Handmaids’ Tales
Photo courtesy of joinonelove
Today is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women
The results of the recent election in the US have highlighted several concerns and one which is clearly of significance was the public preference for a male leader, however brazenly flawed, over the highly qualified female candidate. Racism definitely played its part as well but it is clear that convincing authority and leadership still look masculine to many people in 2024.
This appears to be true even if the male candidates have credible allegations of sexual assault and rape on record against them.
For the past few years, we in the End Sexual Violence Now (ESVN) campaign in Sri Lanka have sought to raise awareness in the community of the different kinds of violence that are perpetrated against women and girls in our society and in the global context, which operate to erode our rights, our freedom and our dignity.
It is discouraging that the backlash against the advances in feminist awareness that we have seen in recent years is so prevalent and that women are still being relegated to secondary or minor roles and spoken of and treated with disrespect on the global stage. The stoking of the gender wars, the rise of incels and the dislike and distrust and resentment of women is palpable, and particularly evident in South Asian societies where many men generally feel frustrated and disenfranchised.
Women who are articulate and proud of the work they do, who have a lot to say, appear to be not very shy or demure or self-deprecating and who do not feel the need to placate the egos of the men they work with are seen as unmindful, arrogant and too ambitious by their male colleagues.
Underlying almost every interaction in every workplace is this power differential, as men occupy disproportional numbers of the high positions in every sphere. Women entering the workforce like immigrants into a supremacist structure are expected to stay at entry level for years and accept inferior status and pay and recognition. Their words, if heard, are expected to not carry much weight. It is in this context that workplace harassment takes place. Disrespect that is deeply felt and has become ingrained does not stay hidden forever.
Mansplaining is something we experience almost every day. If the differential treatment women receive is pointed out, the invaded male entities complain that women are always playing the victim and getting benefits from doing so. What about men who are assaulted? Men who are victims of domestic violence? Men who are used as wallets? Men who are abused as young boys but who can’t even articulate what has happened to them because all the social attention is on the victimized girls?
Are women in 2024 still virtual immigrants in a masculinist hegemony? Still holding only minority status although statistically, in fact, outnumbering men? What violence is done to women’s worth and sense of value in such contexts as these? Do we die of exhaustion, falling short of our personal goals, drained of energy by a thousand micro-aggressions, gaslit to the grave?
Many men, and particularly men who feel frustrated by their own flatlining signs of vitality both professionally and personally, carry underlying grievances. And this insidious sense of grievance is often concealed under social niceties and the appearance of goodwill and respectability in South Asia.
So it takes us by surprise when men overreact to quite normal behavior or respond with surprising aggression when they are not agreed with or when they are asked to explain themselves or clarify their position in a discussion. Angry, stabbing motions become evident in their arm gestures, they raise their voices and make compulsive, numerous verbal attempts, both overt and covert, to undermine the dignity of the woman they are engaging with. And they say they can’t help it.
Some persist in discussing topics a woman has clearly stated she feels uncomfortable in speaking about such as Female Genital Mutilation, for example, and the “medical reasons” according to proponents of such practices as to why such interventions on the bodies of children might be “beneficial for reasons of hygiene”. Beneficial for which party, one can ask. Are men wanting to be protected from possible infection while the bodies of girls and women are subjected to hostile takeover, assault and battering ram behavior in so many contexts in the world today? Such hostile underlying disrespect is itself violent in many ways. No constructive discussion can take place in such contested territory.
The common ground between the genders has become noticeably narrower in the past serveral years. A sneering, irritated assumption that all feminists are “feminazis” is also very much on show once the social masks come off and so is the reactive, foregone conclusion that every woman must be trying to take away from every man she meets any shred of self respect he has or recognition of any admirable quality he still possesses.
Choosing personal peace in such hostile, occupied land is like progressing through a minefield. One attempts to keeps one’s head when all around you are losing their minds and blaming it on you. A recent article highlights a growing dissent by women in the context of this erosion of their sense of safety and dignity.
The 4B movement incepted by Korean women is one which counters violence with non-engagement. Having identified dating, marriage and the whole process of having and rearing children as unilateral and bearing mostly alone the emotional labor and physical and psychological exploitation inherent in the social roles imposed on them by their patriarchal context, many younger women have chosen to opt out.
Women who choose to be single, child free and have control over their time and their energy and their bodies are particularly threatening to those of a patriarchal mindset. Incel men, feeling cornered and driven into a state of passive aggression and emasculated, resent women’s power of choice as it is often, as they perceive it, exercised to exclude them. So they retaliate by portraying women as parasites who are trying to use men as providers of wealth and stability. This limited and stereotypical belief system fails to respect the greater range of capacity of both parties in any connection.
Margaret Atwood, who seems to have accurately predicted where the western world finds itself in gender wars today, has commented that while men are afraid that women will laugh at them, women are afraid that men will kill them. That’s the difference.
There are any amount of talking heads on the internet explaining many “widely-held beliefs” to us: high value men and high value women (high or low net worth in terms of income seem central to these valuations), toxic masculinity and toxic femininity versus divine masculinity and divine femininity and a myriad apologists in singlets (the right to bare arms) and tight fitting clothes influencing our assumptions.
Violence expresses itself in actions but is also manifest in words and tone and conduct and it is always sourced in beliefs, often unconscious beliefs formed in childhood and modelled by toxic family and cultural systems and never questioned or challenged by those who hold them.
To eliminate the violence in relation to the way women are currently treated, the beliefs of superiority/inferiority, strength/weakeness, power/powerlessness and value/worthlessness need to be honestly faced, understood and addressed in the privacy of our own homes before we go out and start perpetrating havoc in the lives of our fellow human beings.
4B, or not 4B, we will do well to opt for personal peace in our time. In a world at war, the only peace we can truly choose for sure is private.
