My twin boys turned one in April. They have since learned to walk, exclusively in opposite directions so every room now requires army-level defence. I have babyproofed the house twice, and they still find dangers that I am certain did not exist before they arrived. “Welcome,” a friend messaged me recently, “to the life of a boy mum.”
Somewhere between the hazards and the hullabaloo, a reel keeps finding me on Instagram. It says angry, independent women were given boys to raise, so they could bring up the kind of men they never got the chance to meet. It’s a gag, mostly. But it touches something real: my generation of mothers is raising sons with an agenda. We want them kinder and softer, yet courageous enough to stand up for themselves and others. But none of us are entirely sure how, because nobody has done it this way before.
So I sat down with two women who would know. One spends her days sifting through the country’s harshest news. The other spent her tennis career at the receiving end of some of the harshest comments about how she looked, what she wore and whom she married. Their paths first intersected almost a decade ago. In 2017, when Faye D’Souza suggested that men and women should enjoy equal freedom during a debate, one of the panellists, a cleric, told her, “Underwear pehenke [aap debate mein] aaiye. Mard aur aurat barabar ho jayege, na.” Unruffled, the award-winning journalist clapped back, “…All you men think that if you rattle Sania Mirza when she’s doing her job, if you rattle all women when they’re doing their jobs, they will run back into their kitchens, cover themselves up and leave the world again for you to conquer. I have news for you, we are not going anywhere.” D’Souza interviewed the tennis player not long after, about motherhood among other things, before going on to have a child of her own in 2022. Reconvening for a conversation with Vogue India, the journalist and Grand Slam champion discuss changing the way we raise boys, so they grow into men who challenge the way we treat women.
Vogue India: Faye, your son is four; Sania, yours is eight. What were your first couple of years of bringing them up like?
Faye D’Souza: I feel like I was given a boy so that I’d learn to empathise with the other team as well, because I was batting so hard for ours. When Neil was less than a year old, I bought him a lot of gender-neutral toys and exposed him to everything, but in the world’s oldest cliché, he gravitated towards dinosaurs and trucks. I suppose it goes the other way too. On holiday, I went snorkelling and diving while my husband, who doesn’t enjoy any of it, stayed on the boat with my son. When we got back, Neil told everybody in his class that girls dive and boys stay on the boat because that’s the safe place for boys to be. He also says girls go to the gym to become strong because he sees me going to the gym. He’s processing all of this into a gender construct right now, and our job is to sieve out anything that would get filed the wrong way.
