Feministaah

There was a short story, read long ago, in which a woman wants to take up a job. She gets one to run a crèche, so she has to hire a domestic helper to look after her home and kids. The woman she hires, then has to leave her kids at the day care centre her employer runs. There must have been a point in there about the price women pay for having careers, but the fact is that a lot of women are able to pursue higher education and work outside the home, because another woman—it is usually a woman, but there are men too—are holding fort at home. The indispensable domestic worker came into focus through Alfonso Cuaron’s film   Roma , that has been a raved about by critics and audiences, and has just won three Academy Awards—narrowly missing the Best Film Prize which went to   Green Book , also about an employer-employee relationship, but in a different context. In  Roma , Cuaron revisits his childhood in Mexico City and plays tribute to the family’s maid  Libori...

Recently, there was a show of a play called  Pink  Sari Revolution , directed by the London-based Suba Das, written by Purva Naresh, based on the book by Amana Fontanella-Khan. Made one wonder whatever happened to Sampat Pal, the leader of the Gulabi Gang, whose vigilante group of  pink -sari clad women in Uttar Pradesh, had so captured the imagination, that two documentaries (by Kim Longinotto and Nishtha Jain) were made on her, also a feature film (by Soumik Sen, starring Madhuri Dixit), two books and several newspaper and magazine stories. There are other women’s groups and NGOs working for the welfare of underprivileged women, but Gulabi Gang made for exciting and colourful (literally—that sea of bright  pink ) material.  Sampat Pal belongs to one of the most backward and patriarchal regions of the country, where rural women have no presence and no voice. Violence, especially against lower-caste women, is rampant. This is the region from where ‘Bandit ...

There are so many ads that are offensive to women, that show them as weak, indecisive, vain or silly. There are protests against some—mostly the brazenly sexist ones—but soon it’s back to normal. There are scantily clad models selling cars, razors, male deodorants, and conservatively clothed women being told what’s good for them, if they want to keep husband, mother-in-law and son (rarely daughter) happy. But one Gillette commercial calling out toxic masculinity has men howling in rage and threatening to boycott the company’s shaving products. The n ew “We Believe” ad —carries the company’s tagline “Is this the best a man can get?” and the 48-second spot address issues like bullying, sexual harassment, violence, and the #MeToo movement.  A voiceover in the end says, “Is this the best a man can get? Is it? We can’t hide from it; it’s been going on far too long. We can’t laugh it off, making the same old excuses. But something finally changed. And there will be no going back...

    Earlier this year, Glenn Close, won a Golden Globe Award for her performance in  The Wife , based on Meg Wolitzer’s 2003 book, about the unequal marriage between a writer and his wife. As Joe Castleman is about to receive a prestigious international prize (Nobel in the film, a lesser Finnish award in the book), Joan, his wife of 40 years, thinks of finally leaving him. Over the years, she has put up with his arrogance and his constant infidelities, when the truth is that without her, he would not be what he is.  She hates the idea of his acknowledging her in his acceptance speech, when all through their marriage, she has played the subservient wife, who is told that she can go shopping or for beauty treatments while the man is busy with important things; the woman standing behind her husband, who humiliatingly hands her his coat when he enters a social event; she sees to it that he takes his medication on time, brushes crumbs from his beard and bristles when...

A group of female acquaintances were chatting about this and that, and the conversation veered—as it does so often—to movies and  Zero  in particular, which all disliked not so much because Shah Rukh Khan played himself without any variation or because he was cast as a vertically challenged man, but because his Bauua Singh was so arrogant and obnoxious AND, two far superior women were inexplicably attracted to him.  Aafia, a brainy scientist (played by Anuskha Sharma) fell in love with him, wanted to marry him, had his baby (out of wedlock); when she was to be married to a scientist, a man her professional and intellectual equal, she ditched him and waited for Bauua to return from his trip to Mars.   The other female, a superstar Babita (Katrina Kaif), still hurting from a break-up, uses Bauua as a confidant and support system, seeing in him something that nobody else could (the audience certainly didn’t or the film would not have failed). The argument went: W...

Politician Vasundhara Raje was recently fat shamed by a male politician who nastily commented, “ And this Vasundhara, give her rest, she has become very tired… has become very fat… Earlier she was thin… She is a daughter of Madhya Pradesh. Ask her to rest .”    (Sharad Yadav is hardly Adonis himself, but that’s not the point). He said it aloud, but sexist comments are constantly being made about women in power, whether they are politicians or corporate heads; for movie stars, models and sportspersons, it’s always open season on barbs as though by being attractive and famous, they have offended those chauvinists who still believe that women should not step out of their homes.   This is just as bad as calling Indira Gandhi the “only man in the cabinet,” the implication being that women are not supposed to have power, and if they do, they can wield it only like men, because there seems to be no definition of female power. Today the term “woman power” is used as a ca...

Some readers would remember a cartoon with a woman in a bikini and sunglasses looks at a woman in a burqa and thinks, “Everything covered but her eyes, what a cruel, male-dominated culture.” The woman in a burqua in turn looks at her and thinks, “Nothing covered but her eyes, what a cruel, male-dominated culture.” The upshot being that what women wear is more often than not decided by men; either males in their family, community or religious leaders, or even the fashion industry, dominated by men. Recently, a village in Andhra Pradesh banned women from wearing nighties during day time, because it was “inconvenient” to see them dressed thus. The Tokalapalli village heads ordered that women cannot wear nighties from 7 am to 7 pm.  Interestingly, the village council which came up with the ban was headed by a woman—though one wonders if she came up with the idea on her own. A violation of the ban would invite a fine of Rs 2,000, and  those who give information about the w...