By Sharanya Gopinathan

Saheli, a journalist with IDG Media, noticed a Reddit thread where men were being asked about the things they do that are considered “unmanly” by society. She decided to put the question out to Indian men.

Good men of Twitter, what is that one thing YOU do, which is not considered manly by our social standards? RT for karma, and more happiness.

— Saheli (@wistyloony) March 20, 2017

The responses were pretty interesting:

@wistyloony I love getting pedicures. Just a great stress buster and maintains hygiene. Plus I’ve got some weird reactions to moisturizers.

— Bradley D’souza (@BradleyDsouza) March 20, 2017

@wistyloony I moisturize my face and hands after a wash. When I did mention it to some acquaintances, got a reaction that ‘oh make up?’ 😐

— Bradley D’souza (@BradleyDsouza) March 20, 2017

.@wistyloony I often cry while watching films. Each time during that brother milap scene of K3G.

— Nishant Kaushik (@nofreecopies) March 20, 2017

@wistyloony Lighting scented candles, sitting under fairy lights and colouring.

— Sahil Shah (@SahilBulla) March 20, 2017

@wistyloony changing diapers, cooking, dropping kid off to school and picking him up, feeding him, crying …

— Irshad Daftari (@daftari) March 20, 2017

@wistyloony Babysitting.

— Ravi Kapoor 🇮🇳 (@RaviKapoor) March 20, 2017

@wistyloony been ridiculed because I can’t get into physical altercations to protect anyone, because I’m not muscular.

— Aatreya (@AatreyaBhat) March 20, 2017

@wistyloony
1. Cooking (LOVE IT)
2. Cleaning my place
3. Buying groceries
4. Comparison shopping (been ridiculed for this one the most)

— Ankur Singh (@TheSinghAnkur) March 20, 2017

@wistyloony it’s often called “shopping like women”. I try a lot of things before I buy something. I take an hour to buy a pair of shoes.

— Ankur Singh (@TheSinghAnkur) March 20, 2017

I found this thread (which had many more responses than just the ones we’ve mentioned here), super fascinating for so many reasons.

My first question was obviously how is colouring gendered, but whatever, I guess that’s not too important. The next thing I noticed was how many men actually enjoy taking care of their bodies and appearance, and how many feel the need to cry. From tweets like these, it’s clear that society thinks crying, which can have several positive effects on your emotional well-being, is something men aren’t supposed to do, and I wonder what impact this has on their mental and emotional health.

If you look at Ankur Singh’s tweet, he says that he’s been ridiculed the most for “comparison shopping”, and he follows that up with the explanation that it’s “often called shopping like women”. Which means that he’s made fun of explicitly for doing something in they way people believe women do. There’s nothing actually wrong or bad about it, he’s merely ridiculed for it because people think women do it, as though that makes it inherently worthy of ridicule. If you notice, a lot of words and phrases, like  “pussy” and “cunt”, or “run like a girl” or “fight like a girl” are used as insults to men, but they’re considered insulting only because they denote something female, nothing else. It’s symptomatic of a fear and hatred towards the female for no other reason than that it is female.

I also noticed tweets talking about parenting. While Ravi Kapoor wrote that people find it unmanly that he babysits other people’s kids, ome users wrote saying in that people consider it unmanly for men to look after their own kids! It says something pretty interesting that men feel that society thinks parenting their own children is not something men do.

As someone pointed out in the thread, reading the thread is super refreshing, and it’s nice to hear men talk about things like this with a rare kind of honesty that reveals how these judgements and stereotypes affect them. It also shows us that toxic masculinity and patriarchy affect everyone in adverse ways, not only women.

This article originally made a reference to Ravi Kapoor looking after his own children and referring to it as baby-sitting. This has been corrected to reflect that he babysits children in his family and circle of friends, not his own.