The ‘Locker Room Syndrome’: When does it end?

Womansplaining

Last week, one controversy dominated the online space, where a bunch of teenage boys were trading pictures of nude women on their Instagram group as also messages about raping them. You know, what President #45 of the United States normalised as “locker room talk”. Social media took over and before you knew it, #BoisLockerRoom began trending. The group was soon taken down – our momentary fix in the age of social media – but it also gave rise to another hashtag, #GirlsLockerRoom, where messages women shared about finding men sexually appealing were used to lend support to the argument that it’s not only men who indulge in sexual fantasies. Because boys will be boys.

That age-old logical fallacy: false equivalence -- women objectifying and fetishizing men is the same as young boys wanting to rape women. I received a WhatsApp forward of a young man (he could not have been more than 17) saying something like: “If she wants to stay safe, let her stay home. But if she wants to be a ho, then, it is not my problem”. I was struck by how deep this hatred for women is in that young man, at such a young age. This was clearly not someone from an uneducated family. He looked urban, street smart, educated, and well-off.

Besides, he used the word ‘ho’.

When and where was this sentiment sown in his mind? Reverse-engineering it points to many plausible explanations. Peer group/pressure. Exposure to the rape culture that rap songs glorify (‘ho’ gives you a clue). Porn. The objectification of women that is everywhere you look. But the most plausible of all: his home environment.

You might take umbrage at this supposition, but there is no way you can ignore it. Likely, the home scenario is one where the woman (even if she is financially independent), by sheer dint of the fact that she is a woman, is secondary to the man of the house. And there's the foundation of the deep-rooted misogyny in his mind. Parents, we can do better.

Which brings me to the workplace. During the earlier part of my career, a co-worker propositioned me, and I had the gumption (gasp) to reject him. He said he would ruin my career. I remember another incident, where a male supervisor, whom I respected and looked up to, ganged up with his male friends to bring me down a peg in an office gathering. This was in retaliation – something they likely thought was fun and benign – for having had dinner with someone in their fold, a dating prospect that never really took off.

There is no way to ignore this: misogyny and patriarchy go hand in hand. As a logical human being, I do understand that not all men are this way. In my own circles, I have male friends who do not care for vaunted labels of ‘feminists’, because they organically are. But misogyny of this kind undergoes mutations and gets to only a grudging semi-acceptance of women in its patriarchal fold. It never really goes away.

Assaulting a woman’s very being, either physically or verbally, is the male-centric world’s way of trying to control a woman’s mind. Want to get her to doubt herself? Body-shame her. Want to control her desires and keep them from manifesting? Question her morals. Want to bring her down at the workplace? Gun for her ego. This is the spectrum of toxic masculinity. It might not seem overt to you as men, but women bristle under this, have done so since the beginning of time, so let us womansplain it to you.

For men, women ought to remain secondary to not rob their shine. Misogyny manifests as hatred and tendencies of violence towards women first, but while life sands a man’s instincts down to being a responsible adult with a family and a career, a part of the misogyny gets retained somewhere like a vestigial organ. A woman in possession of her own mind, of her own faculties, of her sense of self, is the scariest prospect for this macho world. For this fight for equality to fully manifest, men must see women as allies, and not as competition or secondary or undeserving of respect as fellow human beings.

Until that day… boys will be boys.