2020 has been a long and harrowing year to say the least. A year of the new normal. Quarantine, lockdown, fear, death, and of course, isolation. We have been forced to deal with qualms we never knew we had. Seclusion may have been a temporary respite for some in a society wrought with the drudgeries of dealing with the outside world, but it was also a much-deferred test of character and relationships. Even for those who initially basked in the relief of isolation and a much-needed family/me-time, too much of anything can and will inevitably leave a bitter taste in the mouth.
Steven Magee, a world leading expert on radiation and human health, has aptly said with regards to the basic tenet during a pandemic, “Isolation is survival.” Nevertheless, living in an already isolated society: a cornucopia of nuclear families, onerous office/housework, Dhaka’s unspeakable traffic, and not to mention the struggle to just keep from drowning in our stressful day-to-day individual predicaments, survival is hard enough. Our only respite being, meeting friends and family on the weekends, eating out, maybe a short trip out of town, or even just quietly reminiscing over a hot cup of tea and a good book at home.
But when home becomes the only constant, torn away from the rest of society; when the only relief from your troubles is no longer viable; you are forced to face your own demons in the worst of times, under the most precarious of circumstances. Do you like what you see? In most cases, I would say arguably not.
One of Marilyn Monroe’s famous misquotes succinctly says, “I’m selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.” According to The Financial Express article “Higher Incidence of Divorce” (December 23, 2020), there has been approximately “one divorce in every 37 minutes” from June to October, where “70 per cent divorce petitions were filed by women”.
It corroborates The Prothom Alo article “37 Divorces in a Day” (December 22, 2020), which ironically dovetails with another article by the latter newspaper back in 2018 “One Divorce Per Hour in Dhaka.” As alarming as it may sound, unfortunately it doesn’t come as much of a surprise. The reasons laid down by both parties are a stark reflection of what modern couples have to deal with in a modern marriage, a far cry from the marital problems our parents dealt with in the last century.
To borrow from bell hooks’ definition of United States of America’s political system as “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy”, my version of our nation’s political system would be “neocolonialist male-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” One need not be a feminist to understand the longstanding damage that patriarchy causes to the well-being of both men and women, one simply needs to be aware. I avoid using the term “education,” as institutional education itself is an appendage of the same system that has embedded its rules in our collective unconscious.
As the world’s seventh fastest growing economy, we are a developing nation with two female leaders on both sides of the aisle, not something many nations can brag about. Therefore, it is only natural that female empowerment is an obvious outcome of our political milieu. However, in creating these empowered women, we have sadly forgotten to empower our men with the adequate knowledge and tools to deal with their counterparts as equals. Bangladeshi men quite apparently are unafraid to admire and accept strong, independent, single-minded women as role-models, as long as they are not married to them.
We must acknowledge that they too have been brought up and indoctrinated in the same toxic system. The only way to break this vicious cycle is to understand that “patriarchy as a system has denied males access to full emotional well-being, which is not the same as feeling rewarded, successful, or powerful because of one’s capacity to assert control over others” (hooks).
Clearly stated in the article as grounds for divorce, women name the inability to provide for the family, extra-marital affairs, drug addiction, prone to unwarranted suspicions of infidelity, impotence, individuality clash, and the longstanding complications of dowry and domestic violence. This pandemic has seen an explosion in the former issues, as couples have been forced to live together in close quarters 24/7 during the lockdown with no wiggling room to maneuver one’s own insecurities.
They have been forced to also deal with family crises, homeschooling, work-from-home, Zooming and Netflixing all day. No breathing space more often than not brings out the worst in the best of people. Things that could be conveniently swept under the rug, or left hanging in the air until it blows over, are not really an option anymore. Women want/need the same space men do. They work same hours, regrettably often more, in most cases. The skewed home and work balance have created much qualms about their life choices and in consequence their life partners.
From the men’s list of qualms, the women’s indifference towards family life, bad temper, infertility, disobedience, defying religious norms, to name a few; all willfully defy patriarchal norms of how a woman should behave. In isolation, the empowered woman that he so keenly married is not so easy to handle when she becomes a mirror of himself. The crisis facing men is not the crisis of masculinity, it is the crisis of patriarchal male-supremacy and they too have been denied the awareness needed to embrace the changing gender-roles.
2020 has been an eye-opener. We have been forced to confront our personal qualms, perhaps even understand ourselves a little better in the process. In his unfinished manuscript, James Baldwin wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
Let us hope for a collective change, a society that is inclusive and acknowledges that the problem is constructed gender-roles forged by patriarchy. Let us bid farewell to our qualms and find strength in self-reflexibility, and hope we have the ability to accept each other as human beings, as partners and as equals.