Some Micro-Observations on Male Behaviour
This article will seem hollow and obvious to many – as articles of this kind often are.
For here lie only some scattered observations that the author, a complicit cis man, has collated from the everyday and wishes to put to paper. (I really, really wish I could fully communicate the sheer terror of my writing being too self-indulgent here.)
These are observations gathered from conversations and interactions with the women in his life – family, friends, teachers, role models and loved ones, who at one time or another, despite an indisputable writing talent that announced itself as boldly and brightly as a streak of lightning against a clear blue sky, fully internalised the false notion that they were not “good enough”, “serious enough”, or “smart enough” to keep practicing that beautiful skill, and cast their unique voices into some painful well by the wayside of life.
This heart-breaking trend is a reflection of the grander ways in which women’s experiences and thoughts on the world are prevented from being recorded, and set to paper. It is a self-doubt that can honestly only be termed parasitic.
Parasitic and gendered, this self-doubt gnaws away at the articulatory roots of the budding, bright-eyed woman writer. It thrives and multiplies via a diverse range of culturally normalised mechanisms ingrained in the patriarchal system. These same mechanisms, in infinitely more complex ways, also serve to silence queer and non-savarna writers in ways that overlap and intersect in dizzying arrays.
This short article only has the capacity, and the depth, to address a few of these mechanisms in the context of women writers. It is severely limited in its scope, due in part to its length and also to the obviously inadequate lived identity of its author. The bulk of this article will deal with observed behaviours in men, rather than try to speak comprehensively on behalf of women.
Some basic contextualisation regarding societal messaging and stereotyping will be employed, though.
Stepping Out of Line
The brand of gendered self-doubt I wish to address undermines the spurts of confidence, “almost-arrogance” and indeed, arrogance, that young women writers and intellectuals should be allowed to display and truly feel at the start of their creative journeys – unaccompanied by that grinning, stalking shadow of imposter syndrome. Most men in equivalent positions do not need to deal with its breath on their neck. They are free of it, free to indulge in that self-constructed myth of their own ability, free to ignore their own painful limitations, free to make universal pronouncements on the world that selfishly protect their own ideological interests.
For women, those words – confidence, self-belief, vanity and arrogance – all blend into each other and are rendered meaningless in a society where even basic self-assertion, introspection and the unadorned description of one’s own experiences are considered shamefully excessive. The honest, natural, rise and fall of the ego – so crucial to development, is essentially non-existent – with reliable, constructive feedback loops being very hard to come by.
This article must also be capable of being read in the immediate context of Department/Academic Liberal Arts Spaces constructed exclusively for the development of that same articulatory confidence amongst its students. Yet these spaces fail to produce truly collaborative spaces that transcend gender, class and caste – for the marginalised are always prevented from accessing the mainstreams of culture, history and writing in a variety of different ways that kill articulatory development in the crib. Stepping away from structural, institutional barriers like prejudicial treatment, sexual harassment, and failures in infrastructure for a moment, which are the usual units of analysis (and extremely important ones at that), I’d like to focus on “harmless” microinteractions which reflect this greater institutional edifice.
Microinteractions like the basic mixed-gender conversations that inevitably occur between students.
Conversations
I believe that conversations are crucial playgrounds to the growth of one’s ability to articulate oneself. The incredible experience of coming away from a truly enriching conversation that has benefited all participants is an emotion unfortunately felt only by a limited few. An honest, open conversation can do wonders for intellectual development – in initiating those beautiful feedback loops so crucial to learning and growing as an individual. It involves honestly coming to terms with one’s own limitations, of shutting the fuck up and listening to someone else’s genuine experience on a topic – far away from the closed borders of hierarchy, insecurity and the petty concerns of keeping face.
Yet keeping face remains of utmost priority to most men in combative conversation with each other. This need unfortunately only doubles in intensity when a woman is a participant. Prior even to their “admission” to a space, women are cut out of conversations by men in a variety of ways. The men either brand them incompetent interlocutors in various cultural ways from the start, or begin excessively adopting in-group references and lexicons – sometimes even ignoring the women outright. A certain set of conversational topics – usually a whole library – are “reserved” for men, with women actively being signalled at every point that they are incapable of joining in, and should be satisfied to listen on in wide-eyed wonder. This signalling may be subtle or painfully obvious.
The men, by a process of elimination, thus end up with more social experiences which hone a very particular set of articulatory skills over and over again. At the same time, they can also feign cluelessness about women’s experiences and viewpoints. This is a horrific exclusionary practice that unfortunately does come along with very real returns, as men who conduct themselves this way – almost instinctively, as a matter of course – are exposed to a rich learning environment of debate, conflict and conversation, while women are actively excluded from the same.
Even when reluctantly included as participants, it is difficult for a woman to navigate the “rules” of even the most “liberal” of male environments – they are either gently chided for being too quiet, or knocked down and criticised for being too loud and opinionated after fighting upwards through an exhaustive battle of dismissal and interruptions. There is no winning. The third way of not attracting either of the aforementioned criticisms, is of course, to agree with everything the men say, and to simply exist as a launching pad for their monologues.
Men generally tend to approach spirited conversations where disagreement is encountered as a battlefield. It is a place to prove something, to establish worth, to collect heads. Collaboration is non-existent. The terror of not knowing, or of acknowledging some kind of lack or inadequacy is ever-present. Brash, loud men thus tend to skirt around topics they lack any authority over, steering the helm of the conversation through sheer muscle and deceptive trickery to a string of subtopics they are familiar with, while hurriedly rushing over vast plateaus of ignorance. In such a way is constructed an illusion of knowledge over an entire sphere – an establishment of the authority that is so eagerly craved by the man.
A fort of power is thus built over a situation which had no real stakes (now raised ridiculously high), where such a stone monstrosity was absolutely not required at all. This happens for even the simplest and most meaningless of conversations. These simple mimicries of power – learnt languages of domination, fuelled by intense insecurity and a refusal to admit weakness, is anathema to the spirit of conversation, learning and dialogue – killing any openness or possibility for genuine collaboration in a cruel instant. No one walks away the better, as a dick-measuring contest that is thinly veiled in the coating of some grand expedition towards ultimate truth is inaugurated. Women tend to be much more self-aware and critical of their own shortcomings (screamed at continually by a society that insists they do so), and are generally beaten down by the chest-thumping of the men, forced to take their displays of authority at face-value.
Because why shouldn’t they? Men and authority go together, no?
I’d like to emphasise this again.
Women, even while trying to approach conversations generally from the point of view of learning something new, are bombarded with social messaging to continuously be self-critical while proffering their takes – to acknowledge their ignorance, and accommodate, accommodate, accommodate. Over and over again they are pressured into offering the benefit of doubt to the monkeys on the warpath, while no such rules exist in the take-no-prisoners strategy for these primates.
Far too many women give in to these men, and far too many men lie through their teeth, almost instinctively, through learned mechanisms accumulated over years and years – deceiving themselves and everyone around them about the forceful extent of their knowledge on a topic, invoking shakier and shakier ground, increasing the stakes, and building more and more anxious forts. As the women are bewildered into silence, once again real pedagogical returns on argumentation and self-articulation are harvested by the men, as the continuous fake-it-till-you-make-it strategy works towards improving these skills – at the grim cost of multiple perspectives and the death of the conversation, of course.
It is parasitic.
Combative women are classified as “ruining the mood” and told to “chill” even as the men operate at cut-throat levels of casual aggression. Women who are considered “too nice” or accommodating in these conversations are also not exempt, subject to unwanted pursual and sexual harassment, as the men think of them as perfect, pedestalised, angelic life partners. Once more nipping in the bud the possibility of an alternative narrative that could challenge their own presuppositions. The Indian woman treating the average Indian man as a human being with basic kindness will also very likely be stalked back home and obsessed over.
Where does the line fall, then, in conversation?
Every move seems doomed to fail – misogyny is all-pervading. Multiple clashing personalities and behaviours need to be constructed for a million different circumstances and interactions, all while men stretch their arms in a much larger swathe of grassland where they can “be themselves” and “find themselves”. They need not be as concerned about manipulating their images in front of other people at all times. This schizophrenia of circumstance is felt far more harshly by the marginalised in a host of different ways along the lines of caste, class and gender. Agreeable personalities, facades and acceptable projections of selves multiply all the way down. Thinking thrice before speaking is the default.
Every single half-baked utterance by the man, on the other hand, must be treated with the reverence of gold dripping out of the lips of Gods, while even a sensible, reluctant jab into the conversation by a woman, fully cognisant and self-aware of the possible issues that might be thrown up by the statement thrown into the fray, is instantly ripped to shreds. The eyes of authority, are of course, raised beyond such petty utterances – raised always to an ever-escaping horizon of convenience. A mistake is seized upon with glee, as the wolfpack tears into it to feed their own egos. This standard of “reason” and “honesty” is, for some reason, not upheld for the wolfpack’s own analyses, as men debate men. Suddenly the sense of “faith” in the other interlocutor is capable of withstanding some pretty incredible leaps of logic. It is infuriatingly painful and unfair.
The betrayal of the conversational dynamic is just the tip of the iceberg.
Relationships
The most intimate form of betrayal – that of the male romantic partner in the heterosexual relationship, is also a subtype which casually kills creative aspiration in women, especially when both have aspirations in the same field.
The swift dismissal and undermining of the woman in this relationship of aspiring writers is an unfortunately common occurrence in literary communities. The ego and the self-confidence of the man is fed by the dismissal of the “inferior” woman – even though these two people might be at the exact same stage of their journeys. A partner who is supposed to lovingly create conditions for mutual growth, trust and acceptance, can very easily feed off of vulnerability and create conditions of volatility for their significant other – all for the preservation and accumulation of the fragile male ego. The veneer of authority that brooding, “serious” male writers are garlanded with only adds further social baggage and fuel to these relationship dynamics.
This self-doubt, as a result of lowered barriers, is internalised far quicker and more efficiently than the exhortations and criticisms of strangers. The proximity and trust that binds the relationship is thus used to construct the sense of all-knowingness and confidence for the male writer. It is salvaged from the parasitic process of feeding upon the planted insecurities of his partner, and of other women. A certain functional pretentiousness – the image of an all-knowing arbiter of quality – is formed, which once again provides benefit to the man. It instills in him a borrowed confidence, while honing the required skills of argumentation, reasoning and debate.
But at what cost? What literature is suppressed and used as a launching pad?
It is writing that confronts the experience of womanhood, and which even casually speaks to the patriarchy that is dismissed immediately with “Oh, not again!”, as the final arbiter of quality and inspired originality speaks judgement. Writers with a firm sense of social justice in other domains will relate.
“Oh. Feminism AGAIN. Oh men bad AGAIN”, they say, eyes rolling into the backs of their skulls. As if that realm does not encompass a huge variety of topics and diverse expressions with infinitely more complexity and nuance than overtrudged, overanalysed male cultural obsessions. Huge swathes of experiences and topics for the writing of almost unfathomable variety are instantly mowed down with a moronic, cruelly dismissive blanket statement.
Women are thus forced to feel cliche and unoriginal.
That wave of male derision is incredibly difficult to stave off and not internalise, especially when it comes out of the mouth of a loved one – this could be a father or a brother too!
Inner turmoil and angst, so critically acclaimed when studying most banal of male experiences, is so swiftly dismissed when it comes to women. That same celebrated interiority seems almost non-existent. With men it is the most important thing in the Universe, and is accorded that all-encompassing importance. Kingdoms, destinies and the fate of all humanity hang in the balance – even if all the story contains is an incel alcoholic masturbating in his bedroom and wondering, in abstract philosophical terms that invoke Camus, Hemingway and Sartre, if there is more to life.
It is pathetic.
The Attempted Discovery of the Self
A crucial journey to selfhood and interiority is jeopardised and annihilated – which is sadly the most-coveted aim of such institutional violence. This self-determination is the very aspect of the self it seeks to subordinate, and it is terrifying how vindictive, ruthless and efficiently it operates even in the most “liberal” of spaces.
All of the previous behaviours are carried out in subtle, undifferentiated ways even by men who may loudly proclaim themselves to be feminists and allies – so deeply ingrained are these seemingly insignificant behaviours to the preservation of the patriarchy and the performance of gender. There is also, it must be acknowledged, a deep trauma that forces such behaviour from young, insecure men who continuously strive to prove themselves as adequate at every turn. Yet this should not serve as an excuse to destroy the opportunities and self-hood of those around them like an angsty, pampered child.
All too often, power is all too gladly given, and sacrificed at the altars of such performances, as the illusion of authority succeeds in establishing itself.
The realisations of the ridiculousness of the situation, and the associated trickery hit much, much later – but only after several productive years are lost.
The beautiful practice of the craft of articulation is the cost for the budding woman writer, abandoned to the tune of what are essentially the inane tantrums of anxious men. At every point of one’s writing journey, getting honest, constructive feedback is key. Writing is abandoned at the first draft, as internalised standards that are not truly their own come to the fore. Honest feedback from the male is basically non-existent, so anxious is he to prove himself.
Additional obstacles are thus so lovingly peppered across the path of the woman writer.
The Beautiful Craft
Even if she manages to wriggle out of this vice after all this, the entire Institutional weight “proper” of the patriarchy remains. It is ruthless, and defiance at every step is critical. It is exhausting, and so unnecessary. It is all the more exhausting because of just how unnecessary it is.
But writing and articulation does not only have to be subjected to the drawbridge of masculinised capital, or the incessant, totalising gaze of the careerist. Not every writer needs to be published, or awe the world with an incredible, genre-defying work that generates millions of dollars. Writing is not just something to be capitalised upon.
Reading, combined with its little reflection, writing, is a deeply personal, yet political process. A relationship with the self.
It is a way of keeping in touch with one’s own conscience. A constant companion to return to. A messy slate.
It is a gentle liberation. A soothing music that brushes against one’s fingers. A record.
Reading and writing has always been a beautiful stroll through a veritable orchard of delights to those who need it most.
The aim of this piece is a little shaky, but I’d like to add my own small, intensely limited voice to a range of incredible literature that exposes just how hollow and devoid of authority so many of these patriarchal social interactions are. They should not be taken lightly. These interactions of the benign “everyday” play a crucial part in the formation of impostor complexes and breakdowns in confidences for young women, and contribute to the worst, most heinous thing of all – the cruel estranging of people from their own voices.
***
P.S. (Entirely Optional): I struggled a lot with decentring myself from this piece – the ethics of writing it aren’t exactly clear-cut either. I am a cis man who has benefited, and continues to benefit from the above processes and problematic behaviours. I only offer this piece as an ally, and would willingly accept and appreciate any and all criticism of this piece. I am still in the complex, painful process of undoing and deconstructing so much of my personal behaviour and privilege, and do not want any pats on the back for what is not even approaching the bare minimum.
The aim was not to hijack the conversation, or project a saviour brand. As Head Editor of this magazine, it is heart-breaking to continually encounter so many talented women writers who intensely doubt themselves and their ability. I only wished to compile a ready-to-use manual of male behaviours and social signalling to contextualise that self-doubt, and do what I could to help the process to boost the articulatory confidence of my juniors.
Pertaining to the style of prose, I tried my best to do away with my usual flourish of the “virtue-signalling, intensely self-indulgent, narcissistic asshole.” The keyword here is “tried”. (I still needed this postscript as a self-insert.) As an OBC Man, I have struggled against similar processes of dismissal and disarticulation in intensely savarna spaces, but have also actively benefited from the same violence of group dismissal of women outlined here. This piece stems from the forceful realisation that just as there is no meaningful understanding of feminism that is not anti-caste, there is no meaningful anti-caste movement which is not feminist.
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Article 19 