VENKAT: Misogyny: World's most successful culture
For eons, men and women had worked in harmony, toiling in the fields and working absurdly hard to hunt and gather for their families in a calculated effort to acquire sustenance for those around them. Some even proclaim that female hunters were not uncommon.
But as humans entered a more settled lifestyle, which posed creative opportunities not just limited to necessity, for example, the manufacturing of pottery and textiles, gender inequality was born. The glaring difference between the era of necessity and that of opportunity is simple — someone had to prevail.
Ever since, it has seemed that society, in general, has developed a fear of women surpassing men. Should a woman see more success, earn more money or develop a better reputation, people will panic. The amount of nervousness and questioning that arise when women aim for upward mobility makes it seem like no one has ever held a job and reared a child concurrently. So many people fear what a woman would do should they accidentally scare off the men with their success.
The signs are scattered throughout society. Rolf Gates, author of "Meditations from the Mat," discloses his struggles with overcoming the zero-sum game, the idea that one person's gain is another's loss. He discloses that he is working to get over a sense of powerlessness that he attributes to witnessing women outnumber men in law school.
With this notion that if women win, men consequently lose, we end up with a vicious cycle of men trying to get the better of women, leading to them cutting their losses and minimizing their success so they do not get hurt by the men in their lives.
Moreover, in an effort to downplay their success, ambitious women are held to a standard of perfection that similarly ambitious men are not. Hillary Clinton described it as "a cultural, political, economic game that's being played to keep women in their place."
The truth behind Clinton's statement lies in that she was called horrendous names because she did not hold up to absurd cultural and societal standards that differ from person to person and from culture to culture. There is simply no winning.
A certain sector of social media has also greatly promoted a culture of toxic masculinity, the idea that women need to be infantilized and protected, portraying women as mindless, promiscuous and vicious. Social media influencers like Andrew Tate feel it is acceptable to proclaim to the world that women are "intrinsically lazy," and he proudly proclaims himself to be a misogynist.
These statements have no grounds in reality, but their existence has evidently had an impact on young men. It takes nothing more than a few conversations with your peers to uncover teenagers and young adults who succumb to such hateful ideologies.
Moreover, a good deal of social media content aims to humiliate women, shaming them for promiscuity, but hypocritically applauds men in the very same breath for that same behavior. This cements a double standard where it is acceptable for a man to be promiscuous but not a woman. It also creates the idea that all women are promiscuous, which, given the negative cultural connotation of promiscuity, perpetuates a negative view of women overall.
As young people go onto social media platforms, they can easily be corrupted by this misogynistic content. Their consumption of content that is so overtly and overwhelmingly against the success, independence and mobility of women makes for a generation of men, a generation of husbands and fathers, that have had it ingrained in their minds that women are weak and that misogyny is a way of life.
We cannot be so brazen as to label teenagers as having sky-high levels of vulnerability to social influence, then turn around and allow them to be exposed to such ways of thinking.
This fear of upward mobility in women is also evident in the way many women carry themselves and perceive themselves. Surveyed women rate themselves more negatively than do men on scales of scientific ability and are significantly less self-assured than men regarding their ability to succeed.
The fact is that society has been working to keep women down, whether knowingly or not. If this sort of widespread misogyny is not put an end to immediately, we will lose all the progress we have made in women's rights simply because we are scared of them succeeding.
Tejaswini Venkat is a first-year in the School of Arts and Sciences majoring in biological sciences and minoring in psychology. Venkat's column, “Unsolicited Opinions,” runs on alternate Tuesdays.
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