It’s as simple as a friend casually calling you a ‘Feminazi.’ Because wanting equal rights for men and women is basically the same as killing millions of Jews, right?

Everyday sexism is everywhere. It’s in the waiter who places the check in front of my male friend instead of me. It’s in being told that I ‘throw like a girl.’ It’s in all the marriage proposals my sister has turned down because the boy’s family does not want a ‘working woman.’ It’s in my grandmother not letting my father help around the house. It’s very simple and very sad, and it manifests itself in the unlikeliest of situations.

Take for example, the recent blot on the face of liberal India- Mumbai police rounding up unmarried couples from hotels. Not only is this an instance of moral policing but also of the everyday sexism I’m talking about. Some of the girls, legal adults, who were rounded up were made to call their parents. Because of course, in our culture, the sole purpose of a woman’s existence is to go from her father’s house to her husband’s, virtue and virginity intact. Checking into hotels along the way for legal, consensual pre-marital sex? ‘Good’ girls don’t do that.

What is worse is that as women, we often internalize the casual misogyny directed towards us. That is why today, I don’t use the word ‘bitch’ exclusively for female dogs and ‘tarts’ are not just desserts. Casual sexism is in the fact that we often tell each other to ‘man up’ because masculinity is synonymous with strength and courage. It is propagated by the language we use unthinkingly.

We’ve made known our outrage against rapes, dowry, female infanticide and the skewed sex ratio. What we often fail to address is something closer home, the latent patriarchy that has coloured our everyday life. It is the underlying factor which influences all our interactions so that even when we are not being overtly patriarchal in our outlook, it makes us complicit in upholding the tradition of gender discrimination.

My friend was told on the first day at her new job to make tea for the entire team. This continued for a week. When she finally refused one morning, her boss told her ‘Chai hi toh banani hai. Ladkiyon ko toh aur kitna kuch banana aata hai.’ (It’s just tea. Girls know how to cook so many more things.) An innocuous statement at face value, but the assumption that girls should know how to cook is rooted in a mindset which says that women belong in the kitchen.

I know we have a long, long way to go because when I discuss sexism with my male classmates, I’m told ‘of course it exists, but there’s nothing we can do about it’ and when I object to someone using the word ‘feminazi’, I’m told ‘give him a break, he’s just kidding.’

It’s as simple as the fact that no man will ever be asked during a job interview how he plans to juggle home, family and a career.