Why is Nobody talking about how hard it is to be a Man?

Being a woman in 2018 is hard. But why isn’t anyone speaking out on the challenges of being a man?

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On the morning of September 27th 2018, the mighty United States of America was brought to its knees, paralyzed. All its citizens were glued to their screens. They were watching the same program — be it on their phones, on the televisions at hospitals, or even the plastic seatback screens of airplanes forty thousand feet in their air.

It was a strangely dystopian scenario playing across the country, much like something you’d imagine from the film Wall-E: a modern society in the developed world, a world where data and advanced technology contorts and alters primal human behaviour. It seemed like a world that belonged to the future, decades away from now.

Yet, everyone was watching a spectacle that has been unfolding ever since the first humans appeared on the face of Earth.

They were watching a boy spar with a woman.

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The battle between the sexes is not new. Beginning in the Bible, it raged throughout the Roman Empire, continued into the Victorian era, and seeped into modern times. Up till 2018, the flames of the contention are still flickering, with the current political climate only adding oil to the blaze.

For what seems like an eternity, masculinity reigns supreme. Whether you admit it or not, this ideology has permeated the membrane of all our lives. It sure did leave a mark on mine.

Childhood. It was an envelope of time packaged neatly into one of the many recesses of my mind, a vague memory of a simple life blissfully shielded from the vicissitudes of reality I face today. It was a time spent under the pinkish-orange hazy glow of the setting evening sun, playing a game of tag at the small community playground with the other children from the neighbourhood. Although the atmosphere was lukewarm and humid, our peals of unapologetic, carefree laughter shrouded us in a cool cape of comfort. Life was simple. Life was good.

I’d run along with the other kids, girls and boys from the surrounding houses lining our neighbourhood in a far-flung corner of Singapore. We were a small group, no more than ten girls and guys. Though our huddle was small, I’d grow to notice that the girls, for some reason, always ran slower than the guys. The girls got tagged more often than the guys. They fell down more often. Perhaps they were less used to running. Perhaps they were just weaker than the more able-bodied boys. One of those girls was my sister, and over time as we played more games of catching and tag, this unexplainable notion crept up to me like an unwelcome visitor: I was better than her.

Naturally, this belief soon extended itself beyond the padded pavements surrounding the playground. What had been planted in the playground soon blossomed to the bathroom at home (“Let me use the bathroom first!”), and even the family car (“I’ll take the front seat!”) during family trips. In the first few months, my sister would retort and complain at first, but soon she resigned herself in quiet submission to the backseat. I thought I had won — I had got my way. Thereafter, I began flaunting my title of the elder brother as a ticket of inherent privilege. I had won the gender lottery, and I was fated to continue winning.

I am a boy, so I am better than you.

Three years later, those halcyon days at the playground gradually came to an end.

We were growing older, and the racing right next to our friends at the playground in a carefree game of tag soon got replaced by a frantic paper chase up the academic ladder in school.

The excited “5–4–3–2–1s” we counted down aloud – palms shielding our eyes as the pitter-patter of footsteps scampering away from us fills our ears – soon became a silent whirring of jumbled arithmetics working themselves out in our minds as we sat in math class. The desperate urge to find our friends squatting behind bushes or benches diminished into a numbing, annoying ache to unearth the solutions of the seemingly unsolvable problems — a mishmash of scattered letters and numbers — lying before us on our worksheets.

Throughout my entire teenage life, math was my greatest weakness, my most unfamiliar subject. It was that new kid, that awkward outsider who came to the playground on some days, making us regular patrons all uneasy and uninterested in making friends with him. It was not knowing what to do, not knowing how to think, and not knowing how to view his presence, that made us uncomfortable. It made us weak.

Somewhere in that weakness, my sister found strength.

She was the only girl who stepped up to get to know the new boy at the playground.

And she was the only one who volunteered to teach me math.

Through her patient voice weaving into my memory the most fundamental of math concepts, and her kind heart burning with the willingness to teach me in the first place, she opened my eyes to the beauty of the mathematical universe. I became enthralled by the infinite string of numbers of pi, and for the first time, I began to see the fluent intricacy of the layers upon layers of equations arranged one after another, coming together to form a beautiful intellectual orchestra.

My eyes, however, weren’t only open to the marvels of mathematics. My sister had also opened my eyes to the extent of her strength.

When I was a boy, I thought strength was external. Strength appeared as the fastest runner in the playground. Strength presented itself as the most number of kids tagged in the shortest time. Strength was the one who could lift the heaviest rocks and win the most arm-wrestling challenges against other kids.

As I grew older, however, it began to dawn on me that her silence during all our arguments was her loudest show of strength. I began to realise how my sister’s strength blossomed from within, like a gentle flame igniting a lamp that provides light which illuminates all the world around her. My sister wasn’t the fastest runner, but she was the quickest to observe. She wasn’t the kid who fell down the least during our games in the playground, but she was always the one who stood up the most for whatever she believed in. My sister didn’t get tagged very often by the other children, but I realised she’s got it.

You see, when I was a boy, I had the assumption that being male made me superior to her. I ran faster than her and I could win more arm-wrestling challenges than her. All of this stemmed from the simple fact that I was male and had more developed limbs and muscles. Since she couldn’t be as good as me, she was weaker than me, right?

Wrong. As I grew older, I learnt to acknowledge that my sister had her own special set of strengths. When I was a boy, I had thought that acknowledging her strengths would make me feel inferior. As a man today, however, I realise that recognising her strengths made me grow to understand her.

While I thought strength was the deafening claps of thunder amidst the most violent of storms, my sister taught me that strength was the reed that could bend the most in the harshest of winds.

Her strength was the formidable force that moulded me into the man I am today.

It then dawned on me that in order to truly recognise the strength of a woman, us males need to let go of what we think she should be, and embrace who she actually is.

Today in 2018, it’s hard to be a woman. In a world that is swimming in the very pool of distractions which it created, one that’s choking on its own noise, a woman’s silence is immediately viewed as weakness. A woman showing any semblance of authentic emotions is deemed weak and pathetic. A woman standing up alone for what she believes in is a forlorn figure of hope foregone.

As a result, most women resort to what my sister used to do back when we still kids on a road trip: Take a backseat and remain silent. They choose not to open their mouths. Instead, they observe. They feel. They feel very deeply, in fact. A myriad of emotions, emotions that are raw and authentic and passionate, wrap around their heart like a noose suffocating and squishing the tiny, weak pink organ. They want to scream in agony; they want to thrust their fists in their air and resent the unfairness of it all.

Yet, they choose to remain silent. Because they know they won’t be heard.

In 2018, it’s hard to be a woman.

As a result, us men think we reign supreme.

We’re the boisterous ones, the personalities in the party. We’re the ones with the voice, the ones with the charismatic characteristics that contribute to the concoction swirling in the cauldron of this world today.

We think we rule the Earth.

Yet, most of us males are in fact still living like I once did under the pinkish hue of the setting evening sun. We’re still boys frolicking within our own playgrounds, largely-padded areas filled with where we create and play by our own rules.

It’s time we got off the slippery slide and learnt to pick ourselves up after we fall, instead of putting on a smug grin knowing that we’d never fallen down at all.

Indeed, being a woman today is hard, but being a gentleman — one with good character, one who embraces failure, one who accepts responsibility for himself — is harder than ever before.

So why is everyone lamenting about the struggles of being a female, but nobody whines about the challenges of raising good gentlemen?