Tag Archives: Gender

In My Hands Today…

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Decoding Boys: New Science Behind the Subtle Art of Raising Sons – Cara Natterson

When boys enter puberty, they tend to get quiet — or at least quieter than before — and parents often misread their signals. Here’s how to navigate their retreat and steer them through this confusing passage.

What is my son doing behind his constantly closed door? What’s with his curt responses, impulsiveness, newfound obsession with gaming, and . . . that funky smell? As pediatrician and mother of two teenagers Cara Natterson explains, puberty starts in boys long before any visible signs appear, which causes confusion about their changing temperaments for boys and their parents alike. Often, they also grow quieter as they grow taller, which leads to less parent-child communication. But, as Natterson warns in Decoding Boys, we respect their increasing “need” for privacy, monosyllabic conversations, and alone time at their peril. Explaining how modern culture mixes badly with male adolescent biology, Natterson offers science, strategies, scripts, and tips for getting it right:

  • Recognizing the first signs of puberty and talking to our sons about the wide range of “normal” through the whole developmental process
  • Why teenagers make irrational decisions even though they look mature—and how to steer them toward better choices
  • Managing video game and screen time, including discussing the unrealistic and dangerous nature of pornography
  • Why boys need emotional and physical contact with parents—and how to give it in ways they’ll accept
  • How to prepare boys to resist both old and new social pressures—drugs, alcohol, vaping, and sexting
  • Teaching consent and sensitivity in the #metoo culture

Decoding Boys is a powerful and validating lifeline, a book that will help today’s parents keep their sons safe, healthy, and resilient, as well as ensure they become emotionally secure young men.

In My Hands Today…

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Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women – Kate Manne

In this bold and stylish critique, Cornell philosopher Kate Manne offers a radical new framework for understanding misogyny. Ranging widely across the culture, from Harvey Weinstein and the Brett Kavanaugh hearings to “Cat Person” and the political misfortunes of Elizabeth Warren, Manne’s book shows how privileged men’s sense of entitlement – to sex, yes, but more insidiously to admiration, care, bodily autonomy, knowledge, and power – is a pervasive social problem with often devastating consequences.

In clear, lucid prose, Manne argues that male entitlement can explain a wide array of phenomena, from mansplaining and the under-treatment of women’s pain to mass shootings by incels and the seemingly intractable notion that women are “unelectable.” Moreover, Manne implicates each of us in toxic masculinity: It’s not just a product of a few bad actors; it’s something we all perpetuate, conditioned as we are by the social and cultural mores of our time. The only way to combat it, she says, is to expose the flaws in our default modes of thought while enabling women to take up space, say their piece, and muster resistance to the entitled attitudes of the men around them.

With wit and intellectual fierceness, Manne sheds new light on gender and power and offers a vision of a world in which women are just as entitled as men to our collective care and concern.

What’s Happening to the World?

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The past few days have been very disappointing and depressing for me as a woman, as a feminist, as a mother, as someone who is a minority in my country and most importantly as a human being.

Like many others across the world, I was following the US elections and was hoping and praying that the glass ceiling will finally be shattered in that country. But like many others, our hopes were instead shattered that day and millions of women, minorities, and others were left devastated and crying.

As a woman it makes me wonder why a country which has taken the lead on the world stage can’t come off the patriarchy it seems to be in and vote for the person most qualified for and most competent for the position? Instead, they (and by they, I am not only referring to the white male, but also to the 53% white female who voted for patriarchy) voted for someone who not only showed absolute disdain and contempt for women and minorities, but who also ran a campaign on a racist, sexist, misogynistic and xenophobic tone. How could this person be so much better than the woman who opposed him? I am not saying she was perfect, she did have her faults, but how was he better than her? I still can’t get my head around that one!

What’s more frightening to me as a mother of impressionable teens is that how they will now perceive the world around them. I’ve always been telling BB that she can be anything and anyone she wants to be, even the Prime Minister of her country, but suddenly now, I am not too sure. As a female of a minority race, does she even have the same chances and options as a male of the majority race? This election is making me rethink what to tell her now. Maybe our country will be enlightened enough a couple of decades later to elect a minority female prime minister, but do I have the conviction to tell her that now? Can I continue to tell her to work hard, do her best, be nice to people and she will get the results she is hoping for? Or is this all a big fat lie we parents tell our girls?

And then there’s BB. I have always believed that mothers of young boys have a greater job in ensuring that their young boys grow up to be men of integrity and character, that when they grow up, the teachings they learn from their parents and especially their mothers should be the foundation which they base their interactions with the women in their lives – be it wives, daughters, friends, colleagues and every woman they meet in their day-to-day lives. They should be polite men who believe internally that the women in their lives are equal in every respect to a man. But this election has blown that out of the water. That a man, who denigrated women at all times, who was caught doing this so many times, has become the most powerful man in today’s world is nothing but catastrophic for parents who want to teach their boys how not to behave as opposed to how to behave. Now when you teach boys good behavior, it’s going to come to pinch you in your back when they see the reality around them. What they see around them tells them that their parents are wrong. You do get rewarded for bad behavior and the reward is nothing else but becoming the most powerful man in the world! I have no words….

It’s going to take me some more time to get my head around the new reality of our world today and I think I need more time to process it further. I also need to think about how I am going to continue to teach my children how they need to navigate this new reality. This post is the reaction if my feelings from the past few days and is actually a very early morning (4:30 am to be precise) post where I had to write down my thoughts and feelings.

I’d love anyone who reads this to react and comment. Maybe I get a better understanding of the situation and also some tips on how to navigate it.

Being a Woman…

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The past few weeks have been quite frankly, disturbing to me as a woman. Like probably most people on this planet, I’ve been following the US Presidential elections and the news it throws up makes me very disturbed. It also doesn’t help that my Facebook feed is filled with news about the elections and mostly about how one of the candidates is so misogynist about women in general.

Then I read another bit of news, this time from India. Apparently, a couple who applied to divorce has had a judgement from the Supreme Court that because the ‘woman was trying to separate the man from his parents’, divorce should happen. What was so wrong about this judgement was the judge who decreed that after the wedding, in a marriage, when a woman said she didn’t want to live with the man’s parents, she is wrong and this is against the Indian, Hindu culture and so the man asking for a divorce is right and the divorce should be decreed. This is so wrong from so many angles. I, along with many Indian women worldwide have been incensed with this ruling. This turns the clock on so many decades of women empowerment in the country. This belittles a woman as nothing else can and makes parents of women little less than dirt.

Yes, the world over, patriarchal traditions insist that when a man and a woman get married, a woman leaves her home, her family and in some cases in India, even her name, to go and live with someone who is essentially a stranger.  A woman’s parents, who have brought her up and lived with her for the 20-30 odd years pre-marriage, have no rights over their daughter, whom they have brought up equally to any son they may have, have to hand her over quietly and when she raises any objection, tell her to be quiet and adjust and live with her husband and in-laws. In many cases, the woman who is a highly educated, career woman who has subordinates at work, has to have someone who has probably never done any work outside the home telling her what to eat, when to sleep, when to work etc.

There’s a Chinese saying attributed to Mao Zedong that says “Women hold up half the sky”. What does this mean actually? My interpretation of this means that in order for society to achieve anything, women should and must contribute their share of the hard work. Women, who account for half the world’s population (49.6% according to the World Bank), in reality, do not really account for even a fraction of that percentage.

So what’s it like to be a woman?

Being a woman starts young, young girls are told at a very early age that they are women in the making

Being a woman means covering yourselves up, just so you do not inflame the lustful eyes of men around you. Men don’t get taught to lower their eyes when talking to a woman.

Being a woman means that every word, deed and action is scrutinised, if you are assertive and know your mind, you are called arrogant and stuck-up and a bitch while a man is praised for this (as an example of this, please watch the US presidential elections).

A woman is supposed to pure and chaste while a man can sow his wild oats. A woman talking in a sexual way is a slut while for a man, it’s just boys talk or locker room talk and ‘boys will be boys’

A woman walking alone at night always has some pepper spray in her bag, but in many countries, this rarely happens as women are almost never allowed to go out at night.

A woman walking alone, irrespective of the time of the day will invariably attract catcalls and lewd glances, but a man has to never face being the object of sexual attention and feel people undressing him with their eyes.

Being a woman means having to listen to off colour jokes and sexual innuendoes at work and school and laugh it out with the guys as otherwise you are considered ‘not sporting enough’

It’s time, we as women started taking care of our kind. We are mothers, grandmothers, aunts and sisters. We nurture the next generation of both men and women. It’s up to us to make sure that this inequality stops with this generation. As we bring up the next generation, let’s all teach our daughters to be strong and not take any shit from anyone. Let’s, more importantly, teach our sons how to be good human beings, one who respects women, one who knows the line they should draw internally when talking to women. To teach our sons not to allow anyone around them to belittle women and make them feel any less than they deserve, to listen to them actively.

Most importantly to make women feel that they are really “Holding up half the sky”

Random Thoughts – Gender Equality

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2000px-igualtat_de_sexes-svgThis week, I’ve had many thoughts swirling in my head, which I thought needed a post all by itself, rather than put it down in my weekly update, where it may not be really relevant.

One of the big news in the papers last week was about the risqué and sometimes obscene games played at the freshmen orientation at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Apparently, this is common in other Singapore universities too – Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and Singapore Management University (SMU). Reports said that the games were very sexualised in nature with some even invoking feelings of incest.

16d42f1Orientation camps are a chance for the incoming freshmen to meet other new students and make friends. As parents of young teens who will soon get into one of these universities (hopefully), this is cause for concern to me. Since all Singaporean and Singapore Permanent Resident males have to complete their national service before they enter university, this means that there is a two-year gap in age between the men and women who enter the freshman year. This becomes as much as six years or more when you compare a female freshman versus a male final year student.

Some students (both male and female) who were at the orientation didn’t feel that the games were wrong, which lead me to think how they thought of female emancipation. Games like this, which are often under the leadership of the student council and perhaps the university management tacitly condone sexism and misogyny at a very impressionable age. It becomes worse because, in these games, it’s often the men who play the aggressor and the women, the victims. I am a feminist and I strongly believe that when young men look at women in such a sexual way, in what is essentially a very non-sexual environment, then it leads them to be conditioned to think of women in such ways in other such non-sexual environments such as at work. This leads to a life-long tendency to believe that women are very inferior to them and always act in ways which do not demonstrate true gender equality. I guess when men who do not want to take part in such games, protest, they are then ridiculed and called names for being wimps!

The university has stopped all these games for this year at least and hopefully this will lead to a serious review on what can and cannot be acceptable.

stock-vector-colourful-hands-with-male-and-female-symbol-love-marriage-gender-equality-human-rights-and-120122377This actually leads to the other thing I have been thinking about for a week now. I usually steer clear of politics and since I am not a political commentator, I like to leave that to the experts. But I am sure everyone, including me, is watching the US Presidential elections run-up. I was very happy when the democrats finally (really finally!) elected a woman to become their nominee, in what was a historical moment in the history of the country. I along with millions of women worldwide cheered at this, but I was also a bit perturbed that it took them almost 240 years after independence to have a woman at spitting distance of the highest office in the country. For a country which calls itself the ‘greatest country in the world’, this is a bit disturbing as it does not really show that this greatness also lies in the equality of its daughters and sons.

However, the most disturbing part of the election campaign has been the republican nominee. I cringe each time I read about his comments on women, minorities, the disabled, (basically everyone except the traditional white male). At times I think nobody can be like this – misogynistic, rash and irresponsible, and wonder if this is the persona he has adopted to win the elections, then I read another article about him, going back to before he was the nominee and decide I was wrong, maybe he is like that in real life too. Then I really shudder and think of the country and its future.

As a woman, as someone who passionately believes in the equality of the sexes and as someone who believes in equal rights for everyone, I really hope this person does not win. If he does, women’s lib and emancipation will probably retrograde back to 1776 when America became free of the British and the words “Freedom”, “Liberty” and “Equality” are just words in the constitution