The illiberal liberals

Feminism is an offshoot of liberal values. Sadly, in the new climate of hyper wokeness, it is beginning to seem as rigid and intolerant as the illiberal social instincts it rose up against

Liberalism is all very well, but what if I don’t want a boyfriend, or I don’t want to live in? What if I want an arranged marriage? My friends mock me if I say this. There’s a lot of peer pressure against these choices.”

This is what a bright, young college girl said during the question and answer session that followed a panel discussion at a literature festival in Bengaluru recently. The discussion had focussed on the ways in which urban Indian society had become much more permissive about individual relationship choices. The girl in the audience, though, drew our attention to a parallel trend — that liberalism can be counterweighted by its own orthodoxy and that progressive attitudes can be as bullying and intolerant as regressive behaviour.

And she was right. An unfortunate outcome of the spread of liberal values today is that its practitioners are often so dogmatic in their beliefs and so insistent that others either fall in line or be damned as heretics to the cause, that they are eroding the very liberalism that they claim to espouse.

Last week publishing house Hachette cancelled its plan to publish Oscar-winning film director Woody Allen’s memoirs in April 2020 after its New York editorial staff walked out in protest. In 1992, Dylan Farrow, adopted daughter of Allen and his then partner, actress Mia Farrow, had accused him of sexually molesting her. Dylan was 7 years old at the time. The matter was investigated twice, but Allen was not charged.

When Hachette announced the decision to publish Allen’s memoirs, both Dylan and her brother Ronan Farrow — The New Yorker reporter famous for his investigative stories on the #MeToo allegations against Harvey Weinstein — took to social media to express their “disappointment”. Hachette was widely excoriated for giving Allen a platform, which led it to buckle and kill the book deal.

This is problematic on several counts. First, if one feels that Allen escaped being charged because powerful men enjoyed an enabling environment in the 1990s, isn’t it better to reopen the investigation against him rather than to slap him with a presumptive punishment? Second, doesn’t muzzling a person and stifling their voice go against the very tenets of the #MeToo movement? The last time I checked, #MeToo was about giving people a voice — not suppressing it. And third, do we get to keep our liberal spurs if we refuse to hear those who hold views other than our own, and turn on them with the same lynch mob mentality displayed by rabid wingnuts?

A few days ago, Shashi Tharoor’s tweet asking if women should be granted menstruation leave to make workplaces more gender sensitive, threw up a similar spectacle. There were those who passionately supported his suggestion, but many women also pointed out that the move would be counter-productive and make employers leery of hiring them. As journalist Barkha Dutt tweeted pithily, “menstrual leave ghettoises women, becomes one more excuse to close certain professional doors on women and treats the monthly period as a grand event instead of routine biology.”

But what we saw on Twitter that day was not merely an exchange of views on the subject. The pro-period leave brigade lashed out at those who opposed the idea, essentially labelling them anti-feminists. If men joined the debate and said that it would lead to a hiring bias against women, they were treated to chants of “no uterus, no opinion”. Should there be no maternity leave either, went the outraged cry.

The answer to that is, of course, there must be — and India’s 26-week maternity leave provision is both excellent and right. But in a scenario where the cost of this leave is borne entirely by the employer (and not shared between the employer, the government, social security and insurers, as it is in some countries), adding to the cost by institutionalising monthly period leave scarcely makes sense. We need to decide if we want equal opportunity or not. 
 

And feminism needs to debate these points instead of shouting down those who raise them.

Feminism happens to be an offshoot of liberal values. Sadly, in the new climate of hyper wokeness, it is beginning to seem as rigid and intolerant as the illiberal social instincts it rose up to fight against.

Shuma Raha is a journalist and author based in Delhi