https://www.gqindia.com/content/panjim-based-writer-and-dad-to-three-boys-vivek-menezes-explores-the-dynamics-of-modern-fatherhood
After two baby boys as beloved as can be, my wife and I assumed the next one would be a girl. Everyone expected it: our parents and siblings, the cross-cultural web of community that enfolds us in Goa, and every far-flung relative in our close-knit global families. It’s what I wanted most sincerely too, because a younger brother is my sole sibling and my mother only had three brothers, while my father is one of another five boys (with two sisters far outnumbered among them). When we were expecting again, this entire tide of heaving masculinity anticipated what we assumed was inevitable, which is when our youngest son emerged into the world. My first reaction was shock and disappointment, and then another unexpected jolt when my entire being seemingly involuntarily flooded with relief. I was hoping for a daughter, but that possibility had obviously caused some pent-up anxieties deep inside me, which disappeared like magic at the appearance of my son. A bit later, there was some guilt as well. Is the patriarchy alive in me as well? Am I part of the problem? Let’s face it, these are questions that no previous generation has been compelled to confront, but they’re unavoidable now that all of us have become painfully aware of the accumulated perils that accompany testosterone. The data is stark, copious, and undeniable: It is us guys who perpetrate almost all the violence in the world including 98 percent of murders. We man up—literally—the overwhelming majority of every lynch mob and hateful assault, wherever it happens on the planet, in an incredibly ugly track record that has justifiably turned contemporary discourse against our gender. The very language has soured as a result: paternalism, mansplaining, toxic masculinity. As a result, in many complex ways, this new paradigm of understanding poses an existential challenge to human civilization as we’ve practised it from the dawn of time, leaving men like me in an uneasy state of limbo. Patriarchy must fall, fully agreed, but how do we put that principle into action among the fathers and grandfathers we love, and the sons we’re responsible for raising into men? Make no mistake, I am not making any kind of plea for the boy child, let alone my own privileged progeny. We are all well aware that the simple fact of being male in India comes with unassailable advantages that are impossible to justify, and can never be reconciled in comparison to what girls and women have to endure. The 2023 Global Gender Gap Report from the World Economic Forum, where India is ranked an abysmal 127 out of 146 nations, painfully delineates how women in this country eat far less than their husbands, brothers, and sons, and suffer greatly reduced access to education and employment (which has actually declined steeply even as the economy has supposedly expanded). Unicef reports that “globally girls have higher survival rates at birth, are more likely to be developmentally on track, and just as likely to participate in preschool, but India is the only large country where more girls die than boys [and are] also more likely to drop out of school”. All these urgent realities demand immediate redress, and we can all accept that the first step is awareness. Ironically however, turning on that light bulb results in considerable murkiness about the road ahead for men like me, with the responsibility of fathering three boys to thrive and prosper in our admittedly unequal world. Is there still anything at all that is useful, and relevant, about the way I was raised that remains essential to pass onwards to the burgeoning new generations? And, of course, what should be jettisoned entirely? Another more difficult question: How do I empower my sons to recognize and distrust the many different systems of discrimination that perch them atop by accident of birth, and then work to dismantle their own privileges, which they know perfectly well have been ostentatiously enjoyed by every previous male in our lineage? One important thing I’ve learned about fatherhood over nearly 25 years is some biological imperatives are simply impossible to control. For just one obvious example, I definitely want to be friends with my sons, and cherish that intermittent aspect of our relationships, but they also keep on butting heads with me relentlessly, and never cease measuring themselves against their old man in an utterly exhausting pattern of behaviour that is as old as time. That is why the annals of scripture and greatest works of literature are full of tragically bad dads—from Sophocles to Shakespeare, and on to Homer Simpson. What’s more, we all root for the kids, in the deeply embedded archetype that Freud summarizes most pithily: “A hero is a man who stands up manfully against his father and in the end victoriously overcomes him.” Is there any possible relief in this pattern? Can it be different for my sons, and their own children (God willing, let there be some girls in the next generation)? I think so, because my second big lesson from over two decades of 21st-century fatherhood is that they’re on the right track already. Far beyond any parental efforts or role models, my sons have become reflexive feminists of the new school because none of the young women they’re growing up with will tolerate anything different. We are all witness to how their ebullient generation of digital natives is being led by icons like Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai, whose core values are fairness, equity, inclusion, collective empowerment, and the realistic possibility of paradigmatic change. Who wouldn’t be inspired by that? Which leads me to my ultimate conclusion, arrived at after much close observation of this Generation Z: The best path of action for guys like me is to generally get out of their way. “The patriarchy was assumed to be universal,” says Dr Alice Evans, the dynamic UK-based economist whose non-stop analysis about “10,000 years of patriarchy” is my favourite Twitter feed. She says that, “Until the 1960s, the social sciences were dominated by men, who typically ignored women. Grand claims went unchecked…. [The male position in most societies was] often attributed to biology and women’s confinement as care-givers. Susan Brownmiller emphasized worldwide male violence. Simone de Beauvoir proclaimed ‘This has always been a man’s world.’ Others like Marija Gimbutas posited ancient matriarchies and goddess worship.” But then, increasingly rapidly over the past 50 years, “as empirical studies burgeoned, assumptions of universal male dominance were debunked and discarded. Gender relations were increasingly shown to be globally heterogenous.” Evans trawls through mountains of data to reach some fascinating conclusions: “The Great Gender Divergence really occurred in the 20th century. While female seclusion persists in poor, patrilineal countries, gender revolutions have occurred in countries undergoing rapid job-creating economic growth, democratization, secular enlightenment, and feminist activism. For the first time in human history, women entered the labour market en masse, organized politically, and collectively eroded patriarchal dominance. And yet, in every single country and company boardroom, men remain at the top. Their first mover advantage has been entrenched through 21st-century organizational practices (lucrative long hours and unaffordable childcare), homosocial schmoozing (between male bosses and juniors), and near impunity for sexual harassment. Since men are better able to capitalize on (high-paying) jobs with longer hours, they leapfrog up the corporate ladder, and then favour male cronies.” The bottom line: “Global progress is contingent upon job-creating economic growth and feminist activism.” Crystal clear as those conclusions appear—more jobs and freedom for all girls and women—they only address part of the problem. I’m fully down with that agenda, and you can be assured my sons are too, but what about the even more deleterious effects of toxic masculinity on ourselves? Is it now possible to parse my own privileges to reveal, understand, and perhaps rectify the wreckage within, so the same toll is not enacted from my still relatively undamaged boys? Here is where it gets uncomfortably real in ways I would much prefer to cover up: Our generational advantages are founded on gender and caste oppression amounting to slavery. Our “revered ancestors” exercised considerable cruelty in the unshakable belief that might makes right. For my part, I was relatively lucky my mother was different, but the voices around me definitely clamoured the familiar refrain that “boys don’t cry” with its inevitable corollary to “be a man”. Looking back, the way we grew up in 1970s’ Bombay was still comparatively gentle in contrast to the brutal ways of men that my brother and I would go on to encounter at high school and college in the US. We moved to Queens, New York, the same exact milieu that produced Donald Trump, where physical and verbal violence were standard rules of the road, and the only options were “suck it up” or become stereotyped as a “wimp”. School and college in Reagan’s America, followed by graduate school in Margaret Thatcher’s UK, was an entirely Darwinian exercise of both “kill or be killed” and “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. The latter maxim turned out to be true for me, but at what cost? With how much time wasted? Is there no relief in the human condition from this pointless spear-waving? “The world is what it is,” wrote VS Naipaul in his classic novel *A Bend in the River*, “men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” No one likes to hear it put quite that plainly, but the fact is the Nobelist’s line is often cited as an essential truth. Here’s what Barack Obama told *The New York Times *about it: “I always think about that line, and I think about his novels when I’m thinking about the hardness of the world sometimes, particularly in foreign policy, and I resist and fight against sometimes that very cynical, more realistic view of the world. And yet, there are times where it feels as if that may be true.” I share those sentiments somewhat, but we do have good reason to suspect any American president’s musings about “realistic” foreign policy because toxic bellicosity is an important part of their job description. Nonetheless, there is another possibility offered in what Abraham Lincoln aptly described as “the better angels of our nature”. Contra the implicit swagger of Naipaul and Obama, we actually make and remake the world into different versions of what it is, and here the Jungian maxim applies in full: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” Ignoring fear, insecurities, and negative emotions does nothing to change our lives, but acknowledging and understanding those inner shadows—integrating both the light and dark aspects of our individual psyches—does achieve wholeness and inner peace. The way I understand fatherhood is to encourage that probing self-awareness in my sons, and demonstrate it as much as possible in my own life. This too is deeply embedded in the human condition. Many years ago, while still in high school, I was moved by Ivan Turgenev’s magnificent 1862 novel *Fathers and Sons*, with its visceral portrayal of misunderstanding across generations in a time of great change just like ours. At that time, my sympathies lay with the sons (two self-defined “nihilists” bent on changing the world) but more recent readings revealed my more permanent position with piercing clarity: “Nikolai Petrovich was overtaken with melancholy thoughts. For the first time he realized clearly the distance between him and his son: he foresaw that every day it would grow wider and wider. In vain, then, had he spent whole days [reading] the newest books; in vain had he listened to the talk of the young men; in vain had he rejoiced in putting in his word too.” He concludes, like so many fathers have before and after him, “apart from all vanity, I do think myself that they are further from the truth than we are, though at the same time I feel there is something behind them we have not got, some superiority over us”. It is a hopeful direction. The kids are alright.
