Feminism to a Teenage Boy

For as long as I can remember, my naivety has always clouded my attention to the oppression women have faced for so many years. Being in an international school, with friends of both genders at an almost one-to-one ratio, I have always struggled to understand why, in this day and age, why stereotypes still exist.

From an evolutionary standpoint, we lived with defining roles for men and women - men must protect, women must care. However, I always expected these differences to vanish after the enlightenment era, where scientific truth prevailed over baseless arguments - where societies formed to work together, than to kill each other over resources; I expected humans to be way past that. However, I believe that the blind attachment towards "culture" has always stopped us from living in a utopia, where role reversals are normalized.

The stigmatization of men being househusbands, and women being bread-winners is very palpable in the Indian culture, for example. This stems from the strong, and stubborn attachment to the definition of what it means to be a man, and what it means to be a woman. To keep this brief, I believe the culture needs an update, where both traditional thinking must also be in pursuit of truth, than to live by old scriptures that were written thousands of years ago.