Girls are weighed down by restrictions, boys with demands - two equally harmful disciplines.

What the line is asking

• Restrictions: mobility, voice, property, the body — typically stacked on girls.
• Demands: breadwinner, violence-as-honour, no tenderness — stacked on boys.
• Equally harmful is a moral claim about discipline, not a claim that harm is identical in hospital wards.

Family

• Dowry and ‘family name’ on one side; the boy as ATM on the other.
• Unpaid care is still mostly a woman’s day. Name it.

School and media

• STEM gatekeeping; ‘boys don’t read literature’. Both are smaller minds.
• Reels that sell a gym-and-gun masculinity and a shrinking girl.

Work and state

• Peg: NFHS / labour force — women’s work often missing from the count; male suicide and farm distress as the demand’s bill.
• Maternity, paternity, creche: if only women ‘get’ care, the demand on men never moves and the restriction on women stays.

Law

• Art. 14–15, POCSO, workplace harassment law: the republic against the house-clock.
• 73rd Amendment’s seats: a crack in the restriction; the demand on the sarpanch’s husband is the leftover cage.

The counter

‘Equally’ must not erase femicide, anaemia, or a missing girl at birth. Boys’ cages are real; they are not a reason to stall a woman’s file. Justice is two unlocked doors, not a lecture that ‘everyone suffers’ and therefore nothing is due.