Standing by your man: No that is not the job women should be devoting themselves to 24×7 😜

Of course the moment any of us say anything about this we are called traitors. I recently performed stand-up in New York where i made jokes about this specific issue. I knew my ideas had landed because the audience (particularly the Indian women) LOLed. But immediately after the show an Indian man told me that my material would lead to more racism against Indians in America. He was afraid white people would look down on us even more than they already do based on my jokes. This brother wasn’t offended to know how unsafe India was for women, he was offended that people would think less of our men.

Remember that old saying ‘behind every successful man is a woman’? This condescendingly sexist quote was designed to make us think standing by our men, regardless of what they say or do, is our job. It is not. What that quote should have read was ‘behind every successful man is an entire group of women who were told they couldn’t go to school, could not have careers and equal pay, had no rights over their own bodies and that their short skirt was asking for it’. We have been convinced that the combination of chaste and mindless is best for us. We even have a word to describe women like this – innocent – and it is high praise from those men whom we are expected to stand behind because innocent girls don’t ask questions.

So here’s another saying – ‘he has a face only a mother could love’. It is used when a woman has had the misfortune of birthing a baby that isn’t cute. To many women India is beginning to feel like that baby. And maybe that is why we are all being asked to love it unconditionally – because we all know how ugly it really is.