Women and Gender News

Ask Men In Family

to Make Tea, See
The Anti-Feminist
Meltdown and
Misogyny
“Next time you visit your family, ask your
bhaiya (brother), jiju (brother-in-law), mama
(uncle) and papa (father) to make that chai for
you, instead of asking your didi (elder sister),
bhabhi (sister-in-law), chachi (aunt) and
mummy (mother),” wrote Sayani Bhattacharjee
on Twitter. What followed is a total meltdown
from a deluge of anonymous right wing
accounts attacking feminism, Bengalis,
comparing women’s capabilities and expressing
sexism and misogyny.

Four key points emerge for discussion from this

Tweet and the reactions

1. Gender based division of work and the

big lie that women cannot do hard
physical work.
2. Time Use in India Survey Report which
shows men do not do household work
and instead enjoy more leisure time than
women.
3. The lack of understanding of gender
equality amongst today’s social media
users yet making pretentious posts like
one Shivam Chhirolya on LinkedIn.
4. The anti-feminist hate amongst right-
wing ideological camp.

Gender based
division of
labour
Sayani Bhattacharjee (@SayaniBh) is a
Software engineer according to her Twitter
profile. She purportedly made the Tweet to
question the gender roles in Indian households
whereby the role of cooking and caregiving is
inextricably tied to women. Triggered by her
questioning, a social media lynch mob
consisting of anti-women and anti-feminism
right-wing trolls descended on her timeline.
Gender trolling of any women with strong
opinions, which are contrary to populist
political narratives is not new. Most often these
trolls are anonymous, but on Bhattacharjee’s
timeline, a woman with a proper name and
display photo seems to be leading the anti-
women mob.

One Abhilasha Purwar (@AbhilashaPurwar)

replied to Sayani’s Tweet saying, “Next time I
visit my family, I also ask my didi, Bhabhi,
chachi, mummy to carry my luggage up and
down. Come and pick me up from airport/ train
station at odd hours sacrificing their sleep.
Contain entire mapping information to guide
me when driving through new roads?”

Both the Tweet and the reply have gone viral,

with Bhattacharjee’s Tweet receiving 285.3k
views and Purwar’s reply receiving nearly
double, 401.4k views. Hate sells on social
media. Reckless, provocative, insensitive,
violent and hateful statements trigger all wings.
The Radical Right populists rejoice them, so
they retweet and increase the views, and the
liberal critical side outrage at them, and start
quote retweeting. The author of such
insensitive tweets wins both ways.

Millions of
Women Can
Pick Own
Luggage, But
Less Than 10%
of Indian Men
Make Any Tea
Women are physically weak, and therefore
incapable of putting in hard labour is one of the
biggest lies prevalent in India and all
patriarchal societies. Maybe Abhilasha Purwar
is a privileged, rich, urban women who cannot
travel alone or carry own luggage but there are
plenty of women who do. Millions of Indian
women do carry their own luggage. One has to
only visit an agricultural field in the rural India
or a construction site in urban India. Women
carry stones, bricks, cement, firewood, water on
their heads and walk miles. 80% of India’s
women workforce are in agriculture and they
toil all day under the sun. Families which have
a tractor, it is driven by the man, and women
put in the manual labour of ploughing, sowing,
harvesting etc. The same women also do the
cooking and cleaning at home while their
husbands do nothing. Men in rural India can be
often seen playing cards or smoking hukkah
while their women toil in fields or kitchens.

Time Use
Survey Data,
2019
Government data shows that not
even 10% men in India do any
household chores. The Time Use in
India – 2019 report by National
Sample Survey Office under Ministry
of Statistics and Programme
Implementation shows that women
do overwhelmingly more unpaid
work in the house such as cooking,
cleaning, taking care of babies
compared to men. The gap between
men and women handling these jobs
is roughly 80:20. In urban areas,
82.9% of women and 12.10% of men
are involved in unpaid care work at
home. Men spend on average just 98
minutes (one and half hour) in the
day while women spend a whopping
301 minutes (five hours) on same
work. Merely 6.1% men participate
in any kind of cooking, even if only
for a few minutes, but almost every
women aged 15-59 do the regular
cooking every day. Just 8 per cent
men participate in house cleaning
and just 3 per cent in washing
clothes. Regarding “sacrificing sleep”
which Abhilasha thinks men do for
women, the data shows that women
get less sleeping time than men
though the gap is small. It is not that
men are busy working outside that’s
why they cannot do the household
chores. Data shows 87% of the men
participate in leisure activities,
which means they have leisure time,
but they are not participating in
domestic activities. For more on the
Time Use In India Survey read this
informative piece by Rukmini Sen
(@rukmini) on India Today.
Doownload the full report here.

Thus, millions of women do a lot of physical

labour but men do not do any domestic work at
all. It is because there is a gender based division
of labour. Paid work outside home is
considered masculine and unpaid care giving
work at home is feminine. Unless this gender
based division of labour comes to an end,
unless men enter the kitchen and start doing
unpaid domestic work, we will never have
gender equality. And that was the point of
Sayani Bhattacharya’s post.

Ill-informed, agenda driven social media quips

like that of Abhilasha Purwar pulls back
feminist struggle by decades. Her reply was also
shared by a male techie on LinkedIn where a
whole bunch of other men were seen hailing
Purwar’s attack at a feminist voice.

Social Media
Users Clueless
About Gender
Equality Making
Pretentious
Posts
The screenshot of both tweets was shared on
LinkedIn by one Shivam Chhirolya in a
pretentious post about gender equality and
breaking stereotype while actually reinforcing
both. Citing Abhilasha Purwar’s reply, he
stated, “This response highlights that gender
equality isn’t just about redistributing tasks; it’s
about recognizing and appreciating the diverse
skills and roles each family member can
contribute.”

Shivam Chhirolya clearly knows nothing about

gender equality or women rights or feminism.
Redistribution of tasks by ending the gender
stereotype which assumes men and women
have different skills is exactly what gender
equality is about. “Recognizing diverse skills
and roles” is a another way of saying women are
more suitable for household roles or women’s
true place is in the kitchen, and that is gender-
stereotype which he thought is breaking
stereotype. Without understanding anything
about gender and power structure, masculine –
feminine division of labour, he wrote a
pretentious post because talking about women
empowerment and gender equality is a
marketing strategy in political and corporate
circles.

On Chhirolya’s post, seemingly made for

“gender equality” and “breaking stereotypes”,
dozens of men were seen abusing feminism.
Feminism is the movement that gave women
the language to question gender stereotype,
gender based roles, power structure, inequal
distribution of resources and so on. Today, men
bash feminism while tagging their posts as
#GenderEquality.

Right wing
ideology and
feminism
It appears from a quick visit to Abhilasha
Purwar’s Twitter timeline that she belongs to
the right wing ideology supporting Narendra
Modi and BJP-RSS conglomerate. It is a
common trend seen in the West too that right
wing nationalists are against feminism. A lot of
feminist researchers are trying to understand
why right-wing women are also anti-feminism
and hold deeply patriarchal regressive ideas. In
the US right-wing are against women’s abortion
rights, in India they want women to stay within
domestic roles, serve their husbands. At one
hand these women break the gender stereotype
with their violent hateful anti-minority
speeches and actions be it Blacks in US or
Muslims in India. They are found involved in
rioting, bombing and generally terrorizing
minorities which is far removed from the image
of docile wife sitting at husband’s feet. But they
don’t understand women’s rights, history of
oppression and hail the patriarchal family
system.

A separate articles is needed on the topic but

these books might be useful to understand.
Author Eviane Leidig book titled “Women of
the Far Right Social Media Influencers and
Online Radicalization“. In Indian context there
is a collection of essay on “Women and The
Hindu Right” edited by Urvashi Butalia and
Tanika Sarkar.

Please spread the word by sharing this report

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Posted September 14, 2023 in Women and Work

by Women News Network

Tags:
division of labour, gender roles, gender stereotype,
social media, Time Use In India Survey, Twitter

Comments
One response to “Ask
Men In Family to Make
Tea, See The Anti-
Feminist Meltdown and
Misogyny”

Prashant
September 20, 2023

Matlab kuch bhi data se content banana hai,

exact data quote karo na, 300 page ka report
ka link daal dete hain, kaun dhundega. You
are good at sharing screenshots on the blog,
why not share exact screenshot of the data
that you are referring?

Where is the time calculation of working

hours of men, are they disproportionately
higher than women?

Why don’t women ask for equality in the work

that is more fatal, like oil rigs, or military, men
make up just over half of the workforce, and
they experience more than 90 percent of
workplace fatalities. Why do women only fight
for equality where there is an airconditioned
room to work in?

“millions of women do a lot of physical labor

but men do not do any domestic work at all.”
not millions but all the men are first to be
sacrificed in any kind of fatal situation, why
not equalize that too?

Why were men not allowed to leave Ukraine

when there was a war with Russia, why were
all the women were safely moved to other
countries?

Equality ki baat kar rahe ho toh har jagah karo

na!

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