Raj Kaur | The Brown Feminist Next Door (@pinkladoo) Instagram Analytics

South Asian culture’s treatment of widows is so difficult to get your head around. Social outcasts, subject of ridicule and derision, rejected by their families, forced to live an austere joyless life - the list of rules that have been devised to ensure they live in misery is endless. Why? Because their husbands died.

Video footage from @harshalnikale charity @sulabh.international.official
Captions: mine

Iconic scene with @shefalishahofficial. It was the first time any of us had seen the topic of rampant s3xu@l bu$e within South Asian families be addressed in any meaningful way. This was a seismic moment for South Asian culture and cinema. Exquisitely directed by the one and only @pagliji (Mira Nair)

The number of marriages where the wife is an equal, primary or sole earner has tripled in the last 50 years.

But despite this, women are still spending more time than men on chores and caregiving. The only type of marriage in which husbands devote more time to caregiving than their wives is one in which the wife is the only earner, but even in this type of marriage, wives and husbands spend roughly equal amounts of time per week on household chores.

Men spend more time on leisure than women in every single one of these scenarios. The research is from @pewresearch

As @farida.d.author would say, case in point about how feminism empowers women but patriarchy infantilises men.

Study after study from AROUND THE WORLD showing this. Statistically, baby girls are less likely to die than baby boys when both receive the same care, fewer girl toddlers die by the age of 5 than boys, boys are more likely to be born premature, and boys are more likely to suffer disabilities when they’re born at the same level of prematurity as girls. In 2016 of the 48 people to have lived past age 110, 46 were women. Women die at lower rates than men for 12 of the 15 most common causes of death. Women are better at fighting off infections and this is true across all the different types of infections (viral and bacterial). And so it goes ‘Women get sicker, men die quicker’.

If you haven’t read Inferior by @angeladsaini you need to, ASAP. I got all of this (and more) from her work.

I also sometimes wonder if society overcorrected boys’ propensity to die by cooing over them and calling them strong and amazing. Maybe the goal was to give them the confidence to make up for their poor survival outcomes but then it back fired into patriarchy 🥲. Just a musing, not V scientific. 🙃

This scene is amazing because the look on his face says it all: he knows about the dowry demand and he’s okay with it.

“The money is for us anyway so why does it matter?”

If this is true then why can’t your parents give the money to you as a couple? Why does it have to be hers?

Scene from @madeinheaventv

Dowry is still alive and well today. Maybe it’s not this direct, but the pressure to give gifts, pay for everything etc etc is all rooted in dowry and people trying to be smart about it now.