Highlights ⇒ Learnings

• It is considered “common sense” that women, equipped with maternal instinct, are innately good at various forms of care, including child care, nursing care, cooking, maintaining the health of the family, and the all-inclusive emotional care. It is even believed that women feel fulfilled by their work. ⇒ So true, we, as men, have never even tried asking women in our lives if they do indeed feel fulfilled?
• Mothers would take care of their family’s needs, including those of their cherished sons, who would then grow up taking their labour for granted. ⇒ We do take our mothers/wives love for ‘granted’, and do not realize that it is a choice they are making, which we should reciprocate too.
• While men may do their part in condemning sexism and misogyny, it wouldn’t occur to them to take on unpaid care work for the family. ⇒ I have this in my own circles itself, many well educated progressive men would do all the nice talking sitting on the couch, but never do care work at home.
• No matter what progressive ideas you may express, those ideas will never reach children’s minds if you don’t act on them**.**A self-proclaimed liberal father may express outrage on hearing about discrimination against women and preach the importance of gender equality. But the same father allows his wife, unconsciously and without malice, to carry the bulk of the labour of care. ⇒ There are a lot of lip-service feminists. We as men, need to lead the change by our actions, that begin at our own homes itself.
• I can fully understand that women might feel it’s easier to bear the burden themselves than to keep on arguing with their husbands. ⇒ I had seen this tendency ample in my parents generation where mothers had kind of given up. But its sad to see some of this still continue in our generation too, where I see women giving up on men in marriages and continuing to bear the burden on themselves :(
• I urge women to relinquish, therefore, some of the housework and care that have long been taken for granted. Through your actions, with an iron will, reject the assumption that mothers and wives are the caring sex, and show that women and men are the same human beings. ⇒ We should all personally reflect on this and proactively take on house work / care work from our partners, our mothers.
• To achieve this, we need to show wives and mothers enjoying themselves and pursuing their own pleasures. We need to show that, when we make porridge for you when you have a fever, it’s not because we are wives or mothers, but because of our personal love and responsibility for you. ⇒ Maybe we should start from expressing gratitude towards our mothers / partners for their love and care, not only on that 1 special day in the year but on a daily basis. And subsequently make a list of pleasures they enjoy and try to make those happen for them in whatever capacity we can.

Article:

Fathers must confront their unconscious assumptions, says the Japanese writer

image: Dan Williams

WHEN I WAS little, there were still many public bathhouses in town. As you washed up and soaked in the warm bath, an old lady would enter the bathing area with her clothes on to pick up bits of rubbish or hair strands that accumulated in the drains.

It always felt unnerving to see a woman fully clothed in a place where everyone was naked, but what was even more shocking was when I learned that this lady was doing the same in the men’s bath as well. Picture a woman, all by herself, going into a space where men gather naked and picking up their hair and trash. Not another man, but a woman—among naked male bodies. How did she feel? How did the men feel? I couldn’t put my discomfort into words back then, but I had an intuition that I was witnessing something terribly grotesque—and, at the same time, important.

Over the years, I’ve come to realise that this power structure is in fact the norm when it comes to gender roles within Japanese society and families. It is considered “common sense” that women, equipped with maternal instinct, are innately good at various forms of care, including child care, nursing care, cooking, maintaining the health of the family, and the all-inclusive emotional care. It is even believed that women feel fulfilled by their work.

Women took care of their in-laws, from toilet needs to end-of-life care, and it’s only recently that outsourcing child care and nursing care became somewhat possible, though the hurdles are still high. Mothers would take care of their family’s needs, including those of their cherished sons, who would then grow up taking their labour for granted. Those sons eventually became husbands, never doubting that their wives would be hardworking and caring towards their sons, just as their own mothers had been to them.

This perception of oneself as the recipient of a woman’s care is, for men, the most fundamental bodily knowledge that continues to be reproduced through family and society in Japan. While men may do their part in condemning sexism and misogyny, it wouldn’t occur to them to take on unpaid care work for the family. How many men would willingly give up their superior positions and take on the labour of care? This sort of attitude is so ubiquitous that it transcends class barriers.