkmaids' curds and milk and tried to blame Chandravali for it. ..... how can people go on believing in the idea of Stridharma once they have begun to think about what's good and bad?”

The 4b movement in South Korea which is now finding resonance in America, urges women to not marry, date, have sex with or birth children with men. I fail to see anything less than this as restoring dignity to women. Anything less than this, and cruelty will not be cruelty. Plainly put-boycott men. The men who claim to disown patriarchy must demonstrate a complete and total disowning of all that is masculine and patriarchal, beginning with heteronormative relationships.

I think of her, this woman who once had a name and now is just a case, a judgment, a note in some dusty file. What was she thinking as she bathed at midnight, water splashing over her body as the rest of the world slept, while her husband and in-laws perhaps snored in their beds? Was she thinking about her choices? Was she trying to muster the kind of love that makes you stay, the kind of hope that keeps you believing that maybe one day, they will see her as a human being? Did she, in those moments, imagine what it would be like to walk out of that house and never return? While sending her back each time after she told them she is in pain, did her parents console themselves by saying a painful marriage is better than being divorced and alive? 

An edited paywalled version of this piece was published in Times of India

1. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5bc849e8c2ff615809f5d3a7/t/5ccd694471c10b7dac249e0f/1556965705039/Lets-Spit-on-Hegel-Carla-Lonzi.pdf