“I tell my kids, if you have self-control, you have everything,” says Melanie, the innkeeper at our B&B in Fairbanks, Alaska. “It applies to any situation, whether it’s with a wild animal, a school bully, me and their dad. Self-control… it will serve them well anywhere.”

A few days later, my husband and I are sitting in the Denali National Park Visitors’ Center, watching a wildlife safety video. Home to grizzly bears, moose, and caribou, among other creatures, the park is one of the few places remaining in the U.S. where humans are intruders—and need to behave accordingly.

We like to hike, but we’ve never encountered anything larger than deer in the wild, so we’ve been leaning toward exploring Denali behind the protective steel and glass of our rental car. But just in case we feel like wimps once we’re out in the forest, we decide to watch the video so we can make a last-minute call. The trails are open year-round, after all; we can always stoke our bravery later.

Four guides narrate the 30-minute video, structured as a list of do’s and don’ts. The tips for bears in particular are enlightening:

• Minimize surprises—make noise to announce your presence
• Suppress any scents so you don’t attract bears—no fragrances, all food in bear-proof packs
• Stay vigilant: When stopping, choose sites with good visibility. Have everyone in your group face a slightly different direction, so you can see anything approaching
• Bears are curious, and their behavior is contextual; you never want to provoke or set precedent (e.g., don’t keep food in or near your tent—then they’ll think tents equal food)
• Keep bear spray close—you don’t want to be fumbling for it in a crucial moment. Make sure you know how to use it before you head out
• If you do come upon a bear and it spots you, don’t run! (That could trigger the bear’s predatory chase drive.) Back away if possible, but don’t turn your back on the bear. If you can’t retreat, stand your ground and put your arms over your head to look as large as possible
• If the bear attacks, lie in the fetal position, cover your head and neck

As the video wrapped up all the different ways hikers and campers could get in trouble, one of the youthful park rangers offered a final thought: “Don’t be afraid to go out and explore!”

Despite this encouragement, we ultimately opted to stick to our original plan. We drove to Mile 30 and back on Denali’s main road on two consecutive days: the first in afternoon sunshine, the second in morning mist and light rain. On both occasions, the weather revealed different shades of the mountains and valleys, and a variety of animals came out to greet us: bald eagles, caribou, and yes—two grizzly bears. The afternoon bear sidled down the mountain and crossed the road, less than 30 feet from our car; the morning bear stayed up on the hillside, munching on the brush. We snapped a few pictures, the gargantuan beasts transformed into mere specks on our smartphone cameras. We continued on our way, enclosed and safe.

But something about the situation rattled me, and it took me a few days to understand just what exactly it was.

I acknowledged that when I go hiking at home in New England, I am seeking out silence, as well as the opportunity to clear my mind. The recommendations for Denali—being loud and constantly on high alert—seemed in direct opposition to what I’ve always pursued when I hit the trail. I hike to relax, and this type of endeavor was vigilant — maybe even tense.

In fact, I thought, if I wanted to be constantly on the lookout and poised for a potential attack, I’d just stay home and continue my usual, “commuting on public transportation” and “woman walking alone in the city,” routines.

But something about the situation rattled me, and it took me a few days to understand just what exactly it was.
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Suddenly I realized that those safety tips from the National Park Service video weren’t so different from what I learned in a self-defense class a few years back.

• Stay constantly alert! Don’t wear earbuds or talk on your phone. Know your surroundings at all times.
• When going out, look large: Practice safety in numbers
• Dress conservatively, watch how much skin you’re showing—you don’t want to trigger a prey drive
• Yell and make noise so others know you’re in trouble
• If you’re going to carry pepper spray, make sure you know how to use it. Otherwise it could be grabbed and used against you!

And it then hit me—do we regard men the same way we regard wild animals?

I thought of Mike Pence, who refuses to dine or be alone with any woman who isn’t his wife. Louis C.K.’s compulsions. School dress codes that make sure girls don’t distract boys. The string of assaults against women in my former Boston neighborhood — conducted over repeated years by the alleged same assailant — which terrorized residents so much that the local community center provided the aforementioned self-defense classes free of charge.

I thought of the flood of #MeToo stories, encompassing friends and strangers, famous men and everyday men. My own stories, my friends’ stories. In every case, the proprieties of respect and social mores fall away and the feral urges dominate the experience (and headlines). That sense of unpredictability, that succumbing to animal nature, sets the foundation for repeated indignities—and worse.

He can’t be controlled. You need to be smart. (You need to take that self-defense class!)

Boys will be boys—it’s in their nature.   

Don’t tempt him or be a tease—he can’t help it.

Do we regard men the same way we regard wild animals?
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We took a red eye home from Anchorage and promptly fell asleep. When we were somewhere over the Midwest, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford started her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Jet-lagged and bleary-eyed, I watched a video recording of her opening statement later that evening. She was composed, with self control.

I watched Justice Kavanaugh, raging and roaring; Lindsay Graham, red-faced and sputtering; both as volatile as creatures disturbed in the wild. And I suppose they were—here was an interloper daring to call out how they roamed their habitat. In both her statement and replies, Dr. Ford refused to continue the narrative that they had no self control.

Of course, this narrative won’t go away quietly—cultural mores built over millennia don’t just course correct or even adapt immediately. Just this month, for example, the Atlantic gave Newt Gingrich a lengthy (and often bizarre) profile, opening the story with its subject stomping around in a zoo and featuring choice quotes comparing all of human nature to the animal kingdom. Photos show him grinning alongside menacing dinosaur skulls and petting giant turtles.

“It’s not viciousness, it’s natural,” he chides after the reporter pushes back. Later in the story, citing a 2016 speech Gingrich gave to the Heritage Foundation, our president is compared to (what else?) a grizzly bear—specifically, the ferocious bear in the movie The Revenant: “He will walk over, bite your face off, and sit on you.”

Here was an interloper daring to call out how they roamed their habitat.
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But for those of us who have never wielded power — who have never been regarded (or permitted to be regarded) as wild or ferocious — we know by default that there are other ways of moving through the world.

For those millions of us who have always been held to a higher standard — who have never had the privilege to unleash any “wild” tendencies — we know collectively what’s possible. That we all can do better. That the narrative of “nature dictates violence” has to stop. In short — that we all can exercise self control.  

Two days after we returned home, my husband and I drove up to Plum Island for a hike through the nature preserve. The sun was high and the salt marshes spread as far as the eye could see. It was quite a departure from Denali—mostly flat without a predator in sight.

But at a certain point, I got ahead of Andy on the boardwalk trail, and saw a solo man a few feet away. The wind rustled through the brush that flanked the narrow pathway. It was just him and me as we approached each other. He could be a bear, I thought, or he could be a crane.

And just like that, all senses were firing.

I took a deep breath. Self control, I thought, and hoped it would be enough.

I wondered if he had even an inkling of the same thought.

“Hello,” I said as we made eye contact.

“Beautiful day,” he said, and we continued our opposite ways.

Both my parents are the oldest of three, with two younger brothers. When my mother found out she was pregnant, she thought the talk of “their son” was due to this: that they had both experienced babies as being boys, and thus defaulted to the idea that so, too, would theirs be.

But while this was true for why my mother originally believed that she must be carrying a son, I don’t think this was true for my father. When my mother happily called her own father to tell him the news — that she was pregnant, that it was going to be a girl — my father turned to her and said, “Is he excited?” When my mother replied that yes, of course he was, that both he and my grandmother were shouting in excitement over the phone from Poland, he scoffed. “He must be lying. He’s got to be disappointed it’s not a boy.”

Because to my father, this was the tacit code among men: that a daughter was fine and good, if she preceded or succeeded a son. Daughters were sources of “daddy’s girl” affection, and procurers of son-in-laws with whom one could barbecue and bond. A daughter will care for you in old age, fret and fuss about you taking your vitamins, while a son will be out in the world spreading your (however puffed up or imagined) legacy.

This is not so much bitter postulation as it is a direct recounting of what my father would often say on the topic. A male family member had had three daughters, and divorced his wife when she refused to find out the sex of the baby before having an abortion; three children was enough. How dare she: If it was a boy, she had no right.

My parents divorced a few months after I was born. I don’t have many early memories, or many memories of childhood at all. In the classic family unit, children arrive into a domestic universe that is well-established: the family home, the family dynamic, the external support structure of extended family, the rules, the beliefs, the time dinner is served. However, when you are born into a time of extreme upheaval in two people’s respective lives, you join them in the upheaval, and participate in two completely separate laws of physics. In the land of my mother, my girlhood was celebrated in the socially dictated gender-role ways: Spice Girls cassette tapes and funky dresses. In the land of my father, there was anger and confusion.

In all of my baby photos, I am covered in frills and ruffles. But while no one can refuse a baby girl, teenage girls are different: further away from lap candy and closer to nuisance. So by the time I approached the 4th grade, as the awkwardness of adolescence was slowly approaching, the lovable pigtails of babyhood were over. There was a shift: Suddenly, my hair had been cut short and I was in corduroys and rugby polos at all times.

No one can refuse a baby girl, but teenage girls are different: further away from lap candy and closer to nuisance.
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One day, on the last day of school in June, there was a fair of sorts on the asphalt basketball court. I got my hair spray-painted blue. I had eaten a firecracker popsicle, because I remember going to the bathroom and sticking out my blue tongue in the mirror and hissing like a blue dragon. My dad had planned a camping trip on Bull’s Island as the first order of summer; we pulled out of the parking lot of the fair and drove straight there. A few hours later we were on the rocky beach, and my dad threw a towel at me and gestured to kids playing in the water. I rummaged around in the bag he had packed for my swimsuit. It wasn’t there.

“Where’s my swimsuit?” I had asked.

“Guess I forgot,” he shrugged. “Just go in with your shorts.”

I paused, unsure what he was suggesting. “And a shirt?”

“No,” he said. “You don’t need that yet.” He pointed to my flat chest. I was 9.

“I’ll wear a shirt,” I said.

“No you won’t.”

I still don’t know why he obstinately refused to let me cover up my chest, as much as I still don’t know if he actually had forgotten the swimsuit. I just remember crying. I remember being pushed onto the beach in only shorts and my blue bowl cut; a group of boys my age wading up to me, excited to see a new friend. “Hey, man! Cool hair.”

I remember my chest tightening and tears stinging my eyes, feeling utterly mortified and so dysphoric I forgot my own name, which is completely unisex and did nothing to prove that I was actually a girl. (It’s important to note here that not everyone assigned girl at birth identifies that way, or as one or the other gender, but I always have.)

I remember looking over at my dad, and seeing him beaming. His son. Being boys with other boys.

Something had settled in me by the time I was 13: I didn’t like women, and I didn’t want to be like them. There were millions of inane things women were simply bad at: like directions, my dad would say. They have no sense of a map. A step-girlfriend came into my life: a woman who seemed to sway slightly as she stood straight on her skinny legs, with a constant look of wide-eyed bewilderment, a pixie puff of golden curls, and always bright pink lipstick. She looked for all the world like who would be cast as Big Bird’s wife in the live cast version of Sesame Street.

Sandra had her eyebrows and lip-liner tattooed on, and she said things like “serviettes” instead of napkins and “do you want to set the table?” instead of “could you set the table?” She put flax powder on everything she ate and made tea by dipping a tea bag once into hot water and setting it aside. Her favorite things to do were to go out dancing, and watch me scrub the bathroom and point out spots that were missed. She was, as my father said, “the icon of femininity: submissive and demure,” or as my grandmother put it, “a Barbie doll with no self-respect.” These were, allegedly, the same thing. Meanwhile, I was a chubby middle-schooler with frizzy hair and glasses. I often felt like a Semitic goat-herder next to her.

My Father, The Oppressor, The Immigrant, The Patriarch, My Hero
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One time, I went with Sandra to the grocery store. She had only lived with us for two weeks at this point. We passed by an outdoor clothing sale, and she gasped at a long black number, holding it up to her body. “What do you think?!” She squealed, swishing it around. I shrugged. I was moody and contrarian and hardly knew the woman. Of course, she bought it.

Back home, she instructed me to sit and wait for her to try it on. She emerged two minutes later in the clinging dress, which consisted of a sparkly black slip underneath an ankle-length sheath of fine mesh. It was nice, and I said so. All of a sudden she gasped, then clapped her hands and squealed with delight. “I have an idea!”

She quickly shut the door behind her again. This time, she emerged in only the long sheath of mesh, without the slip underneath, or underwear. Nipples, stomach, ass; all dimly lit under the column of tight mesh. Whenever I encounter the phrase serpentine smile, I recall this moment. “Do you think your dad will like it?” She said, twirling.

This is the first time I understood that this was power.

Now that I was 13, my dad was over the desire to make me a tomboy and was now interested in fostering the future woman in me. He encouraged me to take “makeup lessons” with Sandra, to buy colorful clothes and more dresses. He wanted me to lose weight. He said that when I was 18, he would get me lasik surgery, and that when I was 21, he would pay for teeth whitening, and breast implants. He continued to lament my lack of affection toward him.

“When I heard the baby was a girl, I thought, at least she’ll be affectionate,” he’d say every time I’d swat away his hand from the back of my neck, where he liked to control where I looked while we walked.

I became aware of my father’s preoccupation with women’s bodies: When I would comment on a shirt a passing woman was wearing that I thought was cute, my dad would respond with, “I like what’s underneath it.” He had a critique for every woman we encountered: “She’d be attractive if she lost five pounds,” or “Why is her husband with her with an ass like that? She must come from money.”

I became aware of my father’s preoccupation with women’s bodies.
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This served his relationship with Sandra well. She was a stay-at-home Body, retired and tasked with only one duty — maintenance. Her days were spent eating slowly and carefully, and executing day-long exercise regimens. My father would often try to convince her to go to a fertility clinic to impregnate a Y-chromosome fertilized egg. At school, I would eat only bell peppers and cubes of watermelon for lunch. In nightmares of failure, I would often dream of a slowly rotating petri dish.

More and more my father pushed for me to be more effusive, eager, and skirted. There were two opposing categories for a woman’s appearance that were negative ends of the spectrum: “like a lesbian” and “like a prostitute.” Where fathers wanted their daughters was somewhere safely in the middle. For my father, the main source of power any woman could possess was her sensuality.

I think, in some deeply misguided way, this was his most genuine expression of love, as well as his most perplexing directive. At once, he wanted me to have power (read: sexuality) while remaining modestly pure and virginal. This was confusing for him. I was his child — he wanted me to command attention and be heard — yet the only way for a woman to accomplish that was to be enticing. “You want to be pretty, but not beautiful. If you’re plain looking, then you’ll be overlooked in life. If you’re beautiful, life will always be very difficult for you.” By “difficult” he meant: experience violence at the hands of men who will want you.

My Dad Wanted A Melania Wife And An Ivanka Daughter
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By 14, I was at a prestigious all-girls school. I wore baggy clothes and focused entirely on books, being angry, and debate club. At school, I was immersed in a culture of women I respected, but I was not pretty or enticing, so I defaulted to the only other method of power I knew: my father’s.

As the emotional abuse of Sandra increased at home, in which she would be elaborately punished for hours for absent-mindedly leaving a burner on, the flame of my own resentment for her weakness and meek toleration grew. I would dry-heave in the train station when it was time to go home. I was condescending and abusive in conversation. Every time I spoke to someone who threatened me with vulnerability, I would think of Sandra’s most pathetic expression — her wide-eyed teariness and profuse apologizing for the most inane crime — and export that disgust upon anyone in my vicinity who dared to be a “pussy.” I wanted, more than anything, for that pitiful woman to punch my dad in the face in defiance. But that concept didn’t fit into sensuality or tyranny, the two forms of power, the yin and yang, the Mars and Venus, that I knew of. Every day this failed to happen, the gentlest parts of myself shut tighter.

From there, it is a poorly edited film. Image: many stills of my father screaming, at me or Sandra, or anyone. Stopping the car, kicking on the highway, locking us in rooms, withholding school or medicine. Scene: the day the judge announces that I am finally emancipated. Scene: Sandra visiting me at my mother’s house and squeezing my arm urgently to say, “I’m leaving him too.” Scene: Sandra taking it upon herself to visit me at college a year later to tell me she is back with my father. Scene: my grandmother telling me that my father has “adopted” a 23-year-old woman as his “daughter.” Scene: finding out he has broken off contact with his “daughter” after she flirted with men in his presence. Same scene: realizing that my father has never seen me past the age of 17. Image: wearing a dress, image: feminist theory!, image: challenging and changing, image: loving being a woman, loving myself.

Every time I spoke to someone who threatened me with vulnerability, I would think of Sandra’s most pathetic expression.
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There is much more that happened than I could possibly cover, but what remains are the questions — how do we reconcile with what has happened to us, from the broadest way we must reconcile with the most vicious histories of our foremothers’ treatment to the barest facts of our childhood? What does it mean for the clinical toxicity of the patriarch when his only reflection is found in the pool of a daughter? In which no woman is willing to bear him a son, in which no daughter is willing to be his, in which female dissent has dictated the dissolution of his most profound desire: an heir?

I have his hands, his chin, his sense of humor, his love of apples, bluegrass, and compulsive need to share articles. I have never seen him cry. I am the only child he will ever have. I entertain the thought that my father really did know that there was more to women, to life, to me, and that he just didn’t know how to deal with it.

A few months ago, my father and I talked on the phone for the first time in six years. He asked if I remembered when he would lock me in the bathroom in five-hour increments. He reminded me that I was in there so long because every time he would open the door to tell me time-out was up, I would stubbornly say, “No worries, I’m enjoying myself just fine.” This was infuriating for him, this way in which I would turn the power trip on its head. He explains that I have the same problem as my mother, who would pretend it didn’t hurt when her father beat her, which made my grandfather so angry he would keep going. On the phone, my dad said to me, “Can you blame us? How else do you deal with a girl like that?”

I can’t answer this because in truth, I have only loved and celebrated girls like that. I have only tried to tell girls like that that loving others does not make you weak, and resisting mistreatment does not make you a delinquent. I have only dreamt of a girl like that whose spirit is made neither for sex nor breaking, who knows she is complex, dynamic, and wanted, who exists beyond the fears and insecurities of those who aren’t able to imagine the universe of her.

Women who share their opinions and thoughts online, particularly professionally, are frequently targeted for heightened, often criminal and discriminatory, harassment. They are more likely to start their work days and often end their work nights with graphic attacks on their credibility, intelligence, bodies, sex, sexuality, looks, and more, frequently framed in violent terms. A recent in-depth analysis of tens of millions of comments by The Guardian found that eight of the top 10 writers who got the most abuse were women (four White and four non-White). The other two were Black men. All 10 of the least-harassed writers were men. Sexism and racism combined result in this disparate impact.

Among women journalists, women in sports are encountering some of the most vile resistance to their working. The Guardian’s analysis revealed that the more male-dominated a topical area, such as sports and tech, the more abusive the commentary on women writers’ work.

Julie DiCaro and Sarah Spain are two sports journalists very familiar with this problem. Spain is one of three women who host The Trifecta, an ESPNW sports-talk-radio show, and DiCaro is a long-time Chicago sports-radio host. They are both featured in “#MoreThanMean — Women in Sports ‘Face’ Harassment,” the new “reading mean tweets” video, which launched as part of a campaign to raise awareness about what is frequently referred to with the anodyne “online harassment.” In the video, men read messages that have been sent to the women. They have not seen the messages prior to their filmed reading. As the tweets and messages get increasingly more violent and hateful, the men stumble and pause. A typical example: “One of the players should beat you to death with their hockey stick like the whore you are.” Another: “This is why we don’t hire any females unless we need our cocks sucked or our food cooked.”

As they read, the men come to look physically uncomfortable. They experience the displaced but jarring effects that the women live with every day. “I’m having trouble looking at you when I’m saying these things,” says one man to Spain before he finishes reading: “Sarah Spain is a bitch I would hatefuck.”

It’s not just that people still find women in sports “unnatural,” but that they feel that women should be punished for violating their ideas about masculinity and gender roles.

The video is highly effective in showing that “mean” does not capture what is going on, which ranges from run of the mill gendered insults to rape and death threats to the stalking and sharing of nonconsensual porn in the recent case of sportscaster Erin Andrews. While it’s arresting to see the men reading the tweets come to appreciate the inadequacy of the word “mean,” it is also frustrating. Like many similar or related videos that engage in role reversals to further understanding, there is the very real, frustrating, and unavoidable dimension of having to have male validation before people are willing to take what women say seriously.

In February, the Women’s Media Center launched the Speech Project, which I direct. The purpose of the project is to raise public and media awareness of the scope and impact of this type of harassment on women’s ability to go to school, to work, and to participate in civic and public arenas. The project largely came into being after Ashley Judd, who chairs the initiative, experienced first-hand what hostility toward a woman with an opinion about sports looked like. After she tweeted a comment about a March Madness basketball game, she was deluged with tweets from men calling her a cunt, a whore, and a bitch. They threatened her with rape and other violence. “The volume of hatred that exploded at me in response was staggering,” she wrote of the incident. This level of aggression is, unfortunately, standard for many women.

Many people chose not to understand the difference between trash-talking and the abuse hurled at women, which tends to be gendered, reference historic discrimination, and leverage legitimate threats. Online threats of stalking and rape are easier to dismiss as “just words” if rape or avoiding being raped doesn’t shape your passage through life as it does most women’s. Like Sara Spain, and one out of five women, Judd is a survivor of sexual assault.

Professional sports are hegemonically male, and hostility toward women — as journalists, coaches, athletes, or fans — is hardly new. The culture illuminated in “mean tweets” goes hand-in-hand with the one on ample display in an industry where masculine ideology pervasively makes sports a zone of harassment for women, but is written off as “fun and games.”

As coaches, women have made only scant, hard-fought-for headway. Title IX, ironically, opened the door for male coaches in the growing arena of women’s sports, but has done little to make space for women coaches. The NFL recently hired Kathryn Smith as the first female full-time assistant coach in the league’s history. Smith joins a very small group of women in men’s sports.

Women players and journalists face everyday sexism and sexual harassment, both the institutional and casual fan-based kinds. In March, the director of the BNP Paribas Open Tournament in Indian Wells, California, Raymond Moore, thought nothing of explaining that in his next life he wants to “be someone in the WTA [Women’s Tennis Association], because they ride on the coattails of the men.” He then went on to reference women athletes on the basis of their level of physical attractiveness to him personally.

Women athlete’s uniforms are often designed to sexualize them, a problem that exists more broadly in media. Dress codes that mandate skirts, skimpy shorts, and more ensure that women aren’t simply dressing to perform optimally, but to please optimally.

While top American soccer players are suing U.S. Soccer for wage discrimination, Brazilian superstar Marta struggles to be paid at all in a country where her male counterpart, Neymar, makes $15 million a year. As a soccer player, Karen Gibson grew used to fans calling, “Get your tits out” when she ran onto the field.

It was only in 2002 that 60 Minutes’ Andy Rooney loudly proclaimed, “The only thing that really bugs me about television’s coverage is those damn women they have down on the sidelines who don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.” Until 2012, when a woman brought it to public attention, ESPN’s online complaint form included the dropdown option: “Commentator — dislike female commentators.” As recently as last October, several women sportswriters were illegally barred from locker rooms after a Jaguars-Colts football game. “It’s still 2015, right?” asked Joey Chandler of the Tuscaloosa News.

All of this implicit bias and overt sexism is evident every day online, where there are very few restraints on hateful expression, particularly against women journalists, who tend to bear the brunt of abuse, from men and women both. Online comments are a symptom of deep cultural misgivings about women’s equality and rapidly shifting gender roles. Their profusion reflects an abiding societal tolerance for this kind of discrimination. However, technology isn’t limiting women’s public participation or workplace opportunities. Sexism is.

Every day, readers and viewers in the hundreds, sometimes thousands, feel sufficiently socially and culturally entitled to send women sports professionals messages meant to humiliate, denigrate, intimidate and shame them because they are women. There are costs: financial, professional, and personal. This culture of abusing women professionals for doing their jobs gains power when we pretend that the people targeted are not materially affected. It gains power when we use words that hide the ugliness and violence of the expression. It gains power when the focus is on the “evils” of tech and not the cruelty of sexism and racism that are clearly manifest. It gains power when there is little or not counter speech from the public or support from employers. It makes no sense to hide what is going on by using family-friendly, homogenizing language, or to minimize the importance, meaning, or effect of the profound sexism at play.

This morning at breakfast, after reading a related article, my daughter asked what Reddit was, and my husband provided an example of how a particular sports subreddit works to build a community where “people” can share information, talk about games, and generally have fun while engaging in sports culture. My daughter is an athlete, but the experience that she would have online, as a participant in such a forum, would radically differ from her father’s if she was identifiable as female. It’s important that girls and, particularly, boys, understand the difference and in those terms.

Women have made major strides as athletes, coaches, journalists, and other sports professionals. But there is a long way to go.

***

This piece originally appeared in DAME magazine.

Lead image: flickr/Esther Vargas

By Ruchika Tulshyan

Growing up in a South Asian household in Singapore, I never saw my father get up to grab his own glass of water. It was my mother’s “job” to serve him. He would always eat dinner first, and then when he was done, my mother would sit down for her meal. My father would proudly proclaim that he had no idea where anything was in the kitchen, and that he couldn’t even boil an egg. I observed this same dynamic, time and again, in the homes of my friends and other family members.

Nearly three decades later, not much has changed. Still today, across most South Asian households, housework is almost always considered a woman’s work. A recent Nielsen India survey found that 76% of Indian men believe laundry is a woman’s job, and 68% would prefer to watch TV over doing the laundry.

I considered myself a feminist as a child, and have lived independently in various parts of the Western world. But the inequity I saw as a child left an indelible imprint in my mind about gender roles.

When I first got married, I was on autopilot when I made dinner and insisted that my husband eat his meal before me.

“What are you doing? Why aren’t we eating together?” he asked, shocked.

I didn’t have an answer. I was stunned as I watched him help me chop, wash, and clean up. During one early visit, my mother-in-law stopped me as I warmed up rice from the day before for myself to eat, while the men ate the fresh rice we’d made that day. “Are you not human?” she asked. “Why do women have to eat old food while men don’t?” I didn’t have an answer then, either. I just assumed this was culturally acceptable behavior among South Asian couples like us.

A recent Nielsen India survey found that 76% of Indian men believe laundry is a woman’s job, and 68% would prefer to watch TV over doing the laundry.
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That was four years ago — and it’s taken me the entire time since then to undo the messages I learned about gender roles growing up.

All of which may explain why I openly cry every time I watch this new viral advertisement from the Indian detergent company Ariel.

In the video, a father watches his adult daughter return home after a day at the office, cleaning up after her child and making tea for her husband who is watching TV, all while talking on the phone about emailing a presentation (presumably to someone at work).

The father narrates (translation from Hindi is mine):

He goes on to apologize for never telling her that housework is both a man’s job and a woman’s job. But how could he, he laments, when he never helped her mother with housework?

“What you saw, is what you learned. Your husband must have seen the same thing growing up . . . from every dad who set the wrong example, I’m sorry.”

He vows to make a change, and the commercial ends on an encouraging note — no subtitles necessary.

Do I think a commercial that sells laundry detergent can change the world? I’m not that naïve. P&G, the behemoth that owns the Ariel brand, likely knew this commercial — complete with the hashtag #ShareTheLoad — would go viral among the millennial, social-media-savvy crowd in India. And they were correct.

But I do believe this Ariel advert successfully captures a reality faced not just in India, but all over the world. Women spend at least twice as much time as men on unpaid work, like housework and caregiving, that take up long hours and are low reward. And women are shouldering the lion’s share of household work and caregiving even if they also hold down full-time paid jobs.

In every region of the world, women do less paid work than men, with an especially pronounced disparity in South Asia:

(Image is a screen grab from the 2016 Gates Annual Letter)

In India, the inequity is especially acute. Between 2005 and 2011, India’s economy grew 7% on average, but the number of women in its labor force fell from 31 to 24%. Women in India are becoming more educated and the birth rate is actually falling among these women, but still, India is the 11th worst country in the world when it comes to women in the workforce.

Of course, the social cost of this is enormous.

Women spend at least twice as much time as men on unpaid work, like housework and caregiving, that take up long hours and are low reward.
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“Working, and the control of assets it allows, lowers rates of domestic violence and increases women’s decision-making in the household. And an economy where all the most able citizens can enter the labor force is more efficient and grows faster,” Rohini Pande, professor of public policy at Harvard University, wrote in a New York Times op-ed. Pervasive gender norms, and the idea that a woman’s work is at home, continues to keep women oppressed in a variety of ways. According to the United Nations Development Program, India ranks 130 out of 155 countries in the Gender Inequality Index, behind neighbors Bangladesh and Pakistan.

The Ariel commercial reveals a truth sometimes lost in the debate about workforce equality: If women are empowered to work but also expected to do all the housework and caregiving, we’re not really moving women’s rights forward. We’re just adding the pressure of full-time paid work on top of the burden of unpaid work. To achieve real equity, the solution isn’t simply to bring more women into the workplace; it’s also to get more men to share in housework.

Among developing countries, the unequal burden of this work hampers the livelihoods of girls and women for generations to come. In her annual letter published this week, Melinda Gates writes that globally, women average 4.5 hours daily doing unpaid work. Men spend less than half that. “But the fact is that the burden of unpaid work falls heaviest on women in poor countries, where the hours are longer and the gap between women and men is wider. In India, to take one example, women spend about 6 hours, and men spend less than 1 hour,” she writes. At the end of her letter, Gates emphasizes the importance of sharing unpaid work among the sexes.

One tear-jerking commercial and one impassioned letter does not a revolution make. But it can change a few minds.

If these messages were pervasive when I was a little girl, maybe it would be me demanding equality in my home, rather than leaving it up to chance to find a partner who believed in sharing the load. Or better yet, maybe I would never need to demand such equality in the first place.