After having spoken, even writing couple of posts on Gender Neutrality, Equal rights, Feminism for all this years, I realized I am such an Ugly Male Chauvinist!
Having read many stuff on Male Chauvinism from Periyar's Why women became a Slave? (பெண் ஏன் அடிமை ஆனாள்?) to several great writeups Online/Quora, I thought I am enlightened. I believed, I woke up from the illusion of Male Chauvinism and could see everyone equal, regardless of their Gender.
But in my honest journey of finding myself, I was insanely wrong, as always!
Some Reality and Initial Failures
It was in 2015 that I slowly started realizing my Hypocrisy of sharing facebook posts on Feminism and not applying anything in my own life. Yes. Finding one's own Hypocrisy is damn too hard, while finding someone else's Hypocrisy is like eating Icecream.
Change is a hard thing for me. I know very well that I will fail miserably, If I am to apply all my learnings in my home in a single stroke. So we planned to go 1 by 1. This is the idea:
Me and Mom to split House chores by equal half. FYI, I never done any house chores before. As for me, it's all my mom's burden. Yes. I was/am such an ugly male chauvinistic bastard.
We decided to start with Cooking. I have no idea on cooking so we cannot split the days between us, so we decided with the obvious act of cutting vegetables. As expected, I was a good boy for first few days and was voluntarily taking up the work as planned. But as the days gone by, the Male chauvinist in my DNA started pouring the Hypocrisy in my mind. I started skipping the works and after a while, stopped doing works altogether.
And the hilarious thing is, I was angry at her for not forcing me to share the workload. I then told her several times that it's her responsibility to make me learn cooking, be independent and in the end share house chores equally with her. She will say ok ok everytime, when I restart my stance. But when I drag and start to skip the work, she wouldn't mind.
Switch from Cooking to Washing my Clothes
After months, I realized 2 things:
- My Mom wont force me to do the house chores and
- I will always find excuses to escape from Cooking.
So I decided a change of Strategy. Let's take up the task of washing my own clothes. No sharing of work here. It's end to end. Either I do wash my clothes or forced to wear unclean clothes. Sounds perfect.
Discussed the plan with Mom and I really started washing my clothes for more than a month. But then I kept extendeding my days between washing clothes. To the extreme level of washing the clothes, only when I have nothing to wear the next day.
But my true enemy, who is mom (:P) pitched in and started washing some minimal clothes when I am at my Deadline. I told several times, but she was not listening to me. But this time I was strong. More than being strong through my sheer own will, the guilt of my Hypocrisy gave me the strength. I took a pant that she washed and thrown it across the room, saying "I will never wear any clothes, that you wash". She got very tempered and started shouting. In mid of that intense scene, I totally loved how my Pant took a Parabolic curve before it hit the ground.
From that day to this day, she never touched my clothes. Hence I got into this 1 habit of washing my own clothes.
That's not the End - Going forward
Of course washing my own clothes is Nothing! Still my mom bear the heavy burden of doing all other house chores. Initially I thought of taking 1 task / year and stabilize myself doing it completely, then go on to next task by next year. But its been nearly 3 years and I am unsuccessful at my 2nd step.
Hence this post. I should be a less Male Chauvinist, less Hypocrite next year. Having the goal published here will be putting more weight over my head to execute the plan. Let's see how it goes.
Oh yeah. Forgot a Important Note.
Happy Women's day to all those women,
- who gave up your passion to take of your family, so your Dad, Husband, Son can follow their passion,
- who honestly believe doing House chores, raising children is their life purpose.
- who gave up their Life/Time and take care of House chores, so your Dad, Husband, Son can live their life as they wish, rather than doing these mundane House chores,
- who gave up your birthright of exploring your own life, taking on life adventures, because of all social restrictions around you,
- who have no right to love/live/stay with People you love, because you are a girl and you can't decide your life partner and how you live,
- who are forced to get into the system of marriage, even though they dont believe in it.
Peace
