The Woke concept has thrived from racial discrimination and intersectional feminism to the freedom of personalization and social activism. This woke culture has influenced a lot of men and women in person. Gradually, some eye-catchy marketing contents place this idea to a new dimension as many have been carrying it as a lifestyle. Due to investing in addressing social injustices, it became a revolutionary phenomenon from individual to public stages.
Background of the Woke in Gender Dichotomy
Previously the call to “stay woke”, Woke was only for Black communities. But in 2014, after the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, “stay woke” suddenly became a great call to action of Black Lives Matter activists on the streets. Six years later, “woke” has become a single word rife with leftist political ideology, based on social and racial justice. Gradually, it keeps assembling other social issues along with it. The male-female dichotomy is one of them.
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Male Woke vs. Female Woke
When it was confined to racial justice, the Woke community raised for black people. It went forward to the social rights of black women. There came the term- “Intersectionality”. It identifies gender, caste, race, class, religion, disability, physical appearance, and height. These intersecting social identities had been both empowering and oppressing.
Intersectionality largely focused on the experiences of women who were both white and middle-class, including black women, poor women, immigrant women, and other groups. Wokeness leads Intersectional feminism to separate itself from white feminism by acknowledging women’s different experiences and identities.
Contrarily, this Woke idea gives birth to the idea of changing the socialization of men. Being a man is not only being an adult male. It’s something that needs to be continually proven. The Woke community has been fighting against this traditional aspect.
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Society forces men to prove manhood rather than anything innate to the behaviours considered masculine. It results in toxic masculinity. When you get pressure to prove your identities to other people, it gets messy. It affects the attitude of many men, and it changes their behaviour drastically. However, decoupled from this force and tied to identity, they become overwhelmed, distorted and, even harmful.
Being “woke” has then become a soul to many peoples. Although “Wokeness” is a bit hard at first. But traditional manhood is even more stressed. The Woke culture has created a situation of precarious manhood. People who would like to be woke, need to keep proving their wokeness and there are social consequences for being unwoke.
Besides, performing feminism, along with similar social justice causes, has become another method of tailoring the wokeness. Like male with female behaviour, females must also have some good reasons for manly attitude and some of those reasons are still valid. However, some expressions of feminism have become exaggerated, distorted, and harmful.
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In the end
Though Woke was initialized for positive ethos, it has broken all stereotypes in race, gender, orientation and ideology. Wold lifestyle critics try to justify them as fair or unfair but the Woke concept has made a remarkable change in freedom and living.
Source: United News of Bangladesh