The Battle of Sexes: Madam rules Adams today

The Battle of Sexes: Madam rules Adams today
Saumitra Mohan

Every year we celebrate the International Women’s Day in our bid to promote and protect our feminine counterpart and her sundry societal interests. Our various attempts directed at this objective seem to have succeeded very well. From the day of Lady Godiva to the creed of the Bra Burners, women are really into their own now. Like it or not, women have got their feet and grown their wings now and can walk with confidence without a chaperone breathing down their throat. Responding to a query by Queen Victoria as to whether he disliked women, Cecil Rhodes said, ‘How can I possibly dislike a sex to which Your Majesty belongs?’

And really, what would men be without women? ‘Scarce, mighty scarce’, as Oscar Wilde would have said. After all, they have the privilege of mothering, cloning and asexual reproduction notwithstanding. In fact, but for the grace of women, we would not have come to this world at all. Just think of it. Had the eve not insisted on eating the evil apple, we would still be running around in the Garden of Eden eating water melon, trying to adjust our fig leaf.

The other day I had an argument with my wife as to whether I am a feminist and notwithstanding all my pleadings, she was not ready to budge till I threw a clincher. ‘Look, in these odd times when the meaning of gender and sex are changing and that of marital relationships are changing, in these times when homosexual marriages are coming in vogue, I still decided to marry a woman’, a shining example of my being a feminist. She was quiet after that. In fact, like every other man on the block, I entered the marital institution losing my bachelor’s degree and helping my wife gets her master’s in the process. Believe it or not, at the time of marriage, my wife would look so beautiful that I often felt like eating her up, and now after so many years I feel that I should have really exercised that choice. Someone rightly said a la Rene Descartes, ‘I think, ergo I am single’?

Biblically speaking, the genus of the Eves was created out of the extra rib of the poor Adam and since then she has been virtually living in his rib cage. The woman came after man and has been after him since then. The Male Chauvinistic Pig (MCP) of yesteryears is a pale shadow of its former self and is no more than a pig in the sty he creates (pun intended), left to the mercy of the mighty woman who decides as to what should we wear and what should we eat. It is very well reflected in the egotistic assertions of a good friend of mine who insisted that he is the Master of the house, painstakingly explaining as to how all the crucial decisions relating to national and international issues like whether India should make a nuclear bomb or whether Sourav Ganguly should be in the Indian team or not are taken by him with his wife left to take all the small decisions as to what should be cooked in the house, what should he be wearing for the day or what should he speak at what time. The poor man did not realize that his decisions did not matter to any one but the wife’s decisions greatly mattered to him and his life. The prisoner of misplaced ego and disillusioned self. Even today my friend and his wife go along very well. He goes his way and his wife goes hers.

Believe it or not, it is the women’s world today. The patriarchal or the male-dominated society of the mythical past (I doubt as to whether we ever held sway over women) has slowly and discreetly given way to the matriarchal one where women are the real masters. Today, you have reservations for women at several places and in several fields including in a queue. There was an international year for woman, there is a day specially earmarked for the womankind internationally and what not. It is the ladies’ first everywhere and believe me in many cases, there is no second. It is said that even when the giant ship Titanic was sinking, the moralistic Captain had magnanimously declaimed, ‘Women and children first’, the upshot being that Rose survived and Jack died. And that is why people like Gilda Radner have started thinking that ‘we would much rather be a woman than a man. Women can cry, they can wear cute clothes, and they are the first to be rescued off the sinking ships.’

It is said that behind every successful man, there is a woman. But it often seems that behind every successful man, there is a surprised woman; surprised to see him succeed despite her splurging spree and withholding tendencies. Knowing very well that women are going wrong, we go right after them. After all, fairer of the two sexes, they are our better halves. We the men are spell-bound by the womanly charms that pervade our life, we keep chasing the woman and are trapped in her machinations, to the extent of chivalrously ruining ourselves. We work like dogs throughout the month to come back on the last day to bow to the EPITOMY of love and compassion and meekly hand over all the earnings to her and then look forward to her for the rest of the month to tend to us.

Women, indeed, have an unfair advantage over men. If they can't get what they want by being smart, they can get it by being dumb. The female sex has no greater fan than their men and they have the bills to prove this. One really feels that if women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning. And you cannot persuade a woman against her will; she would never take your advice and why should she. After all, advice is not something she can wear in the evening. Jeffrey Bernard was so mortally frightened of women’s penchant for ruining men that he demanded that “Women should have labels on their foreheads saying, 'Government Health Warning: Women can seriously damage your brains, genitals, current account, confidence, razor blades, and good standing among your friends’.”

It has always been well nigh difficult to get a woman who can tell her real age and if she does, then she is either too young to have anything to lose or too old to have anything to gain. In fact one should not trust a woman who tells her real age because if she tells that then she can tell anything and everything, very unworthy of keeping secrets. This penchant of women to hide their age has also led to their passion for numbers and thereby for mathematics. They divide their age in half, double the price of their clothes, and always add at least five years to the age of their best friend.


As a kid, I always wondered as to why were festival not suitably designed for men where we would also make money as there are some for the women. On the eve of Rakhi and Bhai Dooj, it is the sorority all over India, who fleece the fraternity along with extraction of a promise to protect her throughout her life. So, the women have the hubby, the brother, and the society and now the government to protect her but the mankind is left totally unprotected. They are the real endangered species today. There are, today, special laws and regimes to protect the fairer sex and the better halves, but nothing for us, who by implication are the unfair sex and the worst halves.

Man has always yielded to feminine temptation. After all, yielding to temptation is still the best way of getting rid of it. Notwithstanding the strong will that the man has, women always have their way. Howsoever dumb we may think a woman is, the fact remains that had she not been dumb, she would not have married us at all. And tell me one thing. We see so many smart guys with dumb women, but how many times do we see a smart woman with a dumb guy. Believe it or not, a woman’s mind is cleaner than a man’s and that is because she changes it more often. As per a survey, 85 per cent women think their ass is too showy, 10 per cent think their ass is too insignificant and remaining five per cent do not care as they love him and are married to him anyway.
*Saumitra Mohan is an IAS officer presently working as an Additional District Magistrate, Hooghly in West Bengal.
Address for correspondence:
Saumitra Mohan, IAS, Additional District Magistrate, Office of the District Magistrate, Hooghly-712101.
E-mail: saumitra_mohan@hotmail.com.
Phone: 033-26806456/26802043(O)/26802041(R).
Fax: 033-26802043.
Mobile: 91-9831388803/9434242283.