However, in a country like India, there has been a rise in suffragists advocating and fighting for women rights. Yet, here, there is still a male dominance in the society and female chauvinism is not likely to be witnessed much. But there are people who do not clearly understand the difference between feminism and female chauvinism and conveniently assume that feminists are/likely to become female chauvinists. A movie like 'Fire' very well portrayed female chauvinism. However, that is not as common in India as yet as it is in Western countries. But here, feminism itself is seen with negative eyes. The moment you call yourself a feminist, you are looked upon as a female who has no family values and who does not respect tradition and in short, you are not a typical woman who will give up certain things for the so-called sake of family. Though younger generation definitely is getting better in treating women. Yet, female equality still has problems to face. As an example lets take an IT organization where a female gets promoted sooner than other peers. Even if the female is a geek, chances are really high that the women is going to be called arrogant, overbearing, bootlicker and has asskissed her way up. All this, just because men find it difficult to accept that a woman has just shown that she is capable of getting a promotion sooner than her peers by means of hardwork. Similarly, I read on another blog which talks about history and how hindu women were treated back in olden days according to so - called Manu Smruti and other such books or whatever. A religious leader with whom the author of that blog had interacted in person multiple times has been quoted saying that if women are allowed more reservations and more freedom, it would be the beginning of chaos and destruction and women would become uncontrollable. Again I am not surprised. I have heard more than a million times from different men that women should not be given equal rights. First off, in my opinion this just goes to show how much of freaks such men are as they are scared they may lose their self assumed powerful positions in the society. There is no denying the fact that things with respect to parity between men and women are changing. Yet certain aspects of it are yet to change. As I had talked about in another post of mine that women themselves let other women down in several scenarios.
Coming back to feminism and female chauvinism. I think female chauvinism gets triggered when there is excessive male chauvinism. After all we are all human beings. But feminists being misunderstood to be female chauvinists is completely unfair. Is it wrong if a woman prefers to be herself, prefers to have her own identity and not to change her identity after a so-called marriage, prefers to have dreams, goals, ambitions and to work towards them, prefers to be treated fairly. Feminists advocate equality of men and women not superiority of women over men. But I feel that society puts more and more pressure on feminists and they feel compelled to turn towards female chauvinism. I mean if for a woman, standing up for herself against atrocities and retaliating back is going to considered female chauvinism, which by the way it is really not, then women are better off being female chauvinists. If on a social network profile, I were to put that I am a feminist, all I would mean is that I want to be treated equally as a human being and that I don't want to beg for rights from men, I just want to take them anyways. Feminists do not aim at putting men down, but they like to live their lives as they want of course keeping in mind their responsibilities just like men. Feminists do not want to be treated inferior because of being women. I want to end this post with just this much. I can go on and on on this topic and I do have the audacity to write much more with respect to how annoyed I feel about being an Indian woman, but I would like to reserve that for another separate post.