In response to my last blog-post (“Indian Matchmaking: an entertaining reminder why I’m so anti-Auntie”), a few people pointed out quite rightly that Aunties are the product of a system. Often times, they themselves were treated badly or given little to no choices over their own lives, like being forced into marriages or forced to give up their careers. Often times, they still don’t have a lot going on in their own lives (hobbies, career, interests etc.), not because they are intrinsically dull or boring, but because they had to sacrifice so much of themselves just to survive in (certain large parts of) Indian society. So they spend their idle time meddling in other people’s business.
One friend asked “Is the Auntie really the villain here?”
I totally agree that a key feature of the Auntie phenomenon is it is a system that has been propagating down for centuries, not a random choice a bunch of individuals make.
But I also hold the view that being a victim does not preclude you from being a villain. Life is complex like that. We can each be good and bad, victims and villains.
The auntie is a villain
One irrefutable characteristic of systems is that they are made by people and the scene is often set by nature or the realities of the physical universe. Women have children, men are physically stronger (on average), and this sets the scene for some biases to start forming. But then on top of the natural biases, a sophisticated and extensive system of oppression is architected called “Patriarchy”*.
Patriarchy is enforced and handed down generation by generation by both men and women. If sufficient numbers of women protested and were like “WTF dude”, it would break. Why? Because ~50% of the population are women, and we are wives, girlfriends, sisters, daughters, businesswomen, teachers, bosses, leaders, voters and perhaps we are most influential on societal norms when we are mothers, the first teacher for nearly every human.
If mothers everywhere were like “You know what. I didn’t enjoy being treated differently from my brother growing up, I’m not going to do that to my daughter”, you’d see a massive change in the types of men of the next generation. I’ve seen this firsthand in several men I admire who are so wonderfully feminist, and I know their mothers had a large part to play in it.
So every Auntie, and every person, no matter how rough their life was, still had a choice. As one of my favorite poems by John Oxenham goes:
To every man** there openeth a way, and ways, and a way,
And the high soul climbs the high way,
And the low soul gropes the low.
And in between, on the misty flats, the rest drift to and fro.
But to every man there openeth a high way and a low;
And every man decideth the way his soul shall go.
So if you’re a woman who went through very rough times, and decide to pass it on, you picked the low way, or perhaps you made small improvements which I’d classify as drifting to and fro. On the whole, you uphold the system. You become a critical enabler and enforcer of it. You ensure the next generation’s experience mirrors your own or inches forward at a snail-pace (as has happened with large tracts of Indian society: change is happening, just so slow that it’s still going to ruin millions of people’s lives well into the 2070s).
Aunties, you have duality in your nature, and I have duality in my response to you too. You are both a victim and a villain. I have empathy for your victimhood and contempt for your villainhood.
*This blog-post would be much too long if I went into the multiple reasons and theories and speculations on why Patriarchy came to be the norm in much of the world. Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s own is mind-blowingly beautiful literature (for the patient reader) and has some of my favorite explanations on this patriarchy nonsense we’re all in.
**or woman, obviously
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