Have your Men’s Day, but we'll have the rest

It isa truth universally acknowledged that men and women, once they acquire a fortune of revisionist education, which is nothing but gibberish, must voice their demand for a Men's Day.

- Nishtha Gautam

Masculinity has saturated the cultural and institutional fields. Men are tired. They are barely keeping it together while women continue to knock at the door.

(HT ARCHIVE)

Perhaps all year long, but especially on International Women’s Day. This is how the logic of symmetric signalling works: Every symbolic acknowledgement must have a mirror image.

No matter whether a Men’s Day actually exists (November 19; yes, run with it). No matter whether even a Women’s Day achieves precious little to bring equality to the second sex. The issue is not the absence of recognition; it isthe presence of someone else's recognition.

“Man represents both the positive and the neutral,” observed Simone de Beauvoir, identifying Woman, in this symbolic order, as “the Other.” Trying to correct the historical, religious, and sociopolitical attitude and reality that ensures Man as the baseline clearly needs more than symbolic days. The citizen, the worker, the intellectual, the soldier — all these archetypes and more were implicitly male. But men must have their day, too. They cannot bear even a day of not being in the spotlight, however performative that spotlight may be.