Why feminism will save the world

For two millennia, men have ruled the world and brought it to the brink of destruction at least twice. Itu00e2u0080u0099s time for a different approach

As I boarded my delayed Air India flight on Sunday evening, I was the perfect spectacle of a body that was breaking down. I'd written off the fatigue and exhaustion I'd been feeling the week before as symptomatic of dysmenorrhoea, when in fact I had probably been fighting a viral all along. By Saturday evening, I was beginning to see the wisdom in being horizontal. By Sunday afternoon, being any other way didn't seem to be a choice, even.

Except, I had to board my flight back to Delhi. I couldn't afford to reschedule. I tottered my way over the aerobridge, my back feeling like a thousand bulldozers had made their way across it, while the fever kept resurfacing like a stubborn bhakt troll. I was already in tears by the time I stepped onto the flight. My nose was running, my chest felt congested, and my skin felt like burning charcoal. I must have looked helpless when I asked the stewardess for a napkin. She asked if I was okay. I told her I was battling a fever and losing. She asked if I'd like a cookie and some medicine. I told her I'd eaten and had also taken a Crocin, maybe it would kick in eventually? Then I walked all the way to the end of the aircraft and took my window seat on the last row. I continued to cry because I didn't know how else to wrestle with the mind-numbing pain that was coursing through my veins, inflecting the muscles of my wrist, then suddenly my calves, then my chest. I was a mess.

I had to distract myself. Since I'd already been thinking about what the volume must be of tears shed by women since the beginning of time, it felt fitting to retrace that train of thought as my flight began its descent into Delhi. If only the world was a little more afraid of what causes women to weep without disregarding the catharsis as hysteria. In Mumbai, around my sister's apartment in Kalina, I'd heard the war-mongering cries that followed the patriotic hymns that were blasted on loudspeakers, all signs of fascist regimes. I'd heard them first at Jaipur, at the Jawahar Kala Kendra. A group of men had assembled out of nowhere atop the India Coffee House and had began chanting "India Zindabad, Pakistan Murdabad". So this is what the Zombie apocalypse looks like, I thought, people senselessly demanding more war. Sometimes they'd confuse the suffixes, without even realising it. "Are they ready to go themselves and fight this war?" I asked my sister, knowing fully well the answer.

It's easy to demand conflict when you feel you can rely on anonymous uniformed people to fight on your behalf. I remembered a photograph I'd seen in Palermo, in Italy, at a Robert Capa retrospective. It was titled "Funeral of 20 teenaged partisans at the Liceo Sannazart in the Vomero district, Naples, 1943". But really, the context didn't matter. The image was so familiar: women, mostly all mothers, holding photographs of their dead sons at their funeral. How many more mothers need to sacrifice sons to satisfy nationalist blood lust, I wondered. How many more tears do women need to shed until the world decides to give peace a chance instead?

I returned to Mona's place and parked my sick body there for the next three days as she decided to nurse me into recovery. The timing was perfect as she'd decided to take a break too from her hectic filming schedule. Each morning we'd wake up feeling more confused about why it was that we were on the brink of war? What good could possibly come from it? If ever there was any doubt about why we needed feminism it was because in the 21st century, the link between hyper masculinity, patriarchy, patriotism and war mongering has never been as pronounced.

To distract ourselves from the blood lust, we went to watch Gully Boy on Tuesday, a film whose setting is so close to home for a Kurla girl like me, I instantly connected and related with its environment. What I hadn't expected, and what completely floored and won my heart was its considered, almost loving depiction of tender masculinities. The relationships between men and men, men and women, women and women, and all of them with each other, and how expertly it traverses the issue of conditioning. This film had to have been made by a woman and written by a woman. There was no doubt about the feminist gaze that transformed the mundane into something potentially utopic.

War is a patriarchal endeavour that seeks to perpetuate the very systems of oppression that impel it. This is why there can never be a war that ends all wars. And this is why we need feminism. For two millennia, the world has been governed by men and brought to the brink of destruction at least twice. If we're not seeing the link between toxic masculinity, the collapse of international diplomacy, and the rise of right-wing fundamentalism, we're missing the point completely.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com

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