The extraneous noise around gender rights have hijacked the concise narrative of the subject at hand. On the one hand we have the historic battle for equality for women, while on the other side we have a community of men who claim that women have systematically gained an upper hand and have become oppressors of men. This paper will analyze the aspects of women's’ rights movements in light of the much recent men's rights movements.
Women's Rights Movements
In almost all civilizations across all ages, women have been dealt a tough hand and had reconciled to living in the shadows of the men in their lives. They were born at their father's mercy, lived with their husband's permissions, but were allowed the right to die on their own. In some civilizations, women were expected to kill themselves on the funeral pyre of their deceased husbands. However, times changed and the march of democracy brought a new wave of freedom for the womenfolk. They started to demand an equal stake from a resistant male dominated culture and ended up within touching distance from the American Presidency, the most powerful office in Earth.
This progress was not smooth and many women suffered abuse and ridicule for demanding something as basic as equal treatment. Since the meaning of equality and equal treatment varies according to one's understanding of law and their willingness to listen to the other side, it has grown more shakily than steadily. It can be argued that the kind of friction that exists in determining equality also exists proportionally in other avenues such as fair wages, rights to self determination, and quantum of relatability.
From bra burnings to slut walks, the women have developed a unique way of resisting the continued subjugation of their existence that was pretty much alien to men. These women crusaders, popularly known as feminists have used the gender appropriations of their sex and amplified it manifold to educate the men that women's voices matter as much as men's. These movements have become a melting pot of experiences of women from different walks of life and different regions. These melting pots in time became the incubators for pushing for legal reforms for women. With every re-tweaking of the law granting equitable treatment to women, small victories are won but the larger war rages on.
Men's Rights Movements
Fueled by online connectivity and sharing of ideas has allowed a certain group of individuals, men harassed by their wives. In its infancy, men's rights movement was basically a support group for such men who felt trapped in bad marriages because truly, the laws of most countries regarding marriage are not gender neutral. Breaking of marriage vows is more expensive for a man than a woman.
Like most support groups of battered people, it became a venting ground for figuratively battered men. These experiences were shared with other men and certain opinions about such wives were formed which made some men contemptuous of all womankind. This snowballed into the men's rights movement that has taken the proportions of an entire subculture. These people face the same kind of ridicule which is faced by feminists.
This ecosystem, now offers interested men ideas about how to treat women so that they don't get trapped in the same situation as those battered husbands. It is called a subculture because it has derived phrases and definitions unique within its ecosystem that act as a marker of the knowledge of the ecosystem possessed by the concerned individual. For what it's worth, some of the most flowery language is used by these people. This can be attributed to the fact that lacking a concrete university course on this subject has led to the evolution of such self maintained language.
Comparison of Both movements
The politics around both these movements is such that instead of being mutually supportive of each other, they are pitched on opposing sides of the alleged battleground. Proponents of both sides are routinely subject to ridicule and abuse on the internet by the other side that are reminiscent of the debates between the Democrats and the Republicans. Both sides possess their star campaigners that travel around the world in an attempt to educate the populations about the truth of their situations and make them more receptive of their respective ideologies. The internet and the rise of personal blogs and dedicated websites have become the new watering holes for dedicated as well as interested individuals of these respective groups.
Both groups can be found guilty of hyperbole, gross generalizations and an inability to function as balanced individuals on an objectivity scale. Both sides indulge in churning out ideas that are radical and to the general public seem inappropriate and generally hateful. Both these groups have evolved into something akin to a cesspool with neither party willing to accommodate the other. This has led to compartmentalization of the general narrative and many celebrities and well meaning social activists have gotten targeted by one group of they so much as sympathize with the cause of the other group. This can be attributed to the hijacking of the narrative by highly vocal pseudo intellectuals on both sides that churn out reams of pages of literature blaming the opposite camp for most of their problems and their inability to see the ‘truth’. In sum, truth has become subjective in their ordinances and is often peppered with dodgy statistics.
Solution
The basics of debate, listen to the other side needs to be inculcated within the proponents of these groups of there has to be a semblance of a fair debate. Venting out of misplaced anger must give way to respect for the victims in the other side with support mechanisms. If we go by it logically, both these groups should have been natural allies instead of mortal enemies which they have become. Such generalizations of the other sex are definitely sexist and have the effect of arousing reactions opposite to what they originally set out to derive.
