Because so far my thoughts about men’s issues can be thus summarised: Men created the world where they win at all costs and then realised it’s not fun when the women are no longer willing to be their sacrificial cheerleaders.

So I watched an hour of the manosphere debate, where ONE man, deeply concerned for men but completely dumbfounded by the manosphere belief systems decided to take on twenty members of the manosphere, two of the twenty being women.

I realised the top concerns of men today are:

1. Not getting enough first dates with women

2. Unable to find a loyal partner

3. Women valuing height, job titles, looks over other variables when choosing romantic partners

Let’s compare this with what the top concerns for women today are:

1. Being afraid for our lives when we reject a man’s proposal

2. Losing freedom and independence to live life on our own terms when partnered with a man

3. Being tired from emotional and physical labour when men need their women to be like their mothers, perpetually sacrificing their happiness to cater to their wants

Men are lonely and need a caretaker. Women are tired and need a break from striving and sacrificing, they want to have fun for a change.

I could be missing the point here and hence my note asking the member of the manosphere to show themselves to me.

Please tell me why you so desperately want women to be at your service and can’t seem to grow in certain emotional areas of your life.

I’ve had so many “what ifs” over the years with people I’ve had a good conversation with and felt great chemistry, but the timing just wasn’t right. Either I was moving countries or they were experiencing family emergencies. And it’s not like I haven’t heard of people who move to make it work with the right person, but I wasn’t going to be that person, because I hadn’t developed that level of trust in my choices yet. So each time, I refused to be a fool. And well, at least in retrospect, I’m happy I did, because now, after a decade of dating, I’ve started valuing myself more. I have stopped giving energy to fleeting interactions and no longer imagine possibilities. I enjoy the interaction, add the person to my socials on occasion, and carry on with the beautiful life I am building for myself. A life I’ve come to enjoy, a life that feeds my creativity and allows me the freedom to explore myself in different settings. Most of the experiences I’ve had in recent years wouldn’t have been possible if I were partnered up the way I thought I was supposed to be — choices like going back to university and moving across oceans with my life packed neatly into three suitcases.

Repeating patterns of familiarity

Another reason I’m glad I haven’t committed for the long haul so far is that my romantic choices have been eerily familiar. I’ve felt drawn to introverts with a super active inner life and a hundred hobbies — people who speak poetry in conversation and enjoy depth of conversation, folks who are so in their own world that they rarely ever feel the need to spend time with another person to gain energy. Their intermittent need for intimacy suited me very well, because it placed me in the seat of craving and proving myself, which I’d become good at and knew how to perform. I had an emotionally avoidant father who was largely absent from our lives as we were growing up. My three siblings and I lived in a joint family with our paternal grandparents, so they inevitably ended up becoming our pseudo-parents, attending parent-teacher meetings and spoiling us with loads of food. I spent a lot of my time with stories — in books, in movies, in my journals, and in my grandmother’s tales. And I believe that helped me self-regulate, but it also taught me to fantasise vividly. The intermittent moments I spent with my romantic partners became fodder for my detailed fantasies. If I spent more time with them, I became restless and needed to leave, because it felt like they weren’t sticking to the script of the fantasy I’d created for the both of us. That’s how my expectations came to be shaped, and my craving got stronger — the craving for an imaginary person who understood me deeply, because I hadn’t spent enough time understanding myself. I was lost in stories of the future and breathed better imagining possibilities than living in reality, because most times, reality felt daunting.

The cost of being chosen

I’ve never, not once, envied a married woman with kids. She’s supposed to be the woman who won by societal standards — the woman who fell in love, married her person, and then started a family. So when Julia Roberts’s character in Notting Hill said, “I am also just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her” I wondered why she would sacrifice herself like that for a man’s happiness and then go and have his children at the cost of her career, or whatever brought her joy. She clearly had a choice, and she was choosing to sacrifice her work, her body, her own happiness, and her freedom to gain a man’s presence in her life. What was the man offering, I couldn’t tell with certainty. He was the owner of a failing travel bookshop, previously divorced, and didn’t understand her world of acting and show business at all. And yet, Notting Hill has been my go-to comfort movie — possibly because I saw what Julia’s character saw in Hugh Grant’s character: a stable life far from her chaotic Hollywood one, companionship, a present father, a doting husband, and above all, an ordinary man compared to the countless egotistical men she’d dated before. Personally, I have been busy being too wary of the cost.

True companionship is rare

My issue with men can be pinned down to how they’re raised. They’re taught to be confident and to seek adventure at the cost of all else, so they fail to see the silent work being done by their partners — the physical and emotional labour — because it serves their end: freedom and focus on what’s most important to them. I ended up with men like my father because they are the norm. I am so hesitant to fall in love because I’m used to the script of earning the nurturance role in the dynamic. One of my friends said, “Look at your relationships like friendships, since you’re better at choosing male friends than you are at choosing male romantic partners.” That way, I may not default to the nurturance role, because that’s not how my friendships work — my male friends bring sensitivity and warmth into the equation as much as I do. So maybe that’s good advice.

Do you enjoy responsibility?

I don’t envy women who “have it all.” The modern woman isn’t happier raising a child alone while having to supplement the household income and fight to maintain her sanity by getting thirty minutes a day to herself. She’s the world’s most stressed project manager. So while biologically, my body is screaming to have a child, logically and emotionally, it scares the hell out of me. And the only women who I see wanting to have a child are the women who have a partner that does the work, both emotional and physical - so if the world is so concerned about falling fertility rates, it needs to rethink what it’s teaching its men.

On one of my recent dates, third date with the same person, he brought up that Dia Mirza is a hypocrite for saying something like “patriarchy is the root cause of climate change” when she’s sitting in an air-conditioned room in Mumbai talking about climate change and global warming.

Up until that point, I wasn’t really paying much attention to such random comments he kept making. They didn’t matter that much to me. But the thing is, I am an environmentalist. I’m a big Dia Mirza fan because she is an environmentalist.

And I’d once crossed paths with her at a Mumbai music event, and I’d whispered to her, “I love you.” She paused, said “I love you” back out loud, before walking away. That’s the kind of fandom I have for her.

So when he said something about her, I couldn’t ignore it. I paused. Closed my eyes tight. And then, without even looking at him, replied with complete assertiveness: “I 100% disagree with you.”

Because she’s right. And she makes a lot of sense.

Here’s why.

Our world works in a very hierarchical manner. People at the top suppress the people below them, who suppress the people below them. This has even been documented in research on baboons, one of the species most similar to us. The baboons at the bottom of the hierarchy had the highest cortisol levels. They were the most stressed. When humans organise ourselves hierarchically, we create a stressful situation for the people on the bottom, women, especially of colour. And the people at the top are usually men.

This system, where men are at the top, is also the system governing our economy, which is capitalism. Capitalism is about extraction. Take, take, take. Which is the same dynamic as men’s relationship with women: women carry the burden of childbearing, child-rearing, managing a home, with next to no support. That lack of respect for domestic work, combined with the lack of respect for women who go out and work because of their responsibilities at home, becomes this cesspool where men dominate women and men dominate nature in eerily similar ways. It’s the same attitude: extraction over care.

If women were structurally in charge, the orientation would shift toward care and nurturance.

His reaction was utter shock.

Having heard maybe half of what I said, he asked me to lower my voice: “And you’re saying this to benefit the hundred people crossing us at any given point in time in this busy area of the Tower of London?”

I almost ignored him and kept going. He brought it up again once I was nearly done, at which point I did lower my volume but I was frustrated.

His counterargument was that this experiment of women dominating rather than men has never actually been conducted, and likely never will be, so how would I even know it wouldn’t just produce a different flavour of capitalism?

I came back with matrilineal societies, which exist, and have existed in traditional India far more than in contemporary India, particularly in parts of Bengal and Mangalore where both men and women thrived. He wasn’t convinced.

So I pointed to women heads of state during COVID. The Finnish and New Zealand prime ministers, specifically, who by a significant margin outperformed the male leaders, with the most obvious reference point being the orange-haired president of the world’s largest economy, who did abysmally.

His response, predictably annoying, was that the bureaucrats under all of these women were surely largely men, and across the board, under every prime minister, it was largely men who helped execute those decisions. So there’d be no real point of comparison.

I didn’t have a clean answer to that. But I also didn’t feel like I needed one. Since then, I’ve made it clear on my dating profile, the type of man I am interested in dating. This way, I should also be able to avoid the white men who think brown women are “better behaved”.