Fluid and flexible. Those were my two words of the year for 2020. And I bet I’m not alone as I consider tattooing these words (with washable ink) on my wrists so I wouldn’t forget their essence ever … or for as long as the ink remains.
Life was different for all of us, pre-pandemic. Life was especially different for men. Many Indian men, that is. Not trying to sweep half a billion with one stroke, but you get the drift. It wasn’t too long ago when our men needed an app to find where kitchen essentials were kept … or to tell their dals apart. And no number of orientations would do the trick. They’d open the fridge and ask where that mug of cold coffee was even though they’d be staring right at it. That’s because I was told the refrigerator light tends to contract the male eye pupil making it impossible to locate items. Men also thought of the women in their house as a Siri or an Alexa with clairvoyant powers who’d be able to answer questions like where their lost headphones were or what was the name of their boss’s first born.
Men may have been slogging at work and on the jogging tracks in the early mornings. But they were duly exempt from activities such as cooking, cleaning, managing the household staff, and child-raising; activities that were deemed creativity-killing, mental peace-ruining, and grey cell-destroying in the male parlance.
Pre-pandemic was also the time when men not only had different standards but a whole different scale for hygiene, cleanliness, and organization skills. If they could make a list of people to cancel, Marie Kondo would top that list. And they were right. If women felt the need to wear hazmat suits and clip their noses before entering men’s rooms and walk around like they were walking in an abandoned nuclear power plant just because the rooms were coated with dust, grime, and other obscure matter, it wasn’t their problem.
In summary, men were unconcerned with these inconsequential things, and therefore, happy.
Then the virus hit hard, and it changed our lives. Male movie stars who wouldn’t even be seen without an entourage broke the fourth wall and took to their Instagram to show off their household experiments. Heck, they even made it aspirational. It upped the pressure on their non-celeb male counterparts to “be useful around the house”. And you saw a new variant of the quintessential Indian male emerge. This variant was kind and compassionate, was willing to go where no man had gone before, onto the recipe videos on YouTube, watch them till the end, patiently so, then venture deep into the pantry, watching in awe as they pulled out one khada masala after another, marveling at their shapes and sizes and aromas, following the recipes to the T and pumping fists in the air as they furnished edible food to the exhausted women in the house.
As George Elliot once said, it’s never too late to be what you might have been. And the women were rejoicing, not fully accepting the quality of work the new male variant was producing, but rejoicing nonetheless, because for the first time, it wasn’t just tokenism. There was learning there for the women as well. Women learnt that we could be hygiene worshippers and hunters of dust particles and control freaks but it’s not always the quality of work but the gesture that counted. A virus pushed us into blurring our boundaries and we were a better-off species for it.
On the other end of the spectrum was a new movement that was beginning to take form in the western world and proliferating itself on the internet. Women in corporate set-ups were realizing that they didn’t need to act like men to advance their careers. For decades, women were told that they should embrace masculine qualities (self-confidence, risk-taking, aggression, etc.) to be successful at work. But those assumptions were being questioned. There was a call to action for women to advocate for themselves and their value in the workplace, which could be as unique as they are. Women need not necessarily follow a template anymore.
Overall, in 2020, the world witnessed a noticeable shift away from societal gender norms, with the discourse around breaking down gendered barriers becoming more mainstream. The egregious gender stereotypes were beginning to dissolve somewhat. At the very least, it was becoming part of the conversation.
The year passed and so did the gestures and the Instagram videos. But the stigma associated with household chores and child-raising and cooking for men with a traditional mindset was done away with. As we try to crawl back into some semblance of normalcy, I hope the takeaways will remain. We may continue to aim for our pie in the sky hoping for a more balanced world, but substituting ‘balanced’ with ‘inclusive’ and celebrating the unique fits will make the journey more gratifying.
We’ve all learnt to be fluid and flexible to an extent. Let the stigmas not hold us back. Let’s make it fluid, flexible, and fearless forever. Here’s hoping!
In a nutshell, women may wear pants in the house, but men don’t need to wear skirts. Unless they want to. I’m looking at you, Ranveer Singh.
Parinda Joshi is a best-selling author and screenwriter. ‘A House Full of Men’ is her fourth novel. Her last novel, ‘Made in China’, was adapted into a feature film. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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