I Get ‘Are You Gay?’ a Lot For Being a Feminist

The Misogynist Me

I am a highly privileged male member of Indian patriarchal society, of which I am guilty of having taken advantage several times in my life. I wasn’t born or even raised a feminist. Why? Because I was raised by my peers, friends, family, school, and other institutional structures to be sexist, patriarchal, and to a degree, misogynist.

From a very young age, when I started saying full sentences, I was told “ladka bada hoagya hai, ladki dhund doh.”(The boy is growing up, find him a girl), as they’d take care of me, cook, clean and look after me. Every girl I was friends with (I was in a co-ed school) was thought of as my ‘gf’ (girlfriend), a concept that I did not even understand back then. A little older, I was in the boys group in school, and girls for us were, even if they were toppers, seniors, house captains, what have you, just a sum of their body parts. Their body was all we thought of them as, nothing more, and nothing less was possible. Staring at them, looking at their legs, that was routine and ‘normal’. My entire school life, I struggled to make friends with any girl, and ‘can a guy and girl ever be just friends?’ was always a debated question. Back then, my answer would be ‘no’, because to be friends with a person you have to think of them as a person first, and not just a piece of meat.

'Growing Up as a Boy' Picture courtesy, Harsh Doshi

The Feminist Me

We are all born under patriarchy, we have all been sexist at some point, and being a feminist doesn’t fix it all in one go. ‘Feminist’ isn’t a tag that guarantees that the person is completely and absolutely non-sexist, equal, and fully free from the clutches of patriarchy. No, I am a feminist because I recognize these problems, I realize why I get the freedom that my female friends and my own sister do not, I realize why I am not allowed to cry, why I was bullied for not being into sports, I realize how sexism leads to gender and sexual violence, how patriarchy gives men power to rape, teaches women that it is their fault, and gives men power to do whatever they want, and I realize how I myself have been a part of it, in sometimes subtle but real and damaging ways.

Feminism is a choice to stand up, to correct ourselves, one day at a time, and to be more gender neutral. I have been at it for years now, and although I’d like to think of myself as freed from this patriarchal disease, I can never completely rid myself of it, it is all around me, and it leads to a lot of violence that the skewed power dynamics gives rise to.

WASH and Me

Almost all the women I know have either been harassed, molested or sexually abused and I’ve been helpless, like many others, trying to fight patriarchy by myself.

I’m an independent filmmaker and JU [Jadavpur University] and SRFTI [Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute] have been my favorite campuses in the city [Kolkata], and I revered them as extremely liberal spaces where minds can open up without any form of biases of religion, gender, or anything at all. This perception changed as soon as these two places turned ugly with several cases of sexual harassment coming to light, and the inaction of the institutions in these cases. This was when things were happening closer home and heart, and this time around I happened to know the new Director of SRFTI, Ms Debamitra Mitra, who was the former HOD (Head of Department) of my previous college, iLEAD (Institute of Leadership, Entrepreneurship, and Development), in the BBA (Bachelor in Business Administrations) Department (not even the media science department). She allegedly went on to dissolve the ICC in SRFTI and shockingly, is in close proximity with one of the professors who was fired for being guilty of sexual harassment in SRFTI. [They shared the same address during the period of enquiry into the professor’s sexual harassment charges]. I knew of her misogynistic nature, and told this to Nishtha Jain, since she was one filmmaker who had been vocal about the sexual harassment issue at SRFTI. Nishtha Jain encouraged me to do something about it.

It was then that I got in touch with Ekabali from Jadavpur University and told her about the issue at SRFTI. Ekabali wrote to Kunjila from SRFTI and soon they took initiative and formed a group led by survivors of sexual harassment and abuse, mainly in colleges and workplaces, to together give a voice to other victims, to try and bring justice to a very unjust and patriarchal system and to together create a network of support system for anyone who is a victim of abuse, so that they don’t have to stay silent out of fear.

But it is WOMEN Against Sexual Harassment and you’re a MAN!

Yes, I am a man. I am also bewildered by the fact that I get ‘are you gay?’ a lot for being a feminist. It seems that only gay men can be feminist because gay means you are not a ‘real’ man, isn’t that so, patriarchy? So I am a man who happens to not get intimidated by women leading a movement and don’t have a problem with being a part of it, to help them whenever and in whichever way I can. Remember it isn’t ‘Only women are against sexual harassment’; It isn’t ‘Men aren’t allowed to be in this group of women fighting for what is right’, it is WASH, and it means that it was started and is primarily led by women. It doesn’t have the word MEN in it and it shouldn’t hurt your ego or mine.  

Harsh Doshi, the writer, is a member of WASH, an independent filmmaker and wanted to publish this on his birthday. [WASH couldn’t grant him his wish. He is not dead even though we are making it sound like that]