Patriarchal Apporach To ‘Motivate’ Men

Urman

9 months ago

A few days ago, I followed some UPSC preparation pages on Instagram for current affairs and this kind of post started popping up in my feed. It has a hidden message that many of its audiences fail to see.

Two years ago, I read a famous book called ‘Atomic Habits’ by James Clear. In that book, he introduces a technique called ‘cue-craving-response-reward’. Basically, he talks about setting a reward for every task so that the readers can crave it, and eventually to achieve it they start working on it as a response.

It took a while for the author to discover this technique that was being taught by the typical middle and upper-middle-class Indian parents to their sons for decades. Starting from ‘if you score good, you’ll get this toy’ in childhood to ‘only if you work hard, you’ll get a beautiful bride’ during adulthood.

This is utter objectification of women as these posts encourage men to see women as rewards. The woman is further objectified as an achievement that only ‘successful men’ can brag about and show to others. The whole existence of women ends up limited to merely a ‘trophy’.

Furthermore, it portrays that women only choose wealthy men as if that’s their sole purpose: being dependent on the wealth of the men. The concept of love and affection which is supposed to be unconditional totally gets ignored. In the South Asian subcontinent, many women are forced to get married against their will by their parents through manipulation and other emotional factors. This concept enables the parents to practice this process instead of discouraging them from doing so.

The financial independence of a woman is also put under question. The expectations of a typical South Asian man from his wife are known to everyone. This concept only justifies these expectations since “the man has worked really hard to achieve her”. (/s)

A woman is much more than a trophy. They’ve the freedom to be with anyone they like with or without marriage. Women also can dream. They also have the right to study as long as they want and choose a ‘good’ man who actually loves them.

The admins of these so-called motivational pages are probably not aware of the number of women achieving top ranks in the civil services examinations every year. The students, especially the aspirants, many of whom will be leading the country as bureaucrats should not be fed with this kind of patriarchal ideas that encourage them to discriminate against women.