Men facing gender bias

There have been so many times

I have seen a man wanting to weep

But instead

Beat his heart until it was unconscious.

-Nayyriah Waheed.

What patriarchy does to a man?

While most people tend to believe that patriarchy gives a man power over others and to some extent it does, but patriarchy snatches away the power that a man has over himself. While gender bias wants to paint women as weak, it also slather men with a façade of being tough.

Men are told “ not to cry and show emotions” lest they become weak. They are told that “men don’t fail”. They are drowned in responsibilities so dense that they lose themselves in it.

Over time, they become so one with the idea of being the superior and stronger gender that they repress their emotions and deal with it by falling into the clutches of substance abuse and aggression.

Men face issues like that of sexual harassment, domestic violence and unjust treatment too but because they supposedly are the stronger gender and will lose their masculinity if they complain that they just keep suffering in silence.

What effects does it have?

At a youthful age, men are informed that they cannot be, or even seem frail. The essential thought that men cannot be mishandled or bugged, adds to the sex imbalance. Men do endure all types of savagery and it is more terrible for them because in general, they do not address their agony. It is accepted that being manhandled or bothered does not have an indistinguishable effect on men from what it has on women. Be that as it may, the fact of the matter is the impacts are the same on both the sexual orientations. The shame or doubt of society influences men rationally and prompts misery, self-destructive idea, substance misuse, foolish conduct, and so on. It influences their education and vocation too.

While women are more likely to attempt suicide, men outnumber them in successful suicide attempts. Men choose more fatal methods of suicide to end their life. Men are 3 to 4 times more likely to die by suicide than women. Many men are driven to suicide by a sense of ‘personal failure’ that they seem to face whenever they are not able to fulfill the social expectations from a man. They are less likely to seek professional help of psychologist and talk about their feelings, all because society told them that they can’t be weak.

-Rimjhim Gautam