In Defence of Young Men

We spoil boys. Until we don’t.

In recent years, a lot of men have quipped that in Mizoram, we no longer need women empowerment, because the men need more empowering than women today. This is because women are visibly making livings out there – in offices, in market places, going out of the state… even venturing gingerly into politics lately. I always say true, but women still don’t get a say in culture or religion and in Mizo society, women have always been bread-earners, that women have always been economic stock-takers. I have never convinced anyone. They haven’t convinced me either. So we stand at a stalemate.

Of late though, I have come to think on a tangent. I’m starting to think it really unfair how we treat young men. It is not really their faults that their parents and society at large didn’t make an effort to teach them. The village raises the kid but sometimes the village forgets what to teach them. It’s all hold the baby boy, kiss the baby boy, molly-coddle the baby boy. And then suddenly all humans at arms-length, no touching, no babying, be manly men. It is a very confusing world.

I mean double standards sometimes work for females in that people expect us to be emotional airheads. So it doesn’t matter if we become bimbos and white-obsessed. Or k-poppers. In fact, a lot of people are happy to berate us for it. Gleeful, in fact. And also people aren’t ever that stressed about women because we anyway don’t ‘belong’ to the culture as men do. We have very little stakes in it. As long as you pop out a Mizo kid, you’re OK. You really cannot expect us to be as invested in cultural wars as the men.

Young men on the other hand, we judge them so harshly when they don't know EVERYTHING about our culture. When all the time they were growing up, we never bothered to teach them!! We spoil them and teach them nothing when they are young. Not even basic survival skills. We teach them that even cooking is a girl’s job. Feckin’. We have grown ass men who don’t know how to make their own fucking tea, man! We shelter boys to a cuckolding stage but then one day they accumulate years and we have adult men who will not last one day in an Apocalypse.

Why wait for an Apocalypse? It feels like at some point, we expect boys to just know shit. Like that Maybelline ad, maybe he’s supposed to be born with it. But no one is born with the innate talent to say, kill a chicken, or clean a chicken gizzard, or make braids of chicken intestines. Chicken chopping skills are learned. And if no one taught them, how are young men to know? Side note: this is a skill we judge them on.

We teach them nothing, and then judge them when they know nothing. Which seems a tad unfair. Just a bit.

We call them names when they can’t butcher a pig. Or harvest a bamboo shoot. Or (gasp) dare be freshly dressed and smelling nice for office. God forbid they speak in English and not know every single phrase and words in Old Mizo. Minus points if they’re not tanned. The horror! I’m sorry but for a lot of these young men, that is what they know. And they’re not even bad things. Per se. And some of them are just fair-skinned! Besides, they would have known, had they been taught. And some of them do know.

I think we really ought to stop generalizing. Also perhaps not judge people on an Operating Standard that we had not used when we were teaching them. If we want them to be a different way, perhaps we should consider rethinking the Syllabus. Our boys aren’t so fucked up that we no longer have men. We just have a different breed of them. We will yet survive.