Why Should Only Men Be Responsible For Roti, Kapda And Makaan

*Trigger Warning: Mention Of Suicide*

I just took the newspaper in hand. The first few main pages dealt with all the so-called important stories of the nation and politics. Yet in the “brief section”, my eyes could not miss the death by suicide of a 40-year-old man. The reason is quite common — debt. It happens every day, and naturally, men are born to clear all debt.

Let’s just turn the page and check what’s happening with the women of our country — sensational and interesting — that’s the only thing that the nation wants to know.

French feminist and philosopher Simone De Beauvoir in her treatise The Second Sex points out how marriage today has become “a surviving relic of dead ways of life”, which not only annihilates women but also diminishes men.

The very line of Beauvoir goes to the root of the defaulted theory developed by Aristotle, Hegel, Freud or Foucault, exerting the vigorous label for Man as “the self” or the dominator and Women as the “other” or the suppressed.

The concept is quite akin to the Indian context of the Code of Manu, where a rule has been formulated in which husbands should be treated at par God and a woman should obey the males of her life, whether it is her father, husband or son. She should be demarcated within the four walls of the home.

American feminist writer Kate Millet in her book Sexual Politics on talking about marginalisation, proposes how the concept of sexual identity, this concept of male and female, is purely a social construct.

Keeping all these theorists and critics in mind when we analyse the theory of “subaltern” in the 21st-century, the very need for gender sensitisation perhaps lands our focus very selectively to only one side, that is Women, and the very role of Men from the required agenda is always muted and even eliminated.

Men are assumed and assigned the role of being the single breadwinner of the family under the patriarchal domain. There can’t be any sympathy or any excuses. When it’s a man, it’s always the size of their pocket that justifies their status in society.

My empathetic words relate to a very sad story of death by suicide by a man in Pune, Maharashtra, this morning. As a home leader, he provoked himself to bear the financial burden. Unable to clear his debt, he died by suicide.

But such vulnerable cases of deaths by suicide are not just stories specifically captured in the COVID era but something that has been gaining prominence over the last few decades. But the solution is placed in the silence zone.

“We men are compelled to think multiple times before opting for a challenging job or starting up a fresh business. What if it fails and I become jobless? Even after having a wife who is equally capable of earning enough to run the family, we are frightened of what the society will say if I become dependent on my wife’s earnings,” says Partha Pratim Roy, an IT Professional from Kolkata.

“We can’t even express these feelings to our friends or relatives as they will question our manhood. Such societal pressure irks us to suffer in silence, mostly leading to depression and other serious issues,” added Roy in a similar context.

“Housewife is a pleasant and easily acceptable position that is getting gleefully approved with high demand in the marriage market but the househusband gets massively rejected in the traditional patriarchal paradigm,” points Dr Tirthankar Mitra, a Post Doctoral Researcher from France.

“At a time when we take up using hashtags like #feminism #womeninscience # womeninpolitics #womenempowerment proudly on the social media, we should at the same time think about the struggles and miseries of the opposite gender and should also be mature enough to accept househusbands in our society,” added Mitra.

As per a report, the deaths by suicide of men is 131% higher in comparison to women in the year 2020. So it’s high time that women work shoulder to shoulder with men sharing economic responsibilities. Gender role reversals should also be made with the changing times where women should be the single earner of the family and men should take charge of the domicile.

By assigning such roles, Indian society can effectively and successfully understand the real value of the term gender sensitisation. One-sided gender sympathy and one-sided gender domination should be obliterated immediately for the betterment of future generations.

To sum up, Indian citizens should draw their inspiration from the public figure Thomas Beatie, who has been labelled the “world’s first pregnant man” and the “male mother” of three children. Beatie defies biological determinism and gender roles that have dominated ideas about what it means to be a man and a woman in American society.

Written by Aninnya Sarkar, Research Scholar and English Lecturer, Nagpur, Maharashtra, India.