The not-so-spoken aspect of Patriarchy

What is ‘patriarchy’? It is the culture wherein the society believes that the men should hold primary power and take decisions for their family and society. They are given such authority that they feel superior to other genders. No matter where we are from, we all have faced some or the other variant of this cultural supremacy at least once in our lives.

Even today, in many parts of the world, girls aren’t given basic access to education or sports. A certain percentage of the society still believes that girls are just meant to take care of the household. They are still of the belief that women are not supposed to go out in the world and work let alone venturing into male dominated careers like politics, military or engineering. Having said that, we have to realize that we have made progress as well. From women being limited to their homes and taught household chores to them being motivated to choose their path in education and career or from women wearing ‘ghunghat’ to now wearing what they want, we have definitely made progress.

But let me ask you a question? Is it only the women of our society that have to face the impact of this culture? NO. We have always looked at patriarchy from one angle only but it’s not only women, men have also been under tremendous pressure because of it. The society has laid down very rigid rules about the behavior of men that has forced them to act in a certain way. The so-called saying ‘mard ko dard nahi hota’ is instilled so deep in this society that they have to think twice before expressing themselves. Why is crying considered weak and being macho considered normal? Even today, the concept of house husbands is not easily accepted by people. Men are always forced to be the bread earners of the family or they are considered as failures. Why can’t the women be the bread earners and men be the one who are taking care of the household and the kids? Why aren’t both sections of the society given the freedom to decide how they want to live their lives?

We say that the world is progressing and people are changing but we can find subtlety in patriarchy in some way or the other. The root level mentality of people has still not changed that much. We still get to hear comments like ‘ladkiyo ki tarah kya ro raha hai?’ or ‘boys shouldn’t play with dolls’. At an individual level, very few have been able to reform their thought process to accept the idea of gender equality in every aspect of life.

Now in this whole aspect of patriarchy, one cannot not miss mentioning Feminism. In today’s world they sort of go hand in hand. Since Feminism has emerged as a massive movement against patriarchy it is often misinterpreted because of its cause and name but we have to understand that it was women who had been suppressed all their lives and denied some very basic rights. However, this should be made very clear that it is actually not about women alone getting their rights but about everyone getting an equal opportunity to choose for themselves. Until and unless every gender in the society is given the rights to decide for themselves, we as a community have failed to remove patriarchy from its roots.