Pannaa Priyam Das

I’ve had too much time to retrospect these days. And an incident drifted into my mind which took place awhile back- I once shared a post which said:

“Why is it cute and trendy for girls to wear men’s flannel shirts and baggy boy’s sweatpants, but when a boy tries anything remotely close to girl’s clothes, they are considered “girly” or “gay”?

Do you know why?

Do you want to know why?

Because our society thinks its degrading to be feminine.”

A guy friend of mine texted and said, “So relatable, thank you for this.” I’m used to the casual sexism that goes around, the silly remarks, the throwing out of the phrase “hashtag feminist” as a popular slur; it’s all so common that it almost hardly gets to my nerves. Almost. But this instance made me think, really think, does this happen in my college campus, among my friends?

I love my college. I love how people are appreciative and accommodative of the existing diversity. However, some things are still taboo, some things are still not spoken openly about. And if done so, it is often dusted off as humour or worse, ridicule.

The socially constructed ideas of “gender” and “gender roles” are so embedded in our collective psyche that only education doesn’t seem to do the trick. Rot learning of a concept is ineffective when literally every other thing going on around us screams to its contrary.

Another very good guy friend once wore a pink t-shirt to college. I complemented him on his choice, said he looked cute. He explained in an apologetic tone “আটাইেবাৰ কােপাৰ ধুবৈল িদেছাঁ কাৰেণ এইেটা িপি ব লগীয়া হ’ল” which roughly translates as “I had to wear this because all my other clothes were being laundered.” I wasn’t seeking an explanation, I wasn’t trying to be sarcastic or mock him in any way, and yet this is what he presumed. It took me a while to realize it wasn’t really his fault. And I wasn’t the first person to call him “cute” that day. Some of his other friends did too. Were those people any less educated than I am? Were they born this way? No. They were taught; years of social conditioning, psychological manipulation, and collective validation for sticking to their roles have made them that way. And I’m not an outsider; I’m inside this massive operation. I’m a producer and a product of this very system. And I don’t know how to break out of it. But perhaps, recognizing that it exists and is in dire need of an update is the first step.