Is the man-dominated society fearful of women? || Acharya Prashant (2015)

Question: We come from a society which is patriarchal in nature, everything around revolves around a man and there is a general subjugation of a woman in the sense that the laws, the rules and regulations around whatever woman can do, not do; things like that. My question is that, is there a general fear of a woman in the man’s mind and society at large? Because we control things, we subjugate a thing to rule or regulation only when we feel a threat, may be inferiority, if I may say. So, that is my question – “Is there a fear of a woman?”

Acharya Prashant: So, you see you are already in hold of something important. At one end you see that it’s a patriarchal society that we are coming from. On the other end your question is – “Is the man afraid of woman?”

Firstly, we are saying that the man is the controller and then we are asking that is the man afraid of woman.

Questioner: Not just the man, but may be society at large – man and woman – because even the women are equal participant in the patriarchal system, right? It is also the woman who hold the patriarchy; so, society also.

AP: Yes, then the society, by itself, hardly means anything. When we say society, we mean the members of the society. When we say a system dominated by men, we mean “men”.

First of all, a few things about the dualistic nature of mind of existence, probably needs to be seen. First, there is no control ever – in the sense, that there can’t be a controller and a controlled. There would always be a controlled one and another controlled one, out of which one would appear to be the controller. But no one is really the controller.