Should We Just Laugh At Khasi Male Chauvinist Social Media Influencers?

They’re coming out of the woodwork now!

So I fell off the Happy Wagon. In my defense I did control myself and desperately clung on to positivity for 1 1/2 days but in the end, the fall was inevitable.

It all started off with a supposed published writer (hooray!) Going off on a rant about how anyone can sing and make money while writers suffer in silence and abject poverty because they are unappreciated. Fortunately for me, I have very little published to boast as a writer so I’m good with being a rambler. That needled me though, since I have a problem with halo forging angels of light who use people as footstools to get a better view of greener pastures they cannot reach but can cry foul about. But I controlled myself. 

Then other posts of the same published writer began floating around. This time about Feminism and how he found it funny that so called feminists can’t defend their stance when they debate with him. Then another one on the kind of woman he wants! Supposedly he can’t handle a “lazy” one but he has great respect for women …this realllllly ticked me off. But again I controlled myself. 

Then came the video of some man in a suit acting very professor like as he explained in what seemed to be the basement of his house, on a little blackboard with two stick figures, on how women need to accept that men will cheat mainly because of their age. Yes, supposedly after 45 we fall off the cliff and become useless to society and the husband in particular. He drew an arrow dropping down and stressed much on that. He looks and sounds like a clown but the funny thing is I’ve always thought clowns to be anything but funny. 

Every female friend who saw the video was disgusted with it. We all crossed our fingers that he’d eventually be lucky enough to marry a nympho maniac who could probably make him rethink his arrows on that little blackboard. But what surprised me was how every male who saw this video found it outrageously funny. Funny that he wore a suit, funny that he spoke so confidently about the female libido and funny that women were taking the clown way more seriously than they should. 

Sometimes humour is a thin veil over the real issues in society.

Sometimes humour is a thin veil over the real issues in society. The issues that are discussed in small holes in the wall and in elite circles. Tiny circles of tiny men with big heads who feel the need to cry foul over the “kynthei Khasi”, who resort to making weird videos to justify their twisted and warped perceptions of how things are supposed to be. All funny when  you aren’t one of them or aren’t part of the gender that is ridiculed. But for the rest of us, here we are, living a supposedly fulfilling life as a handful of our tiny men live lives of “quiet desperation “. 

May I remind our Khasi women, how we’re the gender that is raved about in textbooks and travel brochures as members of a  matrilineal society, powerful, respected and cherished as torch bearers for women in other parts of the country and the world. Yet if you scratch the surface you’d find that while the textbooks says that, the rough books of these tiny men have words like “kha iapsaw”, “bsa ar khiewja”, “kubi tat” etc. The more intellectual of this lot of tiny men however refrain from such terms but will write about what they think women should act, live and think like. They have YouTube channels, atleast the gentleman with a blackboard does, and he has many subscribers and people who comment on how right he is. There are also sexist commercials to show which broadband connection is fastest in getting you a “chick”.

The fact that intellectual, sane men who do not fall in this tiny circle can laugh it off shows how disturbing it is. For every female these are red flags of a society that is OK with its women being ridiculed by self acclaimed gurus. More disturbing are the number of likes these crazy videos get. Clearly from men who think on the same wavelength. What I did not expect was that while writing this I was attacked by a female supporter of this nut who felt it her duty to remind me it was his freedom of speech and life, she highly disagreed with what I wrote about him on IG. There was a rather long text about how she justified this infidelity trait but I never bothered to read it. Internalized misogyny is not something I know how to handle. 

So here we are in the middle of a pandemic and the tiny circle is slowly unleashing its members. One by one they come out of their little dark spot and feel the need to educate women on how they should live their lives. Humour is key in most cases, where tiny men showcase their wit, knowledge and disgust in posts, videos and rants. 

The Men are laughing, the tiny ones ROFL over their wit and bloated heads, the female turn coats are carrying banners and the rest of us are left to defend ourselves and our sisters with nothing but words.  I’ll end this with an anecdote of a friend who I once traveled with. She was driving by a small lane as a taxi came zooming out of nowhere, thereby creating  a jam in the middle of an already miniscule lane. The taxi was filled with passengers, both male and female who laughed whole heartedly as the driver, stuck his head out and mocked “niah kynthei te sah kut beit. Lynti barit, kali ba heh” (It’s only to be expected for a woman driver to get stuck in a narrow road. Big car, small road) to which my friend also stuck her head out of the window of her car and said “Ia phi pat mano ba kha Bah, lynti kha ruh ka rit te?” (And who gave birth to you? The birth canal too is rather narrow!)