‘Masculine Entitlement’ (of which I’ve spoken of in vehement defiance) is a means of preserving gender inequality. Since Masculine Entitlement is based on the schismatic understanding of ‘Man’ and ‘human’, it essentially aims at the dehumanisation of everything that is not it. Veiling itself as an off- shoot of a rationalist, objective, scientific attitude, and all other synonyms of Detachment, it severs itself from the very basic principles on which human understanding and living are based. It substitutes the relevant factors that affect the realities of everyday living, for abstractions that can neither been seen nor put to work. It discards the very presumptions on which a humane way of life is founded and more importantly, is possible.
Condescension and risqué behaviour especially speech, are the crutches of Male Entitlement. Not once does this ‘Man’ allow himself the time and space to question the constitution of his so-called ‘scientific temper’. Not once does he look outside his cribbed cabin of ‘objective’ (by which he really means ‘indifferent’) living and wet himself with the sentiment that bathes the world. The rain and floods of suffering do not touch him. He has for himself constructed an eerie island of isolation from everything that is human. Equality to him is a mathematical equation. Bereft of passion, of ideals, of the hope that is so essential to combat the lifelessness of the human spirit, of faith, of profferment of one’s arm to the collective human suffering, he satisfies himself in his self-absorbed, unaffected, privileged self- complacency. Everything else to him is ‘personal’, ‘emotional’ and hence ‘arbitrary’.
One of the greatest follies that he commits and is outstandingly recognised by is his understanding of ‘objectivity’. Objectivity to him is ‘indifference’. And is it not that indifference carries within it to a certain degree, an antithesis of everything that is living? Is indifference or Detachment, not the defiance to weigh in everything that weighs and bears itself to the tree of life? Shorn of all these values that ascribe to life it’s real, live-able worth and meaning and substance, he insists that life be viewed in absence of all that which forms a part of it. He insists on its dehumanisation. And in this, in the unacknowledgement of the tears of those who’ve borne witness to life, to the ache of those that has borne the brunt of unfairness, in the dismissal of the human fibre that has strained itself in laborious living, he sets everything aside, looking at the place where life should’ve been, and says “But, but, but; We must be objective.”
His failing is essentially in this fact, that is unable to renounce even for a moment, his privileges as a man, to question them. He condescendingly asserts in a circumstance that does not claim his body and soul, that has not touched him; one that he has never known nor taken the efforts to know, that he is superior. This is the very negation of everything that stands for Equality.
