Indian Men are both empowered and infantilized by Patriarchy
This is not a generalisation but an observation. Putting it out there so that people don’t come at me saying I’m generalising Indian men.
this post isn’t about good men vs. bad men. This isn’t about individuals at all. It’s about a system that conditions men into entitlement while denying them the emotional competence to handle the very power they’re promised.
Now that I have cleared that, I gotta say , Indian patriarchy doesn’t actually respect men. It just overvalues them while simultaneously treating them like helpless, incompetent children. And this is exactly why women, despite being the ones oppressed, are still forced to be more competent, independent, and emotionally resilient, because men, ironically, aren’t raised to handle the very power they inherit. I see this playing out in relationships when men get into relationship with an “independent woman” and absolutely not knowing how to handle the idea of a woman and the reality.
Just look at how Indian families work. Women are taught survival from day one, how to navigate male dominated spaces safely, how to anticipate male fragility, how to manage the egos of fathers, brothers, husbands. And men are mothered into adulthood, their mistakes excused, their emotional immaturity tolerated. The result? A generation of men who, when faced with independent women, don’t rise to the challenge, they crumble, lash out, or retreat into victimhood.
The response isn’t growth, it’s grief. And this provides the space for the podcasts, the incels, the obsession with “modern women ruining everything.”
It works by keeping them emotionally stunted and wholly unprepared for the very world it promised them they’d rule. And again, women will have to pick up the slack, whether through unpaid emotional labor in marriages or simply by learning to live without expecting basic emotional competence from the men around them.
I see my few of my female friends in relationships just evolving( read adapting) around emotional competence, boundaries because they have to. And it’s honestly heartbreaking.
Men, on the other hand, were never forced to grow. And now that they need to? Many just won’t.
Edit : Looks like my post has reached the basement where incels gather. Being bombarded with dms lmaooo