Dear Men Quotes

“Every relationship is a learning experience. With every dalliance, fling, lustful adventure and heartfelt love, we learn something about others, about relationships, and most importantly, about our own selves.”
― Prachi Gangwani, Dear Men: Masculinity and Modern Love in #MeToo India

“I wonder if this fantasy of having a ‘harem’ is a disastrous byproduct of men’s conditioning to acquire things, and social structures that treat women as ‘things’. Men are collectors. They buy gadgets they don’t really need, adorn watches that cost more than the monthly income of the majority of the country’s population, and treat their cars as status symbols. As we have seen, men across all ages tend to treat women (girlfriends, wives, escorts or a harem) as trophies that elevate their status in some way. To many men, women continue to be possessions, even if these men may not be controlling or possessive or otherwise abusive.”
― Prachi Gangwani, Dear Men: Masculinity and Modern Love in #MeToo India

“Thanks to smart phones and the Internet, the way we meet someone new, fall in love, have fights and have sex has changed remarkably. We can be in bed in crushed pyjamas and a bag of Doritos in one hand, and with the other, swipe right on the next person we end up with. Flirting has taken the form of sending memes and lifted the burden of being witty and romantic. And seduction…well, seduction has been reduced to dirty text messages and reluctant nudes. It’s all high-speed and low effort.”
― Prachi Gangwani, Dear Men: Masculinity and Modern Love in #MeToo India

“Sex is about pleasure, not power, compliance or domination.”
― Prachi Gangwani, Dear Men: Masculinity and Modern Love in #MeToo India

“A woman’s honour is usually tied with curbing her sexuality; similarly a man’s masculinity is about flaunting it. While a woman must protect her honour by keeping her legs closed, quite literally, a man must demonstrate his manhood by putting on a show of his sexuality. How can the one physical act that bridges the gap between men and women be so disparate in its meaning for the two sexes?”
― Prachi Gangwani, Dear Men: Masculinity and Modern Love in #MeToo India

“Sexism, and its expressions, are multi-layered and complex. Often, it comes in gender-neutral language, decorated with gendered accents. It comes in the form of pink walls for young girls and blue for young boys. Barbie dolls and G.I. Joe’s. Skirts and dresses and Bermuda shorts. Fairy tales that shamelessly teach that women need a Prince Charming and superheroes who are almost always men. That boys don’t cry. It comes in the form of ‘protective’ mothers and fathers who don’t allow their daughters to date, while the son has many girlfriends. Or in the idea that while a woman may be doing well for herself, she must marry a man who does better than her or marry at all! And the over-glorification of motherhood that carefully cloaks the sacrifices a woman makes to raise a child and systematically alienates the man — the father. There is sexism everywhere if you stop and pay attention.”
― Prachi Gangwani, Dear Men: Masculinity and Modern Love in #MeToo India

“Very few men in India see women as friends, and because of this, most men in India have what is called the ‘nice guy syndrome’. Again, the roots of it are strengthened in childhood experiences when schools segregate boys and girls and parents tell young boys they can’t play with girls or vice versa. When we pitch young children against each other because of sex and gender it carries on well into their adulthood.”
― Prachi Gangwani, Dear Men: Masculinity and Modern Love in #MeToo India

“Children don’t always understand such subtleties. They watch. They observe. They imbibe. They mimic. The byproduct of this is that many young boys have grown up mistakenly believing that they are entitled to a woman’s care and attention just like their fathers were.”
― Prachi Gangwani, Dear Men: Masculinity and Modern Love in #MeToo India

“Being financially independent has meant that women can walk out of bad marriages even when they don’t have family support, fight the pressure to get married by being able to afford to look after themselves, and finally, demand equal treatment in relationships.”
― Prachi Gangwani, Dear Men: Masculinity and Modern Love in #MeToo India

“From playgrounds, public transportation to universities and finally, marriage, none of these places is a ‘middle ground’ owned with equal authority by men and women. Nowhere is this disparity in our social structure as clear as it is in the institution of marriage. The premise of a marriage in our country is that the man and his family ‘gain’ a new member while the woman’s family loses one. Wedding rituals like kanyadaan further solidify this by ‘giving away’ the bride. The woman becomes a commodity that the man ‘gets’. No matter what we say, rituals aren’t inconsequential. They build an ethos which leaves an imprint on our minds.”
― Prachi Gangwani, Dear Men: Masculinity and Modern Love in #MeToo India

“In many cases, when a man is indeed angry most people walk on eggshells around them so as to not provoke him. One doesn’t want to be the reason why a short-tempered man has lost his cool. Parents, partners, siblings and even friends, tend to deal with this by avoiding provocation, and ignoring anger bursts, waiting for them to pass. Rarely do we pause and wonder if it’s a problem that requires psychological intervention. This is a sign of how we have normalized and accepted that men are angry, when in fact, the anger is a result of years of conditioning young boys to not show any emotion.”
― Prachi Gangwani, Dear Men: Masculinity and Modern Love in #MeToo India

“A man crying is not an anomaly because men willingly and happily suppress emotions, but because they are expected to do so by society's norms. It is a part of ‘being a man’. Boys don’t cry, etc. Should a man decide to break down this wall and allow himself to be emotionally expressive — whether that’s in love, sadness, exhaustion, fear — he is considered to be something extraordinary.”
― Prachi Gangwani, Dear Men: Masculinity and Modern Love in #MeToo India

“Love is a curious mix of adventure, attraction, desire, experimentation, rule-breaking, rule-making, flirtation...and fear. While deception may be as old as love itself, modern love comes with modern deception and modern fears.”
― Prachi Gangwani, Dear Men: Masculinity and Modern Love in #MeToo India

“Talking to women and men separately about the same issue(s) made me realize something vital about modern love — we all want the same thing — to have a harmonious relationship, but our maps of getting there are starkly different. Women are discarding the old maps, and rewriting a new trajectory for their lives, while men have only begun to notice the roadblocks. We haven’t bridged the gap when it comes to heterosexual love. The only way we can fix this is if we start talking to each other, instead of at each other.”
― Prachi Gangwani, Dear Men: Masculinity and Modern Love in #MeToo India