a letter to men.

Every once in a while, the whole internet unites over one incident of obvious social injustice and a massive outrage ensues. – the Kolkata rape case will gain traction and for a week, all of us will be infuriated, and we will share posts and stories. Maybe some of us will participate in marches, make reels – but as lovely as it is to see everyone share the same template over and over again, this will all die down in a while. 

Soon, men and women will return to their normal lives – men can go back to their homes and their work. Women can go back to their homes, with a thousand restrictions, 10pm curfews, sexist labor expectations, and their work with casual workplace harassment, accusations of diversity hiring, and a constant necessity to prove their merit. Baby girls will be killed, women will be raped and harassed, till one day we will once again come across a case that we deem problematic enough, and then we’ll call it Nirbhaya 3.0 and the cycle of stories and posts will re-emerge.

People will claim a case with this extent of atrocity hasn’t happened in a while – but it has. Only we are all highly selective with our anger; we have become so desensitized to violence against women and are so riddled by our own bigotry and sectionalism, that we pick and choose what few cases are worth our voice. A doctor being brutally raped and murdered at her workplace is worth the noise – but a Dalit girl being gang-raped, maybe not, because I don’t know if she’s of a respectable enough class to demand that much of a response – a child being raped by a family member, also maybe not, because it’s not like these things haven’t happened before or because things like these are to be resolved within the family. 

The truth remains that physical, mental, and emotional abuse towards women, from all walks of life, is rife and happening all the time. But we’ve normalized it so much, that it’s only when a case as extreme, gruesome, or ‘obviously wrong’ as this comes up that we go – “Oh, wait, this is actually not okay, we should say something about this.”

We need to force ourselves to get uncomfortable and face the facts before us – women are blamed, held back, controlled, and hurt every day because of men’s actions; and rape and murder are very extreme and violent instances of that, but they happen in a very casual sense everywhere around us all the time. 

Guys who were very vocal online about their disgust in the rape case, you also need to start being loud and supportive when there are smaller instances of inequality and discrimination – when girls have to sign in a register every night before they enter their hostel, or when they have to call their parents every time they want to go out, or when they are forced to shut up about how they were harassed on campus because their reputation is at stake.

When your friends are casually objectifying and rating women, or cozying up too much to a drunk junior at an afterparty, you need to speak up. and not just because this is shameful or maddening – but because you can care for a girl, simply because you care for a girl; not because she is someone’s mother or daughter or sister, not because you have a crush on her, not because she is a saint, but just because she is a girl and you respect her for it. 

Men need to acknowledge the patriarchal privileges they’ve been benefiting from for years, and accept that many have been consistently exploiting them at the risk of women’s well-being and safety while the rest are excusing and allowing it. I understand that self-reflection and correction is a draining, difficult process. But if you want a future of equal opportunities, women’s safety and freedom, and a future where men are worthy of our trust, then you need to participate more actively. You need to make a conscious, aggressive and consistent effort to change and do better. You need to prove that it’s not all men, not deny your passive involvement in a world that makes it easier for some men to commit these crimes or belittle women for having very real and justified fears.

In an interview, Meryl Streep said that women have learned to speak the language of men, because of course we had to, if we wanted to make it in a man’s world. But men haven’t learned to speak the language of women, and I doubt they ever will because it doesn’t seem to have any self-serving purpose for them – there’s nothing in it for them. The only time most men get triggered into a response or show a sense of alliance is when they want to be perceived rightly online or when it’s about their girlfriend, or sister or mother, and they suddenly become these macho protectors. 

I cannot lie. I am not left with much hope, because my hope lies with men – men who have repeatedly shown that they have to be coddled, who have to be reassured that “No, we promise we don’t think it’s all men” even when we are all unanimously scared for our lives all the time, who bombard ‘what about male victims’ comments under a reel of a woman discussing her own sexual assault story, only to then invalidate male rape victims, by saying “You must’ve liked it”; men who still think that rapes are only about the rapist and not the societal structure and the mindset that allow for women to be used as pawns and objects. 

Yet, I will swallow my despair and my ego and stand before men. and beg them to show us some humanity, empathy and sensitivity. 

And hope, that it’s not too big of an ask.