Feminism in India will not help the girl child- Part II
The last article in this series talked about low sex ratio and dowry. Now, lets look at some other common salvo fired by feminists to support their presence in India.
Poor literacy among women
This problem is very similar in its origin to poor sex ratio- that is women are privileged that they are not required to work and provide for their families or the families of their in laws. A man in India, if he is married, is expected to find work and break his back to provide for his parents as well as his wife and children. The society actively chastises men who are dead beat and can’t earn a proper living for themselves and live either on their parent’s or their wives’ money. But this is not the case for women in India. Women in India have the privilege to either go to work and earn for their families or stay home and raise their children. No one can force them to work and if it is done, the society see the husband as evil while if the genders are reversed, and the wife forces her husband to work, then the society sees it as right and just. This is the reality of Indian society and there is no point getting around it and mincing words will not change this truth. This privilege women have in not being expected to work is also the reason why the female literacy rate in India is lower than male literacy.
Consider a poor family, who barely manage subsistence level lifestyle and have one boy and one girl child. Suppose that the family is poor and can afford to send only one of the kids to school(of any kind). What will make logical sense for that poor family to do? Sending their boy to college/school or their daughter? As far as the poor family is concerned, their son, if educated will have to work his back off to provide for both of them as well as earn enough to marry his sister away into a good family. But if they educate their daughter, not only does she will leave them and go live with her husband and his family, she is also under no obligation whatsoever to work for the family(be it the husband or the parent, since if the husband makes her work, he can be arrested for torture under Indian law).
Also, given the way majority women and their families usually select their husbands, it is harder for a poor family to find her a suitable husband because the educated woman and her family usually will not like marrying a sub par husband who is uneducated. This is another conscious decision on the side of the girl’s family to prefer to educate their son over their daughter. Logically too, this also makes the most sense. One can mince words from their ivory towers on why this is wrong or patriarchy or whatever, but this is the ground reality for most poor and lower middle class parents. Hence the notion that women are not educated because of misogyny is pathetic. If anything, the fact that women are given so many privileges including the privilege of not being mandated to work is the reason why many poor parents don’t send their girls to education compared to their sons, who are mandated to take care of their sisters and parents. And no, only lunatic feminists can claim that not being “mandated” to work is misogyny or oppression. Conventional or normal logic is that men working their backs off to provide for their women and children is not oppressing the women who live off their husbands work, taking care of their children. In the end, both husband and wife themselves have to decide what is best for their families on whether if wife raising kids from home is better or if both working to earn more money for their kids, albeit leaving the kids to rot alone without any guidance is better . Of course, the husband and wife can decide to both work and let their grand parents take care of their children. It will be a win win situation for everyone, but it is a topic for different day.
So, one can clearly see that this gap in education between women and men in India is because of poverty and other social realities including the fact that women are assigned no responsibilities whatsoever to take care of their parents, for the most part, and not because of misogyny as the feminist lunatics claim. Also, for fixing this problem, one has to fix the root of the problem which is poverty. Of course, when parents are wealthy, they obviously are going to send both of their children for studies and so fixing poverty would help solve most of the problems. The second step is to assign responsibility for women to take care of their parents in the society so that parents don’t feel that educating girl child is a wastage of resources for them, specially when they barely scrape by daily. This of course is not going to be accomplished by upper and middle class entitled feminist princesses who whine about patriarchy on internet everyday and use nonsensical terms like mansplaining, oppression, victimhood etc. Ever wondered why none of the poor women take these professional victims seriously even though all these feminist lunatics claim to fight for them? When was the last time you saw a poor girl holding placards shouting down with patriarchy in the streets? And seriously, is whining and bitching about patriarchy going to solve the poverty problem in India or are feminists ever going to increase responsibilities for women in India seeing as they themselves are after more power over men and society and are not really interested in taking responsibilities? Also generally the poor women hardly complain about not being able to work because they usually have to work to support their family unlike the middle class women who have the choice to not work and still claim victimhood on behalf of their poor sisters who don’t have this option.
It is also worth noting that as the Indian society will become richer, the emphasis on girl’s education will also go up naturally as a by product of prosperity. Why? Because more and more household works will get automated due to inventions like mixer-grinders, fridge, washing machine etc and hence many families will come to realise that a working wife is better for the collective good of the family than the husband working alone. This change can already be seen in states like Tamil Nadu, Maharastra Gujarat etc, where groom’s prefer working wives more than the ones which will be housemakers. As the success of two income households starts to show in comparison with the single income households, the neighbouring single income households will start to pick this idea up and become increasingly demanding for working and educated brides. This of course will have a huge impact on poor ignorant families in India because educating their daughters will then help them in getting married to a better groom in this changed societal reality. This can already be inferred from the increasing enrolment of women in the colleges in richer states.
This again demonstrates that society evolves because of natural social realities and economic progress and not because of feminist hysteria. One can objectively compare which would have made more impact on the rising levels of education among girls- changed social reality that working husband and working wife ensure better outcomes for family life or because of feminist hysteria against patriarchy? A poor family which understands the reality that two income households are much better at dealing with economic problems will be much more inclined and convinced to invest in education of their girl child rather than believing the virtual reality of angry feminist lunatics posturing in the media and academia.
Malnutrition
Malnutrition in girl children is another bogus argument the feminist love to bring up in a debate on why their man hating family destroying cancerous cult needs to exist in India. Although there is some gap in nutrition outcomes of girls and boys but malnutrition is not specifically a girl child problem but rather an Indian child problem. It is a cruel joke to insinuate that Indian girls are malnourished because of misogyny when 50% of all kids in India are malnourished and India does poorly on every social indicator for all children irrespective of their sex. The malnutrition problem in India is not because of misogyny but rather because of poverty. It is interesting to note that while the feminists harp about how misogynistic Indian society is, women in India live on average 6 years longer than men. What kind of misogynistic society is India where its women outlive men by 6 years? This is another example of how facts are manipulated to suit the feminist agenda and narrative. This narrative is really damaging because it takes focus away from important problem of poverty and low nutrition outcomes among Indian kids.
Rapes
Well this point is the worst among all the arguments presented for defence of feminism in India. Firstly, there is hardly anyone in India who supports rape. It is considered one of the worst crimes and the big crowd which emerged to protest in the aftermath of Nirbhaya case should settle the doubt in anyone’s mind on where the average Indian stands on the issue of rape. Secondly, feminism has not been able to do well on this issue in its origin countries. West has much higher rapes per capita than India, almost to the tune of 1000%. So if feminism is the antidote to the problem of rape, why does the west have such high numbers of rapes as compared to India? In fact, all the Asian countries with strong family values and Dharmic culture from India to China to Japan have negligible per capita rapes as compared to the west. None of these countries practise the militant feminism as in the west. So the real question should be- should India export some cultural values to the west to civilize them or blindly import another western ideology when it has failed in its own society?
Conclusion
The above examples clearly show that the feminist agenda in India is driven by those sitting in the ivory towers, the people who have little to no understanding of the ground realities of India. Given how feminism has failed the western countries and created a permanent wall between the two sexes, India should be very careful in importing these cultural memes which will destroy its family system thus paving the way for it to become a failed society. Thankfully the common people are much smarter than the local feminists and very well understand that destruction of family system will wreak havoc on their lives specially when there are no social security nets in this country.
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