A misogynist identified!

“It takes a thief to catch a thief!” goes the saying. Therefore, as I had caught a misogynist what does that make me? I will be thankful if you do not answer that!

I have elsewhere advocated a random choice of the third person singular, particularly among “he”, “she”, “him”, “his”, “her”, rather than the unwieldy, the no-brainer, the politically correct yet stylishly bankrupt “he or she”, “he/she” and such offshoots. I, harbored, mercifully not for too long, a soft corner for “(s)he”, exclusively in the nominative. But, as that style could not be easily extended to the accusative case (how do you derive “him” from “her”, I haven’t the faintest), I threw out the baby with the bathwater!

That is when I said, to myself and whoever who cared to listen, that we should try to pepper both the sexes in our writings and conversation randomly. I did not know Professor Kaushik Basu listened to me and had used that logic in his book, Beyond the Invisible Hand. I refer to a paragraph appearing in page 86 of my copy (Penguin, ISBN 9780143415756).

“Consider the following scenario. There is a cobbler, with poor marketing skills, who produces shoes (efficiently) and then markets them to customers (in his [my emphasis] own inefficient way). Then there is the natural marketer who spends half her [my emphasis] day clumsily making poor quality shoes and sells them rapidly to gullible customers.”

Parse the above paragraph seriously. The efficient producer-cum-terrible marketer is a man. The man can do his job but cannot sell even if his life depended on it. On the other hand, the clumsy producer-cum-terrific marketer is a woman. She understands that “gullible customers” are there to be taken for a ride. Of course, one does not need to read between the lines to catch the implicit sexism too: “She used her feminine wiles to lure customers!”

If I am in a generous mood, I would dismiss this as unfortunate. I may have argued that the good professor followed my advice and the choice of sex of the two protagonists randomly fell on the good male and the bad female (society standards of “good” and “bad” and not mine).

But, I am not in a generous mood. I am sure he matched the sex with the characters of the two actors in the scenario as his experience must have shown to be true and as reason dictated. I cannot but conclude, and happily at that, Prof. Basu is a misogynist. I love him for that!

There may be a clamor for him to apologize for this stereotyping (implicit or otherwise). As he had already listened to my advice once, I am emboldened to offer him the second one: Don’t ever apologize! You will be on the slippery slope of Political Correctness in a trice with no exit ramps, and where you would reach is anybody’s guess! Stick to your guns! You are a misogynist and so am I. Political correctness is for sissies!

Political correctness, as with anything that matters in social interactions, has to have a backstop so that the laudable sentiment of gender equality does not regress into vacuity. If there is no such safety arrangement, you might find yourself arguing for hangperson in place of hangman, even if you are against death penalty, missing the forest for the trees!

Raghuram Ekambaram