“Next time you visit your family, ask your bhaiya (brother), jiju (brother-in-law), mama (uncle) and papa (father) to make that chai for you, instead of asking your didi (elder sister), bhabhi (sister-in-law), chachi (aunt) and mummy (mother),” wrote Sayani Bhattacharjee on Twitter. What followed is a total meltdown from a deluge of anonymous right wing accounts attacking feminism, Bengalis, comparing women’s capabilities and expressing sexism and misogyny.
Four key points emerge for discussion from this Tweet and the reactions
- Gender based division of work and the big lie that women cannot do hard physical work.
- Time Use in India Survey Report which shows men do not do household work and instead enjoy more leisure time than women.
- The lack of understanding of gender equality amongst today’s social media users yet making pretentious posts like one Shivam Chhirolya on LinkedIn.
- The anti-feminist hate amongst right-wing ideological camp.
Gender based division of labour
Sayani Bhattacharjee (@SayaniBh) is a Software engineer according to her Twitter profile. She purportedly made the Tweet to question the gender roles in Indian households whereby the role of cooking and caregiving is inextricably tied to women. Triggered by her questioning, a social media lynch mob consisting of anti-women and anti-feminism right-wing trolls descended on her timeline. Gender trolling of any women with strong opinions, which are contrary to populist political narratives is not new. Most often these trolls are anonymous, but on Bhattacharjee’s timeline, a woman with a proper name and display photo seems to be leading the anti-women mob.
One Abhilasha Purwar (@AbhilashaPurwar) replied to Sayani’s Tweet saying, “Next time I visit my family, I also ask my didi, Bhabhi, chachi, mummy to carry my luggage up and down. Come and pick me up from airport/ train station at odd hours sacrificing their sleep. Contain entire mapping information to guide me when driving through new roads?”
Both the Tweet and the reply have gone viral, with Bhattacharjee’s Tweet receiving 285.3k views and Purwar’s reply receiving nearly double, 401.4k views. Hate sells on social media. Reckless, provocative, insensitive, violent and hateful statements trigger all wings. The Radical Right populists rejoice them, so they retweet and increase the views, and the liberal critical side outrage at them, and start quote retweeting. The author of such insensitive tweets wins both ways.
Millions of Women Can Pick Own Luggage, But Less Than 10% of Indian Men Make Any Tea
Women are physically weak, and therefore incapable of putting in hard labour is one of the biggest lies prevalent in India and all patriarchal societies. Maybe Abhilasha Purwar is a privileged, rich, urban women who cannot travel alone or carry own luggage but there are plenty of women who do. Millions of Indian women do carry their own luggage. One has to only visit an agricultural field in the rural India or a construction site in urban India. Women carry stones, bricks, cement, firewood, water on their heads and walk miles. 80% of India’s women workforce are in agriculture and they toil all day under the sun. Families which have a tractor, it is driven by the man, and women put in the manual labour of ploughing, sowing, harvesting etc. The same women also do the cooking and cleaning at home while their husbands do nothing. Men in rural India can be often seen playing cards or smoking hukkah while their women toil in fields or kitchens.
Time Use Survey Data, 2019
Government data shows that not even 10% men in India do any household chores. The Time Use in India – 2019 report by National Sample Survey Office under Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation shows that women do overwhelmingly more unpaid work in the house such as cooking, cleaning, taking care of babies compared to men. The gap between men and women handling these jobs is roughly 80:20. In urban areas, 82.9% of women and 12.10% of men are involved in unpaid care work at home. Men spend on average just 98 minutes (one and half hour) in the day while women spend a whopping 301 minutes (five hours) on same work. Merely 6.1% men participate in any kind of cooking, even if only for a few minutes, but almost every women aged 15-59 do the regular cooking every day. Just 8 per cent men participate in house cleaning and just 3 per cent in washing clothes. Regarding “sacrificing sleep” which Abhilasha thinks men do for women, the data shows that women get less sleeping time than men though the gap is small. It is not that men are busy working outside that’s why they cannot do the household chores. Data shows 87% of the men participate in leisure activities, which means they have leisure time, but they are not participating in domestic activities. For more on the Time Use In India Survey read this informative piece by Rukmini Sen (@rukmini) on India Today. Doownload the full report here.
Thus, millions of women do a lot of physical labour but men do not do any domestic work at all. It is because there is a gender based division of labour. Paid work outside home is considered masculine and unpaid care giving work at home is feminine. Unless this gender based division of labour comes to an end, unless men enter the kitchen and start doing unpaid domestic work, we will never have gender equality. And that was the point of Sayani Bhattacharya’s post.
Ill-informed, agenda driven social media quips like that of Abhilasha Purwar pulls back feminist struggle by decades. Her reply was also shared by a male techie on LinkedIn where a whole bunch of other men were seen hailing Purwar’s attack at a feminist voice.
Social Media Users Clueless About Gender Equality Making Pretentious Posts
The screenshot of both tweets was shared on LinkedIn by one Shivam Chhirolya in a pretentious post about gender equality and breaking stereotype while actually reinforcing both. Citing Abhilasha Purwar’s reply, he stated, “This response highlights that gender equality isn’t just about redistributing tasks; it’s about recognizing and appreciating the diverse skills and roles each family member can contribute.”
Shivam Chhirolya clearly knows nothing about gender equality or women rights or feminism. Redistribution of tasks by ending the gender stereotype which assumes men and women have different skills is exactly what gender equality is about. “Recognizing diverse skills and roles” is a another way of saying women are more suitable for household roles or women’s true place is in the kitchen, and that is gender-stereotype which he thought is breaking stereotype. Without understanding anything about gender and power structure, masculine – feminine division of labour, he wrote a pretentious post because talking about women empowerment and gender equality is a marketing strategy in political and corporate circles.
On Chhirolya’s post, seemingly made for “gender equality” and “breaking stereotypes”, dozens of men were seen abusing feminism. Feminism is the movement that gave women the language to question gender stereotype, gender based roles, power structure, inequal distribution of resources and so on. Today, men bash feminism while tagging their posts as #GenderEquality.
Right wing ideology and feminism
It appears from a quick visit to Abhilasha Purwar’s Twitter timeline that she belongs to the right wing ideology supporting Narendra Modi and BJP-RSS conglomerate. It is a common trend seen in the West too that right wing nationalists are against feminism. A lot of feminist researchers are trying to understand why right-wing women are also anti-feminism and hold deeply patriarchal regressive ideas. In the US right-wing are against women’s abortion rights, in India they want women to stay within domestic roles, serve their husbands. At one hand these women break the gender stereotype with their violent hateful anti-minority speeches and actions be it Blacks in US or Muslims in India. They are found involved in rioting, bombing and generally terrorizing minorities which is far removed from the image of docile wife sitting at husband’s feet. But they don’t understand women’s rights, history of oppression and hail the patriarchal family system.
A separate articles is needed on the topic but these books might be useful to understand. Author Eviane Leidig book titled “Women of the Far Right Social Media Influencers and Online Radicalization“. In Indian context there is a collection of essay on “Women and The Hindu Right” edited by Urvashi Butalia and Tanika Sarkar.
