Feministaah

Some years ago, there was a gathering of female film professionals and the issue of the casting couch came up. Several of the women directors were of the opinion that it was a terrible thing, but the female could always say no. Which is true, in theory, and could work for a certain level of women in the entertainment industry, but many do not have that choice. It’s an open secret in the industry that women lower down in the hierarchy are subjected to harassment and at some of them have to submit, or they don’t get work. It is easy to say that they don’t have to be in the film industry, but if that’s their chosen line of work, should they be forced to accept sexual exploitation?  Casting couch is a pleasant-sounding term for the humiliation women have to routinely go through.  But, if there is a choice, and a woman takes the route of providing sexual favours for getting work, who can judge  her  for that?  It’s quid pro quo if the woman is going i...

We have lunatics getting space for their “boys will be boys” utterances whenever a rape is reported. There are those who believe the woman asked for it. Why was she provocatively dressed? Out at night? Drinking in a pub? Dancing with boys? How do these wise ones explain what happened to an eight-year-old child? After the horrific sexual attack on Jyoti Pandey Singh, that came to be known as the Nirbhaya rape case, and brought India out on the streets to protest, there were other equally savage rape cases, but the country was probably suffering from outrage fatigue. However, no matter what social, political, religious stand a person takes, how can the monstrosity of what happened to Asifa be excused or explained away? How can anyone in their right mind even come out in support of men like Sanji Ram and the cop Deepak Khajuria, whose duty it is to protect, not to rape a child one last time before they kill   her   and dump   her body?  Still, a group call...

There is an old riddle some of us must have come across some time in the past. A father and son have a car accident and are both badly hurt. They are taken to separate hospitals. When the boy is taken in for an operation, the surgeon says, “I cannot do the surgery because he is my son.” How is this possible? People actually pondered over the answer, which is obvious now, the mother is the surgeon. A female doctor was obviously unheard of when the riddle was coined.   Now women are in every area of the work force, so it was surprising and a bit distressing to read a report that when asked to picture a leader most people—men and women-- drew a man. A report by Heather Murphy in the New York Times quotes Dr Tina Kiefer,  a professor of organizational behavior at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, “Even when the drawings are gender neutral, the majority of groups present the drawing using language that indicates male (he) rather than neutral or female.” Wri...