Bollywood entertainer Richa Chadha today took to Twitter to dish out cure for misogyny.
Every angry, entitled man should be blessed with a daughter… It’s the best cure for c/overt misogyny.
— TheRichaChadha (@RichaChadha) January 22, 2020
In her overly simplistic tweet, she said that every angry, entitled man should be “blessed with a daughter” as it is the “best cure for c/overt misogyny”. There are multiple things wrong with this, like having an extremely simplistic view that having a ‘woman’ in a misogynist man’s life will cure him of the misogyny that has been ingrained in his mind because of decades of conditioning. However, more disturbing is the idea that she thinks women are rehabs whose job is to ‘cure’ broken men.
This is what one may call a Bollywood-inspired suggestion as if you have seen the kind of movies where there is a manic pixie dream girl whose sole purpose for those three hours is to rescue the hero from his depression or anger issues or just his wayward ways. Similarly, having a daughter(s) will automatically cure entitled men of misogyny. These entitled, misogynist men also came from women who gave them birth and clearly that hasn’t helped.
Chadha also blissfully forgets that more often than not, the women in the lives of such entitled, misogynist men, including those blessed daughters, are often on the receiving end of the abuse.
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Men don’t need to have daughters in their lives to treat women properly. It is not a cause and effect relationship. The kind of tweet and mindset Chadha is propagating quite often is peddled whenever we read news about sexual harassment. How the victim was someone’s daughter, sister. How hard is it to see her as just another human. Just ‘someone’. And not abuse her? Men often mention how they are worried about such cases as ‘father of a daughter’. No, you need to be worried about sexual harassment cases despite being father of a daughter, not because you are one.
To sum it up, Richa, daughters aren’t sacrificial beings who need to be in lives of misogynist men to get them to mend their ways. As someone who likes to identify herself as ‘feminist’, one would assume she’d at least get that part right.
