Our world has become more complicated over the last two decades with ever changing gender roles and expectations. The latter is especially true for our young men, who increasingly find themselves having to walk on eggshells around the hugely varying expectations of today’s young women.

I do believe that I’ve noticed many aspects of this because I have an inquisitive 8 year old boy who is not afraid to ask questions or say what is on his mind without any filtering or reservations. Otherwise, I may have overlooked this entirely.

Feminism has come a long way in acquiring a plane where women today are able to go much further in their careers, and have more of a partnership than a hierarchy within their homes. Yet I believe that we’ve also taken equality and pushed it too far the other way where it’s portrayed on screen as completely acceptable to objectify and abuse men and call it fun.

In the past few months, I’ve seen a few times where a female talk show host would ask to touch a physically fit male guest’s biceps or abs and utter sexual expressions. Twice on different shows and with different male guests, it went as far as the female host asking the guest to take his shirt off to show off his physical definition. Even the Queen of Talk, Oprah, has gone down this path when she ended her interview with LL Cool J by feeling up his biceps and being hugely impressed with its tightness.

Now it would be unfathomable for a male host to even think of asking to touch a certain part of a female guest’s body – let alone perform a striptease – before we all collectively scream “PIG!”

Yes, these men chose to let the women touch and feel them and accepted the requests to take their shirts off. But is it fair that they are even being asked? What if women were being asked such things on a public platform with an audience full of people cheering them on? Can you imagine the repercussions?

We see this tendency not only on talk shows and entertainment pieces, but also in movies and TV sitcoms and dramas, where women are shown to publicly slap men, throw drinks at their faces and even kick their crotches in reacting to one thing or another the man did. But what if the tables were turned? Why have we let such actions towards men become OK?

Closer to home, a bunch of us ladies can sit around and bash our husbands while putting them down and calling them names like lazy and foolish and have a big laugh. Would it be acceptable if men were to sit around calling their girlfriends or wives this way? I’m definitely not saying that it doesn’t happen, but I am asking if our reactions will be the same. Won’t we be more up in arms in reacting to the man calling his wife names than we would with a wife bashing her husband? I think beyond niceties and good manners and diplomacy, we’ve come to think and behave in a way where men are expected to take the hit silently or in the name of being laid back and sportive. Is this setting a good example for our young boys?

Today’s women can also have such varying and confusing expectations. Even with something as simple as holding a door open, we have complicated answers – damned if they do, damned if they don’t. Some of us expect a man to be a gentleman and place the woman’s needs first even in the world of aiming for equality. Some of us see a man opening the door for a woman as a needless show of superiority. The rest of us are somewhere in between.

So what is a boy to do in this day and age?

Related articles:

The Making and Breaking of Tamil Women
I am a Tamil Man… and I am a Feminist
The Voices of Feminist Tamilachis