fascinating express ...personally, i too feel we are on the threshold of a new world order where feminine aspects of being would come to the fore...to me, the age of aquarius is a significant portendor of such a happening....

How ironic (not surprising though as I understand now where it comes from - thanks to the article), that women harbour ill-feelings towards other women when they are the ones who are expected to be more compassionate since a woman is supposed to understand a woman better than a man.

Even something like, a young college going girl being harassed on a bus, no other woman sitting in the bus will utter a word in her support. On the contrary, they will probably be thinking to themselves, "she must have given him some signal. Look at what she is wearing. This had to happen. Why doesnt she just get off this bus?" And if she makes an effort to fight her case, then they think, "Look, now she is creating a scene!"

Wonder when this balance of yin and yang within us will be restored ...

Great post jasjit! Thanks for putting such a refreshingly different slant on Misogyny. Up until now it was only looked at from the 'Man' angle. But little did we know that we 'Women' are also partners in crime.

ps: I wish the kkkkk serials were banned!!!

unusual read....liked your take on ektaa (ugh) kapoor....

Jasjit a very unsettling piece. Convincing reasoning but at e personal level the more I think about it the more distressed I get. I guess because somewhere you must have tapped into a deeper truth. You are a deft writer so I'm going to keep that in mind. I really want to think it through for a few days and then I shall respond. Though I so think you must be right about Ekta, there must be an explanation to her twisted perceptions.
Have to say the blog makes you really think. :-]

Striking piece Jasjit

Indeed, misogyny has far deeper roots than we think.I think the mother daughter connection you make is really important....even though you havent said a lot but I sense (and know) that if one moves within this equation one would see many interesting and new sides to the relationship in the light of the subtle and not so subtle ways in which we live and breathe misogyny.

I guess the same is true for men but with women the relationships are slightly more complex and more umbilical with effects that are perhaps much more far reaching.

Jasjit very provocative piece. Though I have to say it is quite plausible if we only look closely. I guess hating is a strong word but I so agree that parenting sets your world view. For instance my father & his siblings grew up without a father when still young. My grandmother was a tough woman made tougher by her early widowhood. In the race to bring up her kids right she was not at all into displaying affection or being 'gentle'. So all her kids are not really into 'displaying' affection. But her only daughter, my aunt, has had very emotionally turbulent time. She used to make a lot of intense allegations against her mum when she was alive and had a hard time being there for her own daughters.
I don't think the anger against her mother ever left her. We used to be quite confused why she couldn't move on.
Do you think that is a kind of misogyny? I just feel its bad parenting. Though I don't think my grandmother did anything intentionally.

Dear Jasjit,

Great piece. My small stint as being a misogynst was a harmless selfimportance that me and my friends gave each other during the initial years of college. It was triggered by a Shah Rukh Khan dialogue in DDLJ ... " I hate girls "

It was my first time in a co education (medical college) and I was bombarded with completely new sortof an atmosphere. The line gave me a feeling of self importance :)

but not for long...i happily mingled with my new friends and never have again harbored that thought.

I also am one of the eagerly waiting to see how a female Buddha is like...God has done his part over the ages...I would love to see how the goddess does.

a perspective....

all of us are journeying towards a discovery of love.To me, it is a march of humanity at micro and macro levels.we have never known love as it is meant to be and are in process toward those unconditional and accepting realms of its manifest.when we talk of love in colloquial realms, we need the others' "need" of us...it is a kind of insecurity manifest.and we do various things to make ourselves indispensable in the others' life...we want to look better, earn better , cook better, be good parents, be good children and so on...all to make ourselves indispensable and needed in spaces we feel attached to and secure in...to me, it is not wrong by itself...but we have to see that we are beggars for love to enable our growths in those realms and when we see our vulnerability, we can also see our humiliating lives in these realms; we are never sure, forever afraid of losing close ones, losing our positions in their lives...love is not about attachments...to me, it manifests only when we are through our attachments...it is a manifest in freedom, not in bondage...
as we grow in these spaces, we become better humans, better parents, better teachers, better friends....all healing is within for manifests outside to happen.

Sundar

Well said. you are dot on about "we are beggars for love" and that is exactly where all of human suffering pulsates. Parenting then becomes so critical since it becomes the seed of how we experience, define and project that love. Truly "all healing is within for it to manifest outside."

Aachi what you shared was so open and lovely. I've often wondered what stage of masculinity this is when boys think its cool to 'hate' women. I know many boys who go through this/have gone through this. I dont remember experiencing the reverse for myself i.e."I hate boys". So I dont know is this just a male thing or do girls go through this too? Any one with any answers to this?

Venkat

Yes hate is a strong and distressing word but often if we can accept how deep our emotions actually go about something perhaps it becomes easier to know and therefore heal them. I have merely suggested hate as a word which comes from the dictionary. Is it not strange that such a term exists (misogyny I mean) and with strong connotations. There is really no counter term.

I have always felt the roots are important and need to be understood either way. I am not convinced it is just in the nature of the world or men to hate women. I think we need to go deeper into what role the feminine (Yin) played in creating even the potential of misogyny. In my work with varied people I find the role of the mother is always critical in shaping the being, both positively or negatively. Motherhood seems to be an undeniable fulcrum of much that attracts or repels us in the world. And for better or worse she seems to carry the larger responsibility of our emotional rooting.

So I guess while the question is not really about whether a parent intends to be a 'bad/nasty/aggressive' parent but whether the child experinces him/her like that. Healing is not about judging the other really but about reclaiming yourself. But of course for that one has to have the courage to look truthfully at where the anger and rage lie. I'm sure your grandmother did her best. But I guess for your aunt those years just spelt emotional aridity and her needs for gentleness or affection became her own bane. Indeed the anger can spill over onto the next generation. That is why healing your own wounds are so critical before one sets out to parent the young.

Just to add, I have found one of the hardest things for both men and women is to be able to critically see the mothering they received. At one level their heart is angry, resentful and in complete contrast is the guilt in the mind, the need to deify her as essentially well-meaning and the fear that in judging your mother you are a horrendous child. I feel this split is really common and a great block to healing the heart.

thats an interesting q u pose, anusheh....recently i was with 5 year old neice planning her upcoming birthday....while she was drawing her lists i noticed that she had not included any boys from her playgroup..when i asked her about it, she said ...I don't like them...i hve found similar manifests in boys at pre-adolescent stages also...dont know if there is some pattern...

Well then there we are Sundar. I guess girls feel the same way. What is it? Do you think its the gender messaging which just crawls under children's skin. Or is it just a deeper programming...an inherent gender mistrust? Any ideas people?

Anusheh as a matter of fact I too can't remember if I have ever felt like that. Perhaps thats because girls never get the social or cultural messaging that 'hating' boys is a sign of femininity or being 'cool'.

Jasjit now that I am answering Anushe's question I realise how true it is that we are all misogynists. For boys- its to stay away from anything feminine and for girls its to stay away from the 'immoral', 'unwanted' feminine qualities. Girls are so involved in 'perfecting' their feminine by concentrating on the feminine itself that the 'other' doesn't come into the picture.

what a last para to your comment jasjit...i have gone through the phase of an intense struggle bewteen guilt and judgement before it dawned on me that our parents' compulsions are equally circumstantial...it enabled an acceptance for me...yes...i found it almost impossible to accept my hatred and lack of acceptance...i almost wished it was not true...i wanted to believe that i did...a projection....acceptance has been healing even as it continues...for me, it helped to have a master who kept guiding me through it...infact , i have realised that deep down our selves are rooted only in our hurts and pains and resentments and fear and so much more...dissolution of the self is essential for that final healing....

wish i knew , anusheh...

Hey Anusheh,

I dont know about 'Hate' but I do believe that girls do go through a phase (around the teens) of thinking that "All boys are dumb!". And that brings in an attitude of - "oh what do they know. Their whole life revolves around action movies, picking fights, and just idiocy in general." HATE is too strong a word, I would say its more like considering boys to be a 'nuisance'. One of the possible reasons could be because girls mature emotionally much faster than boys.

But thankfully its just a phase :)

Shubhz that rings so true. Thanks for that. Personally I always got along better with the boys in my growing up years. I found them less competetive, able to converse on many more meaningful things than the girls (ok maybe thats not fair. Its just that my interests werent very girlie either)and less complicated -emotionally. I still find male friendships just so much easier to negotiate at one level.

Chaitali I didnt quite understand what you said about misogyny. Please rephrase.

love
anusheh

Jasjit what a disturbing post. I mean we are all mysogynists, even women! Just can't get over it. Okay I understand about gay men, transgender men and men. But the son preference part I'm not very convinced. I mean isn't there a lot of cultural and social pressures that lead to women preferring sons to daughters. The mother-in-law who taunts her daughter-in-law for not having borne a son, isn't she too a victim of the social pressure? One often hears that women who are unable to bear sons go to dangerouse heights to get a male child becuase their husbands threaten to marry again. Where do we place this?

This is an observation: Do you think that Ekta Kapoor makes up for her grudge against the Yin by heightening the yin in her male characters. The male characters in most of her serials are more emotional or rather over emotional than her female characters?

Shubhosree this ain't a personal attack but if girls think that we are a nuisance, we are dumb etc etc. wouldn't anyone in a guys place say we hate girls (Not that I hate girls :)). You know its like when adults think we are stupid, immature and all that, we get angry with them and say that we hate adults.

Hello Sohini,

I dont think that Jasjit is talking about the BIRTH of a male child, but about the way mothers tend to bestow special love and attention to their sons. Mothers advertently or inadvertently, become possessive about their sons. Thats why you hear so many cases of newlywed brides complaining of their mother-in-laws not giving the couple time and space. It may not hold true for every mother, but largely, this is found to be the case most of the time.

This was what came from my understanding of the post. Please correct me if I am wrong jasjit.

Hello Raj,

The fact that guys at that age do hate girls (as brought out by Aachi), is where this whole debate started from in the first place. My comment was in response to Anusheh's question if girls, at that age, hate guys too?

So I am not sure what is it that you are asking. :)

Anusheh,

The gender 'coding' that boy's receive is such that any 'feminine qualities' in a boy makes them less masculine. Not being 'feminine' is being masculine. But for girls being 'feminine' has nothing to do with not being 'masculine'; its more to do with not being the 'bad feminine'. I hope that makes sense.

Shubhosree,

I wasn't asking a question. What I am tryn to say is that its like a two way thing. Boys say we hate girls becuase girls think boys are dumb and girls say guys are a nuisance etc as a retaliation to guys sayn such things about them. Its like creating a defence mechanism. But I guess whats everyone here is tryn to say is that we need to break through this defence mechanism :)

Hi everyone!

I have been completely absorbed in reading and re-reading this post.

The articles and insights on the blog have triggered intense conversations and discussions within the family...(we are a large close knit clan..)

I take the liberty of reproducing a portion of a family letter that my mother and her brother wrote to the entire clan recently...

"Weeks into the new year – a feeling that has been gnawing at my conscience – whether the one-line wish ‘HAPPY NEW YEAR’, that we exchange amongst us, year after year, almost perfunctorily, has really any meaning. We really wish each other well, pray for the well being of but somehow or the other, the harmony that should prevail - THE EMOTIONAL HARMONY is missing. While it is there in bits & pieces, raises its head on the odd occasion, the sustained one has eluded us.

We have lost the brightest & the youngest amongst us. Physical distance notwithstanding, I have been there with all of you, emotionally, always.

Why sustained harmony has eluded all of us? It is not very difficult to look for some of the important factors.

Advancing age accentuates personal frustrations.

We have our own nuclear families and the compulsions and pressures that come with it. We have grown up children, some of whom are married and already have their own families to look after- satellite families.

All of us are struggling, barely able to match our ambitions, aspirations and spaces.

Having lost both our parents, we do not look upto anyone as the head of our family. We are on our own, and are masters of our mind and action.

These to my mind, are some factors which have led to a situation, where some kind of mistrust has crept into our relationships all around us. We are consumed by differences over petty matters, finding faults with each other, etc. The innate personality traits, that we are supposed to have imbibed from our illustrious parents, have been overshadowed and overtaken by external influences on our character and personality that we experienced in our growing years.

For example:
More often than not we display behaviour which reflects- anger, resentment, criticizing others, if we honestly introspect, we will see, flashes of mistrust, disrespect towards everyone around, including elders, completely oblivious of our place and what we are here for.

Well, it is not that we have consciously imbibed and displayed these traits. They have crept into our subconscious and have raised their ugly heads under stressful circumstances.

We all have our inadequacies, deficiencies, failings & idiosyncrasies but we all must make a conscientious effort, not to play on these, when we deal with each other, and the immediate environment around us. I am saddened by what I see and I wonder what our children and grandchildren are adopting as life skills, coping mechanisms and values. All of us must initiate and set in motion, effective steps at bringing sustainable harmony into the family and therefore into the immediate environment around us.

Let’s all therefore-

Accept each other as we are, with all our shortcomings. Let’s overlook these and avoid using these to get to people, when interacting with each other or even discussing some family member with others.

Trust each other implicitly. Not get carried away by hearsay.

Tolerate each other completely without having any limits. We all have to practice Tolerance.

Practice & Display LOVE & COMPASSION as the most overriding emotions in our everyday relationships and routines.

Be grateful to God Almighty for bringing us into this world as brothers and sisters, as a family, and for our children and theirs.. that they too may find their place in the sun.

This is my fervent NEW YEAR wish..hope to hear from all of you about your thoughts and plans.."

Every time I read this letter, I feel blessed. This was the starting point for all of us in my generation to introspect and start the healing process amongst us...

In gratitude and thanksgiving,

Sukanya

Sundar the rarest of rare men have the courage of seeing the truth of their mother and realising that something is very wrong there. Men find it so much easier to be angry with their fathers but if they've had a disruptive relationship with their mother they usually tend to go into denial about it because they just cant fathom the complexity of that interaction beyond a point. Plus I guess that there is always a larger guilt that accompanies men in that space...especially sensitive men....because the problems with the mother actually make them suspicious about their own masculinity and its response to the feminine. The problem is further compounded if the mother also becomes the 'provider' in the absence of a male figure head. Because then the guilt becomes overwhelming and the male child especially feels indebted (as he sees it as his role being taken over), helpless and full of guilt. The struggle then becomes between the guilt and the anger and we swing between it like a pendulum, all the while losing sense of our own identity, and exacerbating our inability to relate with the feminine whether in emotional, sexual or intellectual spaces.

I know that it took me a long time to figure out that the anger I felt at my father was infact a superficial one, which was infact hiding a lot of anger at my mother. Somewhere its easier to berate the masculine because its a less complicated space perhaps? With mothers perhaps the nature of the connection is so (that umbilical cord) visceral and integral that the guilt of seeing/experiencing the relationship as anything other than nurturing and healthy just threatens to destroy all sense of comfort and security. Feminism has further distorted the whole picture by making women out to be entirely victims. A very skewed perspective which has made it more difficult to experience the interaction with the mother for what it is as opposed to what we are told about it.Correct me if I'm wrong.

Congratulations to you Sundar for having the ability to see and face the truth with such courage.

wow..what a blessed opportunity, sukanya...very beautiful..i feel it may also enable the total healing of a person as blessed as your mom to write such a note...
just across where i live, 4 cousins stay together as neighbours but they were at loggerheads with each other...individually they were social friends to all of us...a 5 year child in the family developed leukaemeia...since we have a healing network here, the father asked me to come and see the kid...i had gone to the hospital...in healing processes we are part of, we request people to go thorugh their resentments and hatreds and to set right bruised relationships...to us, it facilitates more rapid healing...in this case, i called up the brothers individually and told them that this was an opportunity for the family to come together and heal their relationships...thankfully and in grace, they agreed...they all came forward and even contributed financially to the child's treatment...the father and mother of teh child visited their elders on eaither side of teh family and sought their unconditional blessings irrespective of the past...when we touch our elders feet , especially through sashtanga pranam, it actually activates a psychic connect to the anahata...

other healings were also concurrently on....and the child has recovered very beautifully...
our crisis are our opportunities for greater learnings...really glad at this beautiful event in your family, blessed one...

tx anusheh...for me, it is all the manifest of grace...if healings such as this can happen to me, it can happen to anyone...life becomes a shadayantra.. a conspiracy to lead us in the direction of learnings we seek....and i feel very grateful for it...

Thanks Sundar. Blessings are abundant and I am learning to appreciate them every day... it has been an amazing journey for a about one year now.. this blog has been a great reference point... and I will always be grateful for what it has helped catalyse in me & my life...

Sohini

For too long women have 'absorbed'the power heirarchy and somewhere it is become them. Like I said they begin to become more Yang in their desires/assertions etc. Feminists have furthered that cause saying largely everything is a man's fault and women have no spaces. Generic generalizations may broadly explain the social fabric but it cannot become an excuse for individual apathy. Each must rise from his/her own fire like a phoenix. Life is a celebration of that potential and conquest.

Many, many women, especially like us have enormous oppurtunities for self-referral and individuation. Alas we largely tow the same old truths/untruths because we are unwilling to pay an individual cost which undeniably is high. That in a nutshell Sohini is what a spiritual quest is all about. Finding one's own truth! So no I don't think men pressure us to abort female fetuses, value boys etc....many, many women have choices to take the high road. That they don't is the whole point.

Like Sundar shared his struggle. There is pain, courage, lonliness and guilt on the way.and like he said life is a conspiracy to lead us where we need to go.

Your observation on the men in Ekta's serials is interesting. Though I'm not sure they have more Yin (at least not the healthy sort) but they are more irrelevant in decision making etc definetly. Perhaps what she is pointing to, and maybe not inaccurately, that in the underbelly of family politics women are the key players. And the point is that she is excessively manic about just harping on the ugliness of these women, but some stuff must be believable or why else would so many people watch it? Like I said Yin cleansing can only lead to Yin emergence. Maybe Ekta is forcing us to at least figure out the truth and illusion of it all.

Sundar

I second Anusheh on saying that rare men can face the challenge of healing something so deep. And that is where you get your gifts to heal the others like that child. May the Divine bring many more gifts of courage and protection on your Way.

I guess when Buddha said 'Kill you Parents'this is exactly where he pointed. As Harb and I talked somewhere of micro/macro- these are the many tiny complex streams within that all have to find, identify and then heal. And that is the self that finally must go in totality. As you concluded perfectly "dissolution of that self is essentail for that final healing".

People watch it probably because she has been able to tab the emotional dilemmas, mind games etc that women go through. So an immediate identification with the characters. But then the problem is the twists and turns, melodrama, and what not that make the whole thing a nightmare. But people stick on due to the initial identification and then due to see what will be the ultimate conclusion to the plot.

tx jasjit...sharing what we have received in benediction is the nature of life...there is so much pain all around...and an anaesthesized experience for most...raw pain, when we are in touch with it contains our seeds of liberation...and since we are all interconnected, it works on human consciousness when we connect...in much the same way as sugar dissolves in water...a morphogenetic field which spreads healing and liberation...in human consciousness...

dear jasgit,
i agree with the u ,on the fact tht women somehow dont feel comfortable with each other and there is a rivalry always among them..
and all those ekta kapoor serials ...i wonder y being a woman she gets sadistic pleasure in degrading woman so badly...
this question has always bothered me a lot and still bothers me...
y r women always sterotyped???
y shud every woman on the planet shud look gudd always..(all the time)
y shud every girl learn to speak slowly and softly as if she is chokin on som food...??
how com clothes r given so much priority in India ??
wen our culture tells us to go beyond maya and see wat is present in their minds and souls..
and y r traditional dressing eqauted to being a virgin and the list goes on..

may be we need to set ourselves free sometimes and become more into a individual..
may be that wud start happening wen the conditioning is erased frm our mind..
let the unlearning begin!!!!

O.K Jasjit here's some news for you. Had lunch with some girlfriends and brought up your piece. Here are some responses,

Of course women see each other as rivals.

No women are women's best friends.

Right but once they fall out they never forgive each other.

Women thrive on gossip and artifice

Can you blame them? First they vye for men, then to keep them happy and loyal. Its just a tiring man-centric thing.

No way it must be a gene thing. Why do they choose a man-centric life? Especially today?

I'd trust a male frind with secrets any day but with women I really need to be choosy.

On and on we went in a circle. No one was clear they wanted to call it misogyny but we were all pretty distressed where we were headed.

I don't know Jasjit I'm still confused but I think you have opened a can of worms. Maybe you can write more on women & misogyny. I really want to get to the bottom of this. If there is one ????

I can relate to it to a certain extent. women surely have a lot of jealousy for one another. just to give an example, back in college, i used to have a friend, who used to write quite well. so she would hand me her writing every now and then and i would read them with great interest and compliment her on them generously. eventually, i started penning down some thoughts myself. and one day asked her to go through them and let me know what she thought about them. days went by, i never got any response. i reminded her a few times and still nothing. she would always give me some excuse or the other, like she is busy and stuff. then, i realised that she is not reading them on purpose or that she has read them but doesnt want to tell me that she liked them. it was then that i learnt how jealousy can make women degrade themselves beyond imagination.

i never asked her again. but this article brought back those memories and i thought i will share them with you.

Forgot to add my question Jasjit. So if the yin as you call it, is so deformed and self destructive in a sense, how come the feminine continues to be the primary nurturing force in the world?

Dear Radhika

To answer your question I would say water by its nature quenches thirst and moistens the parched. Yet water comes in many forms. Even when it is murky, slimy or polluted it can still moisten, cleansed it can still quench thirst. Only the quality of what it does changes.

Yin too by its nature is here to nurture. Prakriti is the Yin principle because it creates and destroys as its fundamental principle. The question is do we understand the true nature of our essence and in doing so flow with its force and purity or get caught in self limting ponds and swamps of degenration.

In art there is a term called chiaruscuro (Italian) for the play of light and dark. IT is the phenomenon which ads realism and depth to a work of art. I would say life, Yin etc have to be all seen and understood as that play. One needs to know the dark before one can choose/decide to purge it. Nothing is by its nature irredeemable or 'damned'. All has immense potential for transformation and new heights.

Hope this helps.