Few voices in Kerala’s current media landscape generate as much argument as Rahul Easwar. A fixture on television panels and social media, he has built a substantial following by positioning himself as a critic of what he describes as an excess of overreach in feminist discourse, of legal protections that have, in his telling, tipped too far. He is also among a small cohort of Malayali commentators regularly invited onto national English news channels, typically as a ‘soft Hindutva’ voice explaining Kerala to audiences outside the state.Easwar does not describe himself as anti-women or opposed to equality. That disclaimer is, in fact, central to his project. He positions himself as a reasonable man, a voice of balance, a critic of extremes. His tone is controlled, his manner soft-spoken. He sounds concerned rather than hostile. And that composure is not incidental; it is the point.Understanding why requires looking closely at the arguments he consistently makes, and at what those arguments actually do.Two phrases that do a lot of workTwo claims recur across Easwar’s interventions. The first: that feminists rely on “straw arguments” and deliberately distort men’s positions. The second: that women now use the law “not as a shield, but as a sword”.Both phrases are effective precisely because they sound measured. They invite agreement without provoking alarm. But each performs a specific function. The charge of “straw arguments” allows Easwar to sidestep the substance of feminist critique entirely. If the problem is framed as one of bad faith, of deliberate misrepresentation, then the conversation moves away from consent, power and institutional behaviour, and becomes instead a debate about tone and intent. Feminist voices are treated as ideologically compromised before they have even been heard.What this framing erases is the actual diversity of feminist politics in Kerala. The Women in Cinema Collective, to take one prominent example, has had sustained and public disagreements within its own membership. Feminist discourse here spans lawyers, activists, artists, students and survivors, and it disagrees fiercely with itself and with the world. None of that complexity survives Easwar’s telling. Feminism becomes a single, monolithic, unreasonable voice, and therefore one that is easy to dismiss.Rhetorical use of ’empirical evidence’Another habit reinforces this positioning. In the middle of debates, Easwar sometimes invokes what he calls an “empirical study”. The phrase is rarely accompanied by specifics, no author, no methodology, no scope. It functions not as evidence but as impression management. It signals that data is on his side without requiring him to produce it.The effect is asymmetric. One interlocutor sounds objective. The other, because they are responding to something vague, can only sound emotional. Questions of gender injustice, structural violence, and institutional failure are thus kept off the table. The empiricist posture is not about research. It is about controlling who gets to sound credible.Inverting the lawThe metaphor of the law as a “sword” captures a real anxiety, among men who feel newly exposed by legal changes around harassment and abuse. But it also works as a distortion. Laws protecting women from harassment and domestic violence did not emerge suddenly or capriciously. They were built over decades, in response to systematic silence, chronic under-reporting and institutional indifference.To frame these protections primarily as weapons available for misuse is to invert the sequence: it centres the fear of false complaints over the reality well documented of how rarely complaints are made at all, and how rarely those that are made result in conviction.This framing has identifiable consequences. Women who seek legal redress are viewed with suspicion. Men who face scrutiny become victims of excess. Accountability begins to look like an ambush. The possibility of misuse is real, but statistically marginal, is given more discursive weight than the much larger, ongoing reality of under-reporting and attrition within the system.Grammar of masculine grievanceEaswar’s appeal draws heavily on what has been called “manosphere” politics, but filtered through a distinctly Malayali register. He speaks of exhaustion, of walking on eggshells, of conversations that feel rigged against men. This is not rage politics. It is grievance delivered calmly, which makes it considerably more portable.His public persona amplifies this. Debonair, Brahmanical in lineage, from the tantri lineage associated with Sabarimala, soft-spoken and urbane, he carries his cultural authority lightly, without the xenophobia that marks more strident Hindutva commentators. He appears knowledgeable, god-fearing, charming. He is legible to a wide aspirational Malayali audience across caste, class, and party lines. And, a detail rarely acknowledged, he draws a significant portion of his following from women who are themselves uncomfortable with feminist assertion in a male-dominated social environment. But the vulnerability he performs has structural limits. It asks for empathy without self-examination. It seeks protection from critique without acknowledging the power relations that make that critique necessary. Discomfort is presented as injustice.A pattern bigger than one personThis is not a phenomenon specific to Kerala, or to Easwar. Across India and globally, masculinity under feminist scrutiny has learned to change its register rather than its position. Authority no longer shouts. It sighs. It speaks of hurt, imbalance, being misunderstood. The language softens. The control often remains. What makes Easwar influential is that he has mastered this grammar early and fluently. He sounds reasonable. He avoids crude hostility. This is what allows substantive resistance to gender equality to circulate as common sense rather than as what it is.The cost is not simply one of disagreement; disagreement is healthy, and feminist discourse should be subject to rigorous criticism. The cost, rather, is erosion of the conditions that make honest engagement possible. When feminist critique is routinely framed as exaggeration, when legal protection is recast as overreach, and when “empirical evidence” is deployed as a rhetorical gesture rather than an actual evidentiary standard, the space for reckoning with real harm contracts.Kerala’s unfinished reckoningKerala is in the middle of a genuine social shift. Old hierarchies are being questioned, be it in cinema, in religious institutions, in workplaces, in homes. That process is uncomfortable, and some of that discomfort is legitimate. But discomfort is not, by itself, injustice. The question is whether it prompts reflection or simply produces louder claims of victimhood. Easwar sits alongside other visible currents in the state’s changing public culture, neo-right Hindutva bhajan movements gaining traction among the middle class, and the global phenomenon of figures who repackage dominance as injury. His version is more polished, locally rooted, and carefully assembled. But its emotional register is familiar.What his interventions ultimately narrate, while presenting themselves as critiques of urban radical feminism, is a deeper anxiety about what equality actually costs those who have benefited from its absence. That anxiety is increasingly visible, increasingly confident, and still searching for a language adequate to what it is actually defending.Sooraj Shaji is a Chancellor’s Merit Scholar, Young India Fellowship, and a visiting artist at Adishakti Theatre.