Man proposes, but God disposes. I am a man of my word. He is a man of letters. The ball landed in no man’s land. One man’s loss is another man’s gain. Man has landed on the moon. A manned mission to Mars is on the cards. Would man be able to save his planet from himself?
Take a look at all these phrases, idioms and announcements. Do they have anything in common? Yes, they all are a description of human understandings, expressions and achievements. Is there a basic problem with them? Well, apparently there isn’t any obvious grammatical or technical loophole in there, albeit one. All these expressions, queries and announcements are about man, though they mean to convey about our species, the human beings.
Biologically, the human beings consist of two majority genders; man and woman, the third being the transgender. So, why is it that whenever we are to describe something of the humans, we choose man to be the sole representative of the whole species? Like it or not, but that certainly is a very basic question. We, all of us, have to question this pattern. Does the word “man” account for all the types of human beings, especially the reciprocal part of the men? And, if it does so, why the word “woman” can’t?
Many men, and even women, may calmly accept the usual explanation for this formulation of language and the style of expression, but the problem won’t flush itself out of the debate. At least, it could easily guide us to the apparent notion that men have always led women in almost all the corners of our civilization. That could be digestible for some but all won’t succumb to it either.
If you believe the aforementioned men leading women mantra, let me share something here. We are a civilization which is currently, to some extent, relying on nuclear source of energy, so who was it to discover the first ever radioactive atom? All the nukes of today are just based on the discovery of that one person. Who was that person; a man or a woman? Here is another fact. We are a world breathing and living on silicon chips, the computers and all these smart gadgets. The primary thing that kick started this revolution was computer programming, thanks to Ada Lovelace, the first ever computer programmer. That’s just a bit of our surrounding world here and one could easily have a glimpse of what our life today could be without the innovations of these two women.
Now, take it a step ahead. We broke all the shackles of earthly gravity and landed on the moon, not long ago. Here is how it turns out to be, “MAN has landed on the moon.” But, if you go through the bits and pieces of this space venture, you would come across an interesting reality. We landed on the moon courtesy the software developed by a woman named Margaret Hamilton. Without her developed coding and software, it wouldn’t have been possible for the Apollo mission to place its steps on the moon.
This is just a glimpse of what a few women, despite living in a clichéd, man-ruled world, added to the course of human civilization and social evolution merely over the past two centuries. So would you still hold to the same old “men leading the women mantra”? Don’t just go for the comparison. Be honest to yourself and consider if it were all so smooth and easy going for women as we men enjoy wandering around and doing whatever we choose to do, what more could have been added to our social evolution by the women?
There jumps in religion to throw all the logic away and simply announce the superiority of men over women. Quite an interesting exploitation of religion to rescue misogyny, isn’t it? Contemporary forms of all the religions, including Islam, fail to provide women any breathing space at all. To the religious minds, woman is but the sole bone of all this contention. Christianity and Judaism have held the belief over centuries that it was not the fault of Adam at all. So, the whole blame is shifted on Eve for provoking Adam into tasting that forbidden fruit and causing the man to be expelled from Heavens.
Contemporary Islam also follows this pattern and adopts the whole old story without any ‘if’s and ‘but’s. So, it turns out to be that the messed up world we live in, was actually caused by a woman, Eve. That pathetic simile is repeated again and again just to make women realize that they were a faulty apparatus in the assembly of this universe. They are blamed to be the root cause of all the evils. None dares speak up and challenge these religious authorities if they have any rationale to this hypothesized tale.
Not to talk of Christianity and other religions, let’s question Islam first. Quran, the only authentic book as believed by Muslims, doesn’t have any account of such an event ever happening since the time being. Quran literally says it was Satan, the devil who actually provoked both Adam and Eve to disobey that Divine ruling and consequently being expelled. Go and check it by yourself. You won’t find a single verse in Quran stating any hint of this self-assumed tale.
Okay, but is there any social or moral harm with this misogyny? As of 2012, the female population of the planet earth figures up to 50.1% of the entire population. Given the current state of women rights around the globe, we can roughly derive that almost half of the population on Earth is living in an oppressed state, mentally as well as physically. What would it lead us to?
Arguably, it’s not about the superiority of one gender over the other. It, primarily, hits hard at the rate of our social and economic development. Imagine half of the world not being able to add anything to the course of civilization and we end up having this lifestyle in 2015. Now reconsider it and imagine if this half of our population had been given all the rights what men have, what could have been the rate of human advancement. What standard of a lifestyle could we be enjoying today?
Many of us, though, have the delusion that this wave of feminism is nothing but some bold women complaining about nothing. With all the debate stretched above, it isn’t the right way of approaching this hardcore reality. Feminism is the simple reaction of what men have done to women over centuries, that has forced women to stand up and speak up for themselves. It’s not women who generated feminism, it is men who provoked all this and now must be ready to own it.