Sexism - the has been of a nation that doesn't want to know it

What is with the obsession of portraying men as having the liberty to stray? This question disturbs me at a lot of levels but I'll just stick to the simplest one. The advertisements in this country have touched the nadir of crassness. How many ads do we have floating around that say a man flirting with many women at the same time is pretty cool and smart? And how most women are credulous enough to buy anything that the pretty cool and smart guy says? May be it is true, but still… or may be I’m being cynical. Either way, that's not the point.

Alright, agreed that this is not gender specific. There are prototypes of both species. But in India, at least, the bias is towards men. It's OK to get away with a lot of things if you are man; a woman in the same position is definitely not as lucky. The point is not to discuss morality. The issue is the subtle, and in some cases not-so-subtle, exhibition of sexism in our society.

In the urban world, sexism is a fine example of the elephant in the room. No one wants to acknowledge it. Men don’t want to acknowledge that they withheld a female employee’s promotion/career opportunity because she got married or is pregnant. Women don’t acknowledge that they got a hike because they belonged to the prettier lot (versus not-so-pretty women), or that they dint get yelled at for a goof up because they are women.

In the same urban world, most people refuse to accept the perception that a philandering man is actually referred to as a guy who many women want to be with. So poor thing, how can he help that he’s so charming? But a philandering woman is actually someone who gets around a lot and is easy to get into the sack with. So if you want an easy lay, you know where to go. The same is true for the man, but is never said of him. And it is never acknowledged that a guy who is good with his job is good but a woman needs to be exceptional at her job to be “good.”

And that’s the problem. The fact that men and women (I still say men, mostly) are choosy in deciding when they want to be liberal and when they want to shrug off their selfishness and sexist beliefs as “just the way things are” is quite shocking.

I mean, look at the Hindi movies. Sexism has been a staple for years now and is clearly a non-issue. To most people who watched a stupid movie called “Rab Ne Banadi Jodi,” it didn’t even occur that the movie, apart from insulting our intelligence, is being supremely sexist in portraying that an educated woman, albeit a small-town resident, lacks the basic sense to identify her husband without a moustache. Or even that, the very same husband does not so much as bother apologizing when his wife discovers that he was actually conning her by acting like he was somebody else just to test if she would stray or not. I mean, really?

So by the same token, do we project in our movies that a woman trying to “con” her husband by giving her alter ego shorter hair or a different style of dressing gets away with it? That he buys the fact that she is this whole new and different person altogether?

I don’t think so. And this movie is just one example I can think of from the top of my head. Sexism is so deep rooted in our heads, society and culture that people who indulge in it or people victimised by it don’t even realise most of the time. It’s just acceptable because it has been happening for so long. And because we have forgotten to question why some of us are entitled to liberties that many others are not. Why pub-going women are beaten up and not men or why it’s OK if men work long hours and take their job seriously while for women it’s just “attaching too much importance to your work” when “It’s just a job.” It all comes down to the same thing. An archaic mindset that is supposedly our culture. And the fact that it is so darn convenient to go on continuing this culture.

And India is going to be a super power and an epitome of modernity in the next 20 years, when the country is not even willing to move beyond mistakes that were made generations ago. What a joke.