Gender constructs: the lock and the key

Once up a time, there was a man who possessed a lock and a key. The man was so obsessed with the key’s ability to unlock the lock, that he praised the key for his successes and accused it for his failures. So, you and I have a tale to hear about this mysterious man who had dropped the unbreakable key and reliant lock amid us ages ago and which continues to exist in our midst. Since then, the world went through massive evolution and so did the lock and key. Yet the key’s burden of unbreakability and the lock’s burden of reliability remains unchanged. The lock always gets the empathy but what about the burdened key?

Borrowing Simone de Beauvoir’s opinion from the book The Second Sex, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”. Similarly, one is not born, but rather becomes, a man. Hence, masculinity is not a virtue but a construct. It has always been about her plight but what about his endurance? Be it laws, society, the entertainment industry, fashion, family, and even friends for that matter, everyone ignores ‘his’ melancholy.

What per cent of innocent men win a case of alleged gender abuse? Does a dwarf, or a fat, or delicate man hold marriage prospects in our society? Hasn’t a brother always been ridiculed for using his sister’s “ladkiyon wali cream”? Why aren’t there any high-heeled shoes for men? Why can’t he wear pink? Why does every Farhan Qureshi (R Madhavan’s character in Three Idiots) have to leave photography because of family pressure to pursue engineering? Is it because he is the ultimate breadwinner? Maybe it wasn’t enough that even his friends contribute to the plight. Because according to them, he cannot cry like a little girl but has to be a hero. And if he fails, “kya usne chudiya pehenli hai?” We have burdened her with femininity, but haven’t we burdened him with hyper-masculinity too?

“Innocent until proven guilty” our law believes, but people don’t. The list of expectations of the girls’ family regarding the groom is never ending. Not to forget, his duties of lifting buaji’s and taiji’s suitcases, removing the ghee ka dibba from the top shelf, and because he is a driver by birth, he has to park the vehicle inside every night. While the girlfriend has the privilege of shopping, he has the privilege of holding her bags. He should be gentle enough to pay all her bills, open the doors, and pull out the chairs for her. And therefore, he remains unconditionally and conventionally masculine.

Being a woman, I am thoroughly aware of the struggles and compromises we make and I refuse to dismiss those issues. But it is time we think about the unspoken, unrealised, and unacknowledged silence of men. One has accepted the construct of masculinity in such a way that if any man tries to step out of its realm, he is labelled a loser or, worse, a “woman”.

So the moral of the story goes unchanged and the key has to remain conventionally unbreakable.

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