Feminism And Masculism

Before I delve into feminism, trying to explore its roots in the ancient Indian times, let me at the outset make it clear how I have interpreted feminism so that the writer and the reader are at the same wavelength with no communication gap.

Feminism is the advocacy of women’s rights on the basis of equality of sexes, and I believe, and I am sure all will, that pivotal to the spiritual conception of feminism is humanism; it implies bringing wholeness to the existence of a woman by upholding the eternal truth of the right to dignity for every individual on this earth. Hence, Feminism is a set of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women, and feminists

It gripped me before I could move on towards the subject of this study. An exciting curiosity powered my dig into the relevant literature to discover whether masculinism or masculism ever existed, despite my well founded impression that despite my well founded impression that discrimination against men is definitely not an issue in the world, the reality of a few matriarchal societies-mostly tribal-notwithstanding. I didn’t feel surprised at masculism or masculinism being majorly concerned with maintaining the supremacy of men over women, and learning that it emerged as a reaction to the feminist movement which challenged their supremacy by professing gender-equality; Philosopher Ferrell, Christensen differentiates between “progressive masculism” and an “extremist version”. The former welcomes many of the societal changes promoted by feminists, while regretting that some measures reducing sexism against women have increased it against men. The extremist version promotes male supremacy to some degree, and is generally based on a belief in women’s inferiority. Nicholas Davidson, in his book The Failure of Feminism, describes an extremist version of masculism which he termed “virism”: “What ails society is ‘effeminacy’. The improvement of society requires that the influence of female values be decreased and the influence of male values

But I got a sense that since animal meat was the main staple food for the survival of humans, which man brought from the forests, he began being considered more important than woman. Somehow the contention of a few scholars like Margaret Ehrenberg (in her book women in pre- history) that women were the ‘major food providers’ because the food gathered by women was more in quantity than that brought by men, couldn’t sound convincing to me; it goes without saying that the history of those times is pretty speculative in nature. Instantly struck my mind, the theory of Historical Materialism of Karl Marx, supporting my contention. This theory professes that the decisive even and society take place because of the material factors, and how man produces the goods of his need and who owns the mean of production determine the social relations. Karl Marx devised this theory to establish the truth of the class struggle in the society, bringing out the superiority of the Bourgeois (capitalist owning the means of production) to the proletariat (workers). I feel this Bourgeois-proletariat relationship got replicated in the domain of man-woman relationship also. Even after the civilization began and family system emerged, man came to be viewed as the bread winner of the family while woman because of the demands of the sexuality and maternity remained confined to the household.