sthreeling

a view on "being different" and social conformity

2007-08-06T05:02:00.001-07:00

take an old-fashioned feminist who doesn't like the attention that Being Different attracts, and doesn't think non-conformity has to have a high-visibility component. add to that a strong tendency to be a peacenik. i am very, very picky about what ways i will "stand out" from the crowd.

while sometimes non-conformity is intelligent and necessary for integrity to one's political beliefs, most times i hear it being advocated like a panacea. Being Different seems to be regarded as a GoodThing(TM).

especially if you are a feminist you are expected to Be Different by adopting certain (predictable) patterns of behaviour. other than the fact that these patterns are again dictated by an arbitrary someone who considers they know best as to what is liberating for the feminist in question, the reasons given for advocating non-conformity are almost half-baked - and any refusal to comply and obligingly Be Different in the dictated manner means you are sadly under patriarchal control still!

broadly speaking, i think there are two kinds of social demands.

the first are to do with respectability/decency/something-else-equally-vague; the second is to do with maintaining the social fabric.

the first kind is the set of demands that are made of us as individuals representing a certain group. society is full of competing groups that try to attain social dominance/power. when a group A that is more powerful than group B decides that group B is worth noticing or being allies with, group B's power increases.

historically, B groups try to sell their members as highly desirable members, who are "respectable", "decent" or whatever else is in vogue. the group makes social demands of its members, along the lines of "if you're decent you wouldn't do this". it's telling that most of these decency/whatever conformity demands are mostly only restrictive! the group makes these demands purely to make sure that you don't embarass it. so no, the group doesn't give a damn about the individual in its quest for political power.

saying bow-wow to these demands is a part of rebellion against the group's oppression of its members, but it's nowhere near enough. this sort of non-conformity is important in adolescence when you're (hopefully :D) determining your politics and practising resistance because it's a relatively easy way to challenge the way you live and think.

but carried beyond a certain age and in the absence of anything more profound than the purely symbolic gesture, it's quite pointless and peurile. it becomes pop-rebellion along the lines of "i do ganja and so i am liberated and very progressive!".

i also think that this is a kind of non-conformity that doesn't really demand much of you as long as you don't mind the occasional bursts of attention. all the confrontation of beliefs that happens at this level, is confrontation of others' beliefs. you don't challenge yourself at all. so when no one's watching, it may be quite meaningless.

there is the second kind of social demands. i think these demands are made of us as members of society at large (or humanity if you will) as opposed to members of a certain social group. these demands have to do with stability of society. such as not trying to take the law into your own hands, or keeping in touch with your kin. i think it's actually lots of stuff like the second that is about building up a robust social support system to ensure reasonably well that nobody goes too berserk.

it's true that these expectations can be rejected too. there are people who manage to live quite happily and independently of their kin. (there are also some kin who deserve to be kicked out of the network!) then by all means, don't conform.

however, i'm a little wary of non-conformity to these expectations because while that may not threaten those who do not need these guidelines, who are wise, able &/or capable enough to live on their own terms, the potential for damage in terms of less able/wise/capable followers is tremendous.

the systems needed for stability are necessary in order to protect those who are not wise enough to intelligently reject these norms and who may get into trouble of a magnitude that affects not just them individually but also society as a whole. many children of the hippie generation suffered bitterly because of parents who thought they were being progressive by absolutely disrupting all existing social systems but just ended up being flaky and broke. today we have problems of adolescents going berserk and killing, school kids committing suicide because of stress and soaring rates of depression. i think they're all indicative of system failure. (how much more unstable can a society get?!)

so am i advocating complete docility and conformity as a safe option? no. i just think there is a huge area between these two kinds of non-conformity, where non-conformity means challenging ourselves more than an audience (and is therefore more honest!), where rebellion is reasoned rather than attention-seeking. i rather think many of the madusar patis figured this one out pretty well. i know some in my clan who have seemed outwardly perfectly traditional, but have been very strong and progressive women.

the more i think about it, i think it would be fabulous to teach meaningful, questioned (as opposed to merely rejecting) rebellion as part of higher secondary schooling. we'd finally be giving people a chance to become sensible adults!

Of girlfriends, wives and subliminal conditioning

2007-07-17T04:32:00.000-07:00

Read this extract from THE HINDU (16 July, 2007 Metro Plus [Chennai Edition])

When Shruti Kamal Hassan asked Arjun Vignesh (one of the ten finalists in the Chennai leg of the Horlicks Wiz Kids 2007 competition) "What is better – having a girlfriend or a wife? And why?", the boy blushed but was not out of his depth. All of 11 years, Arjun preferred a wife to a girlfriend. Reason: girlfriend means impermanence, but a wife is forever. He said “A girlfriend can dump you anytime, but a wife won’t” to thunderous applause. Guess who clapped? An auditorium (Kalaivanar Arangam) full of school students.

Just one paragraph and I don't know what irks me most.

1. The fact that it seemed appropriate for an adult - a 21-year old is considered an adult - to ask THIS question to a child of 11.

2. the fact that a 11-year old child answered in THIS particular manner.

3. The fact that an auditorium full of children applauded this answer.

4. The fact that Prince Frederick, the author of this piece, thought this charade worth reporting.

If I'm a prude, so be it; but in the world I knew it wasnt okay to ask a child if he/she preferred a girlfriend/boyfriend to a spouse. The question is loaded. Not because of the manner in which it is asked or because the person who asked it was an adult, but in content of the question itself. are we seriously expecting our children to be able to, at the age of ELEVEN, decide whether they want a relationship or a marriage?

If there is anything worse than the question itself, it is the answer! I think there is something horribly wrong in the way we look at the concept of trust if a boy finds himself able to question the need for commitment in a relationship. The boy's logic might be infallible but the assumption that a wife is bound by a social construct to not abandon her husband, begs the question, "Why did the woman want to dump him?". The boy's logic seems to insist that he either does not care about the reason for the woman wanting to dump the man in her life, or does not believe that the woman can have a valid reason for dumping a man. all the boy cares about is that one option does not give the woman the freedom to do something she wants, and hence (as far as he is concerned) THAT is the better option. But frankly can you or I fault the boy? All he is doing is reflecting a view that he has (doubtlessly) heard an older male voice. And how does the boy know that this answer is a good one? Everytime someone has made a statement like this, the statement has been recieved with much fanfare and merriment. It disgusts me, this mirth at the portrayal of a wife as one bound to her husband - a slave, a playtoy, a prisoner.

But what really hurts is that THIS is the kind of thing that our newspapers report. Does no one find it offensive? Am I ultra-sensitive or is the rest of the world immune? How can it be that a man can report this charade and report it as a story and nothing else? Does a journalist cease to be a human being with a sense of judgement?

The reporter goes on to say,

"Their answers were sweet because their innocence shone through them."

It wasn't their innocence that shone through. It was the conditioning that shone through. The conditioning that makes us prejudiced. The conditioning that makes us unthinking. The conditioning that makes us mock at guys who learn an art form like dancing for being sissies. The conditioning that makes us teach our young to dress like bollywood actresses.

I'm sorry, but if THIS is innocence, then I don't think I want my child to be innocent.

Kill 'em! Castrate 'em!

2007-04-16T17:08:00.000-07:00

What would be the appropriate punishment for someone who sexually abuses children? When asked this question, typically people respond with the following answers:

Kill them!
Castrate them!
Rape them/their kids.

While these responses arise out of the shock and horror stories of child sexual abuse often bring, they are neither appropriate nor practical. And here’s why:

Kill them!

Besides the arguments along the lines of human rights and capital punishment, it is a fact that killing them won’t help protect more children from being abused. First of all, killing an abuser will eliminate the possibility of that abuser abusing more children. What about thousands of other kids who get abused everyday? Second, it will not serve as a deterrent for other abusers. There are many countries across the world that have excellent rape and child abuse laws. However, these crimes are still extremely prevalent in those countries. In India, where laws and their implementation has always been an issue, this method will just not work. Third, being identified as a child abusers carries tremendous stigma in any society, including India. Social stigma is always a greater deterrent than legal instruments. If the social stigma does not deter the abusers, it is highly unlikely that death penalty will (this is not to state that laws don’t matter… of course they do… just that they alone are not sufficient). Fourth, death penalty is allowed only in the “rarest of the rare circumstances”. Take a look at the prevalence figures for child sexual abuse across the world, and you will realize that child sexual abuse is not rare, leave aside being rarest of the rare (World Health Organization estimates that 1 in 10 children is sexually abused!). Finally, this method will kill only who get caught. Abusers are so smart in their modus operandi, that for every abuser who gets caught, there are hundreds who walk away free. How will death penalty catch them?

Castrate them!

This is probably the most common response. However, sexual abuse doesn’t require genital gymnastics. In fact, it does not even require for a child to be touched physically. Rape is only one form of abuse. What about child pornography on the internet? What about voyeurism (where the abuser gets sexual pleasure out of looking at children when they are in the bathroom, changing clothes etc.)? What about forcing a child to engage in sexual activity with another child? All these acts do not require the abuser to touch the child? But are they abusive? Of course! Castrating someone does not take away their ability or intentions to be abusive.

Rape them/their kids.

Violence is not the answer to violence. If we do this, we will send out the message that rape is justified as long as the motive behind it is justifiable. Motives can always be interpreted, misinterpreted, manipulated and twisted. Rape is unacceptable. Period.

So what needs to be done?

We need to stop looking only at legal and punitive measures to stop abusers from abusing. They have their place, but they don’t change society. We need to stand up and be counted, instead of passing the buck to the courtrooms and expecting prisons to do the trick. We need to accept that:

Abusers exist.
They exist among us, and not just on Jupiter, developed countries, English-speaking countries, poor illiterate families, rich urban families and blah blah blah.
They can be people we know, like or love… like our family members, relatives, friends, neighbors…
They are not devils or demons, but people like us who live routine lives.
Primary responsibility to stop them lies with us.
They can be stopped by breaking the taboos and the silence about child sexual abuse.
They can be stopped by talking to children about sexuality and sexual violence (in an age-appropriate way, of course).
They can be stopped when we stop covering up for them when find out instances of abuse… but place the responsibility of child sexual abuse where it belongs – on their shoulders.

(What is a post on child sexual abuse doing on a blog on feminism? This is here because child sexual abuse is a feminist issue.)

Crossposted here.

those "sassy" babes

2007-04-14T11:37:00.000-07:00

i chanced upon an edition of that gem of a magazine, India Today.

"smart and sassy" said the cover page, showing a young woman. the story was ostensibly about how women are making it big in the corporate world. india today is india's largest-selling english magazine, so i think it's a fairly representative visage for that fuzzy beast called mass media. i want to dissect the representation made by them now.

first, have a look at a couple of recent editions which have featured men on the cover page.

(from indiatoday.com)

and then, the current issue:

(from indiatoday.com)

let's see, famous actor... think of the face.

a cricket coach who was murdered ... how do we recall the person? face.

representation of powerful women ... strike a pose, display that groin. obviously a woman's intelligence, power or drive to succeed all lies centered in her crotch. therefore it's completely relevant if not absolutely vital to include a splay-legged display of it when discussing her abilities.

it makes you freeze to realise that it's easier for the media to portray a dead man as a person, than portray a woman as something more than a "body".

i don't know about you folks, but i'm yet to see a woman posture like that in a board-meeting, or even in a team meeting. wow, how realistic a pose. so that's what women do at work - stand like they're about to launch into a quick tea-break version of moulin rouge.

(from allposters.com)

using a chair in a cabaret act is almost cliched now. in 1972, liza minelli made a movie called "cabaret". the poster of the movie less blatantly highlights the woman's groin than this supposedly non-sexualised depiction!

also, how many women have you seen waltz into office dressed in the finely embroidered ensemble that this one has on? can you imagine getting any work done dressed like that? is it even remotely practical? the only thing you could comfortably do with an outfit like that, would be to sit in an air-conditioned glass case. someone's been suffering an acute attack of woman-are-decorative-elements.

finally, the most obvious idiocy. "sassy"?

sassy

• adjective (sassier, sassiest) informal, chiefly N. Amer. bold and spirited; impudent.

impudent of the little girls to walk into an office and get noticed? ooh, they're being spirited in the presence of the Big Male In Charge, huh? the word drips condescension. so that's a really bad choice of words, mr editor, even if the reader didn't know that "sassy" is an americanised corruption of the word "saucy" which happens to have certain specific connotations.

saucy

• adjective (saucier, sauciest) informal 1 chiefly Brit. sexually suggestive in a light-hearted way. 2 chiefly N. Amer. bold, lively, and spirited.

"sexually suggestive"? well, knock me down with a feather.

Of "Boardroom pin-up girls", leadership across "global ponds" and women's day

2007-03-12T13:41:00.000-07:00

On the occasion of Women's Day on March 8th, The Economic Times marked its "observance" of the day by inviting Padma Ravichander, Managing director Perot Systems, to write something up about the participation of women in higher management in industry. The original article can be found here.

Let me start by saying that I was hugely disappointed by the content and general writing of the article. I am in fact, so traumatized by the whole experience that I am going to proceed to dissect the article and tell you why I hated it so much. This is going to be a bit of an exhaustive ripping apart seeing that almost every line seems to bother me. Words in bold and with quotes around them are straight out of the article. Those that have quotes around them but are not in bold need you to imagine me making air quotes if I were saying all this out :)

I am really hoping I totally missed a big point here and that my whole understanding of the "message" is warped, because my trauma will continue if that is not the case .:)

So she writes this article and she decides to use for a title, "Boardroom pin-up girls making waves" . While it doesn't make any immediate sense to me, I am sure if I were top-brass management of a Fortune500 company, I would not want to be referred to as a "boardroom pin-up girl" whether or not I am "making waves". Even to just catch the reader's eye, this , I thought, was a rather poor choice of words.

It starts out painfully like a high school essay stating how women "hold seats on corporate boards, run major companies and are regularly featured on the covers of business magazines as prominent leaders and power brokers." and with the naivete of a high school essayist she asks "Who could have imagined this even half a century ago?" . Why do I get the feeling she thinks "half a century" amounts to 500 years back?

We are then treated to a whole bunch of illuminating statistics about how the percentage of women at the "top of the corporate ladder" is very low. She goes on to say that in IT however, " The demand for IT jobs particularly in India have ensured a greater population of women in the workplace than ever before ". Of course, if we had only half the jobs they would all go to men and women are just making up numbers here. Notice also, how a demand "have" ensured something....in The Economic Times no less!!! ( I am not going to be charitable to grammatical errors. With my not-so-admirable grammar skills , if I can catch such mistakes,come on, those editors are paid for correcting them!)

" Information Technology, world over is a relatively new industry and hence has enjoyed the luxury of greater gender neutrality than other industries where the organisational values, definitions of competencies and leadership are still predicated on traits that are stereotypically as-sociated with men tough, aggressive and decisive."

This long sentence left me in a fix. While the poor language and paucity of punctuations are besides the point (or may be the reason for the dilemma), I am not really able to make up my mind what it is trying to convey:
a) Gender neutrality is a luxury.
b) IT owes its gender neutrality ( even while the rest of the article shrieks about even IT not having enough women ) to the fact that it being a relatively new industry, helps it "concede" that women may in fact also be "tough aggresive and decisive".
c) The problem is somehow, more that concepts of competency and leadership are associated with traits such as "tough, aggressive and decisive" and less that they are infact "sterotypically male" .

While most women in IT, she observes, are at "entry-level" jobs, there is a "definitive trend" that they "can" become global leaders because IT jobs demand " for employees to work across countries and cultures and reach out to people across continents. " What about world peace?? This is the kind of writing (BS,if I may) I subscribe to when my answer to a question that demands a 500 word answer ends in about 50 and I need to fill up the space provided.

I gather the courage to read on. The next paragraph starts off promisingly with the question " So can women in IT make good global leaders and what is holding them back?" and I go "phew! May be she will redeem herself." But Alas! that was not to be. Ravichander is of the opinion that "Leadership is an inborn trait in women, whether they lead global teams across ponds or manage households discreetly by always ensuring that every member of the family or team is well nurtured and attended to. It is a quality that is fairly unique, yet very much a part of the DNA of a woman."

While I don't quite understand why someone would want to lead a "global team" across a "pond", it could be some IT jargon that I am unaware of. However, "inborn traits" such as "leadership" don't seem to ensure that every family in the world with a woman in it is well nurtured and I am not really sure how many times the household management is discreet or that every member is "attended to". A quality so "unique", a little less than half the world's population has it as "part of its DNA". ( why oh why can people not stop this abusive use of the concept of the DNA?!!) Is she also not putting in question the ability/involvement of a man as a caregiver or/and "discreet manager" of his household ?

She goes on to talk about the work culture in IT that leaves no minute unconnected and demands a "24/7 online-culture" of employees. How is the woman supposed to take care or her family and work? The solution according her is that " Both men and women need to join hands" and "look closely at our current management practices around meetings, deliverables, timings, work styles, success metrics, performance evaluation criteria and decide how we can change some of these practices across the organisation that would cater to needs of a gender diverse population collectively. "

Why is it a work-home balance struggle only for the woman? Not once does she consider suggesting that men share or should share the responsibility of the household. While evaluation of general work culture will help no doubt, how much impetus is a consumer-driven industry going to provide if it affects deliverables and time lines? How much good are sweeping statements in the vein of "re-evaluate work culture" going to do?

Like I said in the beginning, the way it was written and the fact that,despite the style and content, it got published was a big disappointment. Successful women like Padma Ravichander should be able ,in the least, to not consider themselves "pin-up girls". It is most unfortunate that she should give an impression that

a) A happy family and a successful career are involved in a trade-off
b) The happiness of a family is solely the woman's responsibility
c) There is no part or involvement of the husband in the success of a woman's career.
d) Men in industry need to be understanding to their women colleagues because these poor women do not get the support from the very same men in their roles as husbands.

Maybe the next time they will find someone better to ghost-write ( yes I am the optimist and still want to believe she doesn't really think this way.) the article for her and definitely someone better to edit it.

As a side thought, I wonder if IT big shots hire publicists and if this is in fact the light in which she wants to be seen by the "global" market, because otherwise, that is one more job that needs to be filled in by someone new :)

5 things feminism has done for me

2006-11-09T04:14:00.000-08:00

aishwarya had tagged us quite recently (*blush*) for the "5 things feminism has done for you". sorry for the delay a., here it is at last:

1. feminism has made me a happier person in a lot of ways, and added to my sense of self worth. there are days when, even if my whole world has fallen apart and nothing's going right, i still think "i'm a woman", and feel this absolute rush of joy!

2. i love the emphasis that feminism places on honesty and ethics in analysis. one of the things that bothers me about mainstream academic/scientific thought is that it seems to be conducted in ethical and moral vacuums.
as noam chomsky once remarked, "the intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if i didn't betray it i'd be ashamed of myself."

3. i think i've become more responsible and more socially aware a person. there are so many things that i did not perceive before - so many worlds i didnt know coexisted with mine. after my introduction to feminism, i've also become more aware of silence being as political a gesture as active dissent or assent. i've learnt that brute force (or power) is different from strength.

4. feminism has taught me a lot about myself. my first encounter with feminist writing reassured me that i wasn't insane, and that amongst other things, it was in fact normal to be bothered by violence and misogyny. ironically that first book also shook me up and churned my mind. it took a while to be able to accept the things i was reading - and not feel like a criminal!

5. feminism has been mind and soul food, and so intellectually a very deeply satisfying experience! it has helped me clear up my head and be surer about what is important to me, how much freedom and responsibility i can handle comfortably, the codes i live by, my tread-carefully-here mental landscapes ... assorted things like that. one of the things i like immensely about feminist theory is that it doesnt "talk down" to the reader.

A sense of Responsibility

2006-10-18T14:54:00.000-07:00

Prologue: Aishwarya tagged us all for "five things that feminism has done for you" and i really think I would not be able to do justice to any of this in a paragraph. So I've decided to write 5 posts. This is the first of the posts. Essentially, as Aishwarya said, all of this boils down to "being a person". So a lot of what I say might not be integral to feminism per se. It is just that I have recognised these things largely because of feminism.

A sense of Responsibility.
that's right. Responsibility with a capital R.

"every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty"

- John D.Rockefeller Jr.

in a very narrow sense, responsibility is about being answerable to someone for one's actions. in a higher sense, responsibility is about having the capacity to make moral decisions and thefore being accountable.

While all of us (well, most of us anyway) recognise the veracity of the first, not too many of us really acknowledge either the validity or the relevance of the second. This is why the average man on the street takes no "responsibility" for a rape committed by one of his kind; why the average asian based in america takes no "responsibility" for the "war against terror"; why the WUCHM takes no "responsibility" for the fact that his tribe has been the single biggest human-rights offender in history of the human race; why the average indian non-voter takes no "responsibility" for the actions of the government.

we ARE responsible. it really does not suffice to say "I didn't do it!". it really does not matter if you AREN'T the perpetrator. it is really not good enough to say "I don't approve of this, so I'm not to be blamed!". WE are responsible.

WE have a collective responsibility. While it is true that each one of us has a right to our own personal space, we have a collective responsibility to ensure that the exercising of this right does not deprive anyone else of theirs.
While it is true that the question of whether a guy likes his girl-friend having hair-free legs is entirely his choice, the question of actually asking the woman to shave is not one that HE can choose to call "his own business": he has the responsibility of understanding that a woman has a much greater say in that issue AND he has the collective responsibility to ensure that his personal preferences do not re-inforce a social stereotype - especially one that is a feminist issue. (Laura has been kind enough to allow me to link to this post. I think it explains the concept perfectly. Read the comments too! )

It is not enough to know or to believe that domestic violence is a crime; or that pornography is demeaning; or that sexual harrassment is unacceptable. each one of us has the responsibility to ensure that no woman is subjected to domestic violence; that no man uses his male-privilege to enforce his opinion on the women in his family; that no country uses its military strength to invade another country. we have a responsibility to the collective to ensure that the world is a safe and fair place.

How does this tie up with feminism? The fact of the matter is that I used to insist that I be treated purely on the basis of merit and with no positive or negative bias because of my race, gender, religion (well, the lack of one) or sexual orientation. Six months ago, my argument was this .......

Why should I be mis-trusted or blamed for something that had been done by someone who shared with me nothing more than a gender, a country-of-brith, or a religion. Why should I not be trusted by a girl because some other male had abused her? I didn't do it, did I? I'm not a creep. I'm dependable. I live by my own code of ethics. If you do have anything against me, let it be on the basis of what I believe in; not on the basis of what other people who share SOME characteristics with me believe in....

This was, I used to feel, a complete and sufficient arguement. In fact I believed that I was being fair and that others weren't if they used a stereotype to classify me. It took feminism to drive home the point that I cannot disclaim responsibility for the actions of the people around me; that I cannot claim to have no responsibility for the actions of other men; that I should be treated without prejudice inspite of the fact that men rape, abuse, hurt and crush women everyday all over the world.

The fact is that given the number of atrocities we men commit against women individually and against womenkind as a collective by supporting or not protesting against gender stereotypes about beauty, it is almost a miracle that I have managed to find women who have treated me without prejudice as a person, as a friend. They had no cause to. They had no reason to. MEN (like me) had hurt them, abused them, subjugated them. And they trusted me. Even though I was a man. Even though i was disclaiming all responsibility for the actions of men.

I want to thank them for helping me realise that I do have a responsibility to the world. I want to thank feminism for helping me realise that every action of mine is not only a reflection of my personal preference but also representative of every male on the planet. I have feminism to thank for helping me see myself not as an island put as part of the main.

Epilogue:

every human's death diminishes me, for I'm a part of humanity;
so never seek to know for whom the bell tolls.
It tolls for me.

adapted from John Dunne's "for whom the bell tolls".

(update: added link to Laura's post: A rethink on choice)

abuse of male privilege

2006-10-18T02:11:00.000-07:00

i had made a list - a list of the unearnt, undeserved privileges that i have as a well-to-do brahmin woman. i hoped - almost prayed - that some men at least, after reading that, would make a list of the gender-bestowed privileges that they have.

because this is what happens when a man abuses his male privilege and uses it to hurt a woman.

every time some guy says "but i'm a nice guy!" and expects to be trusted implicitly, i want to bury him in the mound of "nice guys" who do hurtful, vicious, unthinkingly dumb things.

no man has ever introduced himself to me, or any woman of my acquaintance, saying "you know what? i'm not a nice guy, i do bad things. so please don't trust me - treat me an aberration in the world of nice men". pretty much most men consider themselves nice people. "nice men" who happen watch porn, leer at women, "eve tease", or exploit vulnerable women and children sexually.

more than dealing with god, i find that dealing with men is a daily act of faith, with more immediate repercussions if i misjudge. each time i let myself be seen in the company of a man, i know its a risk. i know if anything happens to me, that fact that i was With A Man will be the first excuse to humiliate me and pain me further.

men know this almost better than women. the man who abused me was a father of a nice little girl. every single father and husband i know has taught his daughter and wife to never trust other men. my own father says every single man is guilty until proven innocent. im sure my husband will, with the same concern for my safety, say the same thing.

women are taught, as a policy decision, to mistrust men, but are expected to make a "personal" exception for every single male who chooses to enter their lives. questioning any man provokes "righteous" anger. a woman is expected to automatically wipe her mental slate clean and start from ignorance all over again.

she is confronted by two choices : to compliance or refusal. either way is a hard way.

in compliance, the more she walks away from her lived experience, from all the knowledge that she has developed from first principles, the more the rift between her resolutely rose-tinted world and reality. and reality has a way of catching up and giving you a nasty jar if you try to leave it behind. a woman conscious of the rift rails against the social order that expects her to be such a hypocrite to herself and others. a woman who doesnt perceive the rift eventually falls into a dark painful abyss.

so there is the other option. to refuse to wipe one's mind blank. to face the blaze of anger that will surface each time a man's code is studied. this is a choice that especially most women who have undergone abuse make. to always warn oneself of the danger of trusting blindly. of unquestioningly accepting someone's word about their morality. (often times, not even an open, explicit claim, but an implied one which is much harder to disprove or analyse because of its chimeral nature.)

it is both hurtful and infuriating to repeatedly have to make this tradeoff. and to be judged after being put in a situation that doesnt offer healthy choices in the first place.

were i a man, i guess i would want to crucify each one of my kind who sustained and reaffirmed such a screwed up social system. collective responsibility, while distinct from personal responsibility, has a way of hitting home.

I am not an angry girl
but it seems like I've got everyone fooled
every time I say something they find hard to hear
they chalk it up to my anger
and never to their own fear
and imagine you're a girl
just trying to finally come clean
knowing full well they'd prefer you
were dirty and smiling

- Ani DiFranco & Tracy Chapman

Five things

2006-10-10T11:10:00.000-07:00

[Crossposted to my blog]

I was kind of hoping I wouldn’t be tagged for the five things feminism has done for me meme, because it’s a difficult question to answer. Not because feminism hasn’t done enough for me, but because the things it has done are so utterly fundamental to my being that the best I can do is too make them all into one big point, “being a person”. That isn’t explicit enough, of course, so I must find more concrete (yet less important perhaps) things.

1.When my mother got into medical school she had to convince my grandfather to let her go. My parents (and grandparents!) are proud of my academic achievements, such as they are. In the immediate family, somehow, all the older cousins (21-27) are female. All of us have been encouraged by the family to do pretty much what we wanted to careerwise.

2.I grew up in a family where both parents worked similar hours, made similar contributions to the household income, did similar amounts of housework, and were proud of each other’s successes at work. As a result, I thought that equality and mutual respect were normal in male-female relationships. Not perfect, not utopian. Normal. I know a lot of people who grew up in very different surroundings with very different ideas of what normal was. I’m grateful for mine.

3.The right to vote. This is cliché, of course, but honestly. The ability to participate in ones own government? The right to have a say in what laws are to control one? The right to actually have an opinion and have it acknowledged? It’s huge and once upon a time we did not possess it and now we do. That deserves to be celebrated.

4.Role models. Women are doing everything, they’re heading multinational corporations, taming lions, building up good, solid careers in banks, going into space. And no, there aren’t enough of them and it’s harder for us and that’s why feminism is still important, but it gets easier every time someone is prevented from saying “girls can’t…” because *girls * already have.

5.Female writers. That’s tied up with my fourth point, I suppose, there’s a good deal of overlap. It’s not simply the ability to write and be published (though that in itself has been an achievement) but also to be accepted for it. Women have won all the major literary prizes. If it weren’t for feminism we wouldn’t have Angela Carter or Ursula LeGuin. We probably wouldn’t have Jeanette Winterson.

And I tag...all the other contributors to this blog.

Feminist. Man. Feminist man.

2006-09-11T12:48:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking about this for a long time and perhaps its time I pen my thoughts down. Besides allowing me the opportunity to share my thoughts with others, it helps me structure my own thoughts and takes my own thought process forward. These may sound a little random and haphazard, though.

M’s recent post on bloggers and gender politics got me thinking once again on this. She writes:

"i also hate explaining obvious things like "feminism isn't about male bashing" ad nauseam; something i find i have to do all too often if i start these discussions with people in real life."

I have done this for a long time… defending feminism… in society… at workplace… among friends… on my blog… on listservs and discussion groups. And as much as it is agonizingly frustrating, I guess I will continue to do that for the rest of my life. But it does get very irritating to explain the obvious… especially to people who claim to know what “feminism is all about”. There is no cure for informed ignorance!

But I won’t go into the emotional rhetoric of how people don’t care and don’t listen. What I have been contemplating and what I want to talk about here is how I perceive myself as a feminist man and how I think others perceive me as a feminist man.

First things first. I am a feminist man. In many ways, that’s my declaration of independence, and shapes my identity, my choices and my work.

I, the feminist:

I never liked –isms… still don’t like them. I feel they pigeon-hole people into a single blinkered stream of thought and clouded lens of vision. They restrict free thought, and demand loyalty which is oppressive to human mind and as a consequence, human development (no, I’m not referring to industrial development here). I am too “tilted” as a person to be straight jacketed into –isms.

So when I came across “feminism” not merely as a term but as an ideology, my first reaction was “I believe in it, but I’m not a feminist. I am not an –ist. Period.”

But as my understanding of the subject grew, I realized feminism was not like other –isms. In fact it wasn’t like any other –ism. It was not about blinkered vision, but it opened my vision up. It did not demand loyalty, but simply helped me to view the “personal as political”, and therefore make sense of my own lived experience. It did not monopolize my mind, but helped me understand it better. It provided a validation for my own thoughts and beliefs. I had never lived inside a box… and had gone through my own share of ecstasy and horror for making that choice. Feminism didn’t put me inside a box. Instead, it told me it was okay to not be in one. That was therapeutic.

And so, being a feminist is not the same thing as being a constructivist, post-modernist, Marxist, leftist, this-ist, that-ist. Being a feminist is to believe that patriarchy oppresses, gender justice liberates. And I believe in that, so I’m a feminist.

I, the man:

When I referred to myself as a feminist man a few paragraphs ago, I made a political choice. I could have called myself a “male feminist” instead of becoming controversial by defining myself as a “feminist man”.

So what’s the difference between male and man? Basic Gender Studies 101: Sex refers to the biologically defined attributes of a person… male, female etc. Gender refers to the social construction… in terms of what sexes do… boy, girl… man, woman etc. Mummy is female, Papa is male. Mummy cooks and cleans, Papa drives and earns. Rajiv is male, Ranjeeta is female. Rajiv studies rocket science, Ranjeeta studies home science. Binu is baba, Binitha is baby. Binu plays with GI Joe, Binitha plays with Barbie. Sex, Gender.

So when I refer to myself as a man, do I accept the social constructs of gender? After all, isn’t “being a man” a loaded concept coming with its own set of contents and discontents instead of being a mere statement of fact? Should I be embarrassed to call myself a man, especially when I claim to support feminism and oppose the centuries old oppression that “men” seem to have perpetrated? I have asked myself these questions often. Of course I refuse to accept the social construction of the term “man”. Of course I feel terrible… even apologetic… for what people of my sex have done to women and to themselves all these years. And that’s precisely why I feel I need to define myself as a man. But no, I don’t feel embarrassed at calling myself a man, because in doing so, I believe I am taking power away from the social construction of the term “man”. And I certainly don’t intend to present myself as the harbinger of gender justice. I am just another person who’s trying to understand, analyze and detoxify myself of the patriarchal socialization I have been, and still am, a part of. And I’m a man too. And when I proclaim myself as a man too, I believe I’m helping pluralize the term “man”. I believe I’m doing my bit in shifting the terminology from “man” to “men”… “masculinity” to “masculinities”… and communicate there are many ways to be… some more liberating than the others. Its time we drew clear boundaries between being a man, and “being a man”… and in effect differentiate between man and MCP (yes I know I’m being politically incorrect… but I’d rather be politically incorrect here than be apolitical).

I, the feminist man:

It is often debated if men can be feminists. No, it is not a cynical question (by some “male-basher bra-burning radical women who can’t get married and are jealous of those who have happily married lives”), but a valid one. And this question gets debated even within feminist groups, among women, and among men who support feminism. One popular point of view is that men cannot claim to be feminists as feminism arises out of a personal and shared history of gender-based oppression, which can be experienced only by women. Proponents of this thought, however, do not say that men cannot be supporters and believers of feminism. So the term they have coined for such men is pro-feminist men. And so, the question for me is, am I a feminist or a pro-feminist? And I choose to call myself a feminist.

There are no absolutes to victimization and oppression. We all exchange roles in being victims and oppressors. So we essentially lie somewhere on the continuum of being a victim and oppressor, and therefore end up being a victim-oppressor or oppressor-victim. A victim-oppressor is in the primary role of being a victim, but is also an oppressor in some ways, such as in terms of perpetuating and tolerating oppression. In terms of gender oppression, I believe women would generally fall in this category, since they are the primary targets of gender oppression, but can be oppressors in their secondary role as perpetuators of patriarchy. For example, a woman who demands dowry for the marriage of her son, or abets harassment of daughter-in-law for bringing less dowry, or prays for a male child when she gets pregnant. One can argue that she does so because of the socialization she has been through, but there is no excuse for violence or injustice, and there’s a limit to which ignorance can be accepted as an excuse. But primarily she is the victim of patriarchy for being a woman and therefore has lesser status within the structures of the State and the society. Therefore she is the victim-oppressor. Then there are oppressor-victims. They are oppressors in their primary roles and victims in secondary roles. In terms of gender oppression, men would essentially be in this category, for reasons of creating, developing and perpetuating institutions within patriarchy that put them on higher rung than woman in the society, and for enjoying the benefits of such privileged position. However, they are victims too of the same patriarchal system, as it is as stifling for men as it is for women, just in different ways. For example, a man who beats up his wife because he thinks it is important to establish his status as the “man in the family” and the “head of the household”, and in effect robs himself of the emotional security and happiness a mutually supportive intimate relationship with his partner could possibly bring.

This makes both men and women victims, in one way or the other, of this system of gender relations called patriarchy, while certainly according more privileges to men as compared to women. Therefore, if woman can be oppressors and men can be victims, then does patriarchy remain exclusive domain on any one gender group? Should the focus then not shift from actors who do gender, to factors that are at the root of it? And what is feminism? Working against gender oppression… working for gender justice. And when I call myself a feminist, I am not working for women… I’m working for myself… because I don’t to be either a victim or an oppressor… because I have a discomfort with people being victims and oppressors. And therefore I am a feminist.

Also, even if we go by what I feel is a narrower definition of feminism, which talks of women’s freedom from male-perpetrated gender oppression, it is time we broadened its boundaries. Its time for a men’s movement. Its time men talk of their personal histories and lived experiences of gender victimization and oppression and realize that personal, after all, is political. And for a such a movement to start from a feminist thought will not only be a fitting tribute to what all feminism has stood for and endured, but will also do feminism proud, and not compromise its integrity.

And that’s why I choose to call myself a feminist, instead of pro-feminist.

The I Within Eyes:

I often wonder how I get perceived by others when I speak of myself as a feminist man, or through my work, action, expression. And this is not just about my speculation, but comes out of experiences. And such perception depends so much on the group/individual/population I’m interacting with… and no, stereotypes don’t work here either.

Perceptions of how people see me as a feminist man. Perceptions of how I see people seeing me as a feminist man. Perceptions of how I see myself as a feminist man. Perceptions are numerous.

Am I a sissy? Not “man enough”? Don’t I have better things to do than do this? I must be a sissy. Am I brave? Bold and courageous enough to challenge gender constructs and walk the road less traveled? I must be brave. Am I the good man? “Straight”, yet sensitive? I must be the good man. Am I a hypocrite? Spitting venom against patriarchy, and yet accepting the privileges it allows? I must be a hypocrite. Am I an armchair philosopher? Talks too much and does little? I must be an armchair philosopher.

Perceptions hurt. Perceptions heal. Perceptions vary.

No, I am not a perception. I am not a captive of my eyes… or of other’s eyes. I am a feminist. I am a man. I am I, me, myself and much more.

I am.

What's in a name? just shame...

2006-06-26T23:41:00.000-07:00

A rose by any other name might smell just as sweet. A rape, by any other name, would not cause just as much disgust. Try this.
In India, what is the most natural substitute for the word rape when you speak in any of the Indian languages?

blackening of the face...
loss of honour...
SHAME...
If someone has been robbed, or beaten-up, it is an emotionless expression we find to talk about it. If someone is murdered, any words we use convey sympathy or concern (in the least).

If a woman is raped, Uh-oh... SHAME pops in. And the shame is not associated with the perpetrator of the crime. It is associated with the victim.

There is no mention of force by the doer...
No mention of physical or emotional or even spiritual trauma of the victim...
No mention of sin on the part of the doer.
Not even the remotest indication of violation of a person's identity.
Just shame.

The victim of a rape has done NOTHING to be ashamed about. Yet, the only indian words we have as equivalents, all imply a high degree of shame on the victim... and almost no mention of the perpetrator of the crime.

We are a nation of euphemisms; eve-teasing for what should be rightly called sexual harassment, tel or thailam for what should rightly be called bribery; flowers and birds for kisses and sex on the screen. We, the people of India, do give unto ourselves a culture of temperance. No strong emotions, no strong feelings, no strong words. Everything couched in less intense words; everything couched in less graphic images; everything couched in blurry thoughts.

We as a nation suffer for not being able to see a naked truth. We suffer for not being able to call a spade, a spade; or a rape, a rape. We, as a nation, will continue to suffer as long as we refuse to move the focus of the crime from the victim to the perpetrator.

'What's in a name?', you ask. Everything! A rape is matter of invasion of personal space, as much as breaking-in is an invasion of personal space. The man whose house is broken into, is not shamed. He is cheated, he is angry and he expects the robber to bear the brunt of the guilt. Justifiably so. In fact, rightly so.
The woman who is raped must by all means be eligible to the same set of feelings. The same set of emotions. Yet, the rape victim in India is allowed only one emotion. SHAME!

The SHAME is on us... that we allow this form of cruelty to continue.

2006-04-03T12:45:00.000-07:00

A commentor at Ginmar’s blog links to an opinion article in the Times. The basic point of the article is that the way to stop sexism and related problems in India is to allow female foeticide.

The writer begins by pointing out the fact that, while abortion is legal in India, sex determination isn’t. Now it is true that in an ideal world, you should be able to abort a foetus for whatever reason you like, but the fact is that that would be a problem in India. Aishwarya talks about it here.

The first part of the article presents a fairly sensible opinion in favour of abortion rights. And then it starts to go somewhat off.

I think the best way to raise the status of women in India would be to legalise sex-selection abortion, and allow as many of them as are requested. Without wanting to be all Margaret Thatcher about it ... market forces can be the resolution of many cultural problems.

So the solution to sexism and commodification of women is to ... er ... commodify them.

Then she presents a scenario of there being fewer women than men.

Consider, now, if there were a two-year waiting list for Indian women. Those 1000 men would soon be duking it out for those 793 ladies.

Now consider the words ‘duking it out’. The writer hasn’t thought it through. Consider there are fewer women than men, they are living in a situation where women aren’t considered important enough to be born, and consider the manner in which men would ‘duke it out’ for women.

Put simply, there would be an extraordinarily high increase in the abuse of the women who live. Market strategies are obviously not equipped enough to consider this. And of course, sexism would definitely not decrease. There would, if anything, be an increase in the treatment of women as property, which the writer vaguely acknowledges:

On finally getting his $80,000 woman, the man would then be doing the marital equivalent of polishing his wife every night with protective dubbin, and putting her on a special peg in the hallway.

The only difference between the situation now and then is that it would be the woman’s family who earns money from selling her, rather than the man’s family, as happens today.

Theoretically, the men would be much more respectful towards women, but there is no real basis for this.

The fact that this article even exists is an example of not thinking things through. As a friend of mine is fond of saying, even if you know how to write, it’s no use if you don’t know how to think.

PS: Also perhaps relevant is Matrubhoomi, a dystopic movie on the subject. I haven’t watched it, but I will link to Jai Arjun Singh’s review here.

eve teasing - the claims of ownership

2006-03-06T14:53:00.000-08:00

humiliation, actual and insinuated gender-based violence, violation of privacy and sexual harassment are issues women around the world are tackling. however, its such an established part of our culture that we even have our own term for it. "eve teasing" as its coyly called, is a word of indian origin.

we know it is a pretty old phenomenon - almost something of a tradition. probably if we asked our fathers and uncles, theyd admit to whistling at girls or following them around in their college days. they may hastily add that its a lot more violent now than in their days, but nudge, wink. these things are part of growing up eh? "adolescent pangs".

sexual harassment is condoned by society as an acceptable phenomenon - after all, we do have a seperate blanket term for it. a term to hide behind so that we can forget that what it refers to, is the assertion by men around us that they own women. "their" women. little boys gang up and stand in the corridors lifting up each girl's skirt as she passes, grown men gang up and remove it. men have a societal grant to stare at, discuss and dissect womens bodies as though they are inanimate .

such behaviour is part of expression of "male sexuality". well, no - maybe thats a very narrow view. its also to do with female sexuality - eve teasing tells us that female sexuality is nonexistent if it doesnt exist to gratify male lust. we are sexless feelingless objects except when of interest to a man. if we happen to get hurt in the process, its magnanimously discounted. after all, "these things happen".

what is really interesting, is that even several men who feel upset by such a thing, still speak of how they were only able to stand by and witness their sister/mother/friend getting harassed in terms of the episode being a personal insult to them! again, the woman is passive in the situation, almost a non-element, while the men around her fight either to encroach on or guard her person. should the woman happen to do something, it results in a huge hue and cry - you even hear the occasional "whatever he did, you had no right to do that!".

and intimidation follows: a mob of smouldering tempers, a threat of beating up, acid throwing, kidnapping, rape... if the woman actually braves all this and does something, very often the police capitulate (forgiving, generous authorities) and magnanimously pardon the offender. male dominance is upheld at any cost.

its after all a concept that we have romanticised from childhood. we have legitimised stalking, emotional blackmail and harassment, white-washing them all as acceptable expressions of "love", until we've thoroughly confused infatuation with physical attraction, with love. result: (pseudo) love stories and songs in popculture saying

" I don't care who you are
Where you're from
What you did
As long as you love me "

- backstreet boys, "as long as you love me"

( youre a non-person who exists in my world solely to pander to my needs.)

or

" There's so many times I've let you down
So many times I've played around
I'll tell you now, they don't mean a thing"

- john denver, "leaving on a jet plane"

(isnt that convenient now!)

and so we mutely accept being groped, pressured into sexual relations, fought over like property, even being told that all that is "normal". our former defence minister george fernandes even asserted in parliament (so much for that sacred institution of democracy) that women will get raped in times of conflict. these things happen. stop making a big fuss about it!

yes im bitter about it. very much so. and what breaks my heart more than anything else, is that these guys arent all otherwise thugs and rogues, theyre just average junta like you and me, and theyre participating in a social ritual that they have been taught. the "boys", are being "boys". so we girls end up being sexually abused and harassed women. in this prevailing social order women end up living in a police state perenially : looking over their shoulders, furtively doing a headcount of the other people on the road, being strung up, all the time bracing themselves against the next grope, nudge, leer and isult.

"solutions" like promptly posting cops all over the place, segregating men and women in a vehicle - most animals dont require that treatment - merely underscore and quietly accept that things will continue as they are now.

for a genuine long term solution we need to rethink sexuality and sexual expression so that we can start looking at establishing sexual rights and having mature and responsible relationships. all of which is possible only when we firmly reject the "normalcy" of violence against. speak up against harassment and sexism.

beauty and the geek

2006-03-02T12:14:00.000-08:00

A conversation I overheard sometime back between two poeple who share my office. The "she" in question is a brilliant young teacher who is, for the record, doing an excellent job of teaching a class full of dunces like me. So, of the two gentlemen having this conversation, one is in this class and the other is his friend.

One: (Returning from class looking sapped out and feeling dumber than ever. An effect the class has on most of us.) Man I am so tired.
Other: Oh you had that mechanics class. Tough eh?
One: Yeah dude! If it wasn't for the prof I would have quit ages back. She is brilliant!
Other: Really?
One: She really knows her stuff and teaches really well. She has a double honours degree and a PhD in this stuff. ( Me smiling to myself in the next room, 'cause he is echoing my thoughts) I wish I were that smart!
Other: (With the typical I-am-going-to-crack-the-funniest-joke-ever look) Well yeah, she is smart but, is she married?

For a moment I don't see the connection and then, even as the two guffaw at the "joke" of the geeky "unfit-for-marriage professor", my smile fades away.

The Blank Noise Project Presents....

2006-02-28T17:23:00.000-08:00

the blank noise project is holding a blogathon on march 7th (tuesday) to increase awareness of and discuss how to address issues related to the harassment of women.

please do check out their site.

the common thread

2006-02-24T23:34:00.000-08:00

india's female population is greater than the total of the combined female populations of usa, canada and the russian federation. women are biologically the stronger sex - when living conditions are equal, women outlive men. according to the un figures, the men-women sex ratio is in favour of women in most countries – notably excluding ours. while that’s not surprising, what may be so is that is has grown steadily worse over the last 70 years.

when trying to understand social issues , many times we end up coming back to education, how the lack of it is such a problem, and how only education can emanicipate the minority segments of the population. women, especially in college years, hear so much about how they are privileged to have an education, and virtually nothing on how it may not be sufficient for the problems that they will face in real life. problems of violence and hostility, directed at them because they are female. we are also repeatedly bombarded with the differences in the lives of the educated and uneducated, and several of us start believing we really do have nothing in common, that our problems are distinct, and that ones struggles are disconnected and irrelevant to the other.

there is much in common between the educated and uneducated woman in india. it is another form of social control to fragment a group with the same interests by brainwashing the members to believe they have nothing in common, and thereby stifling communication between them.

while ive a deep respect for knowledge, and therefore the process of education, i do think that its overrated. when the educational institutions are merely pawns of patriarchal culture, the pseudo education that is churned out can be positively damaging. as a result, "educated" women today are so conditioned by institutions that they are less able to stand up for themselves or their children. we are prime examples of learned helplessness. of course, if we show signs of having deconditioned ourselves and really using our education, its unacceptable and we are attacked all the more viciously. (prime example: kerala. with the highest literacy rates in the country, its treatment of women is miserable.)

so what binds womenkind in india?

the female foetus is an unwanted thing, a liability to be gotten rid of if possible. in the last 20 years, at least 10 million female foetuses have been killed in India. and no, that isn’t a predominantly rural phenomenon: illegal screening for sex determination is much more common in urban areas, where educated people are also more in number. so a woman may own a diploma certificate - but she still doesnt own her womb or what grows in it.

if the girl child is allowed to be born, she may well go “missing” – around 500,000 girls “vanish” (a euphemism for “are murdered”) every year. if she does manage to stick around, there’s malnutrition to face. the boy child is given higher priority over the girl, so especially when resources are meagre, the girl ends up starving. thousands of children also die of starvation and malnutrition every year. even in perfectly well-to-do highly educated families we see the women being the last to eat – literally the lowest in the pecking order. its not surprising then that every 2 of 3 indian women are anaemic.

there is a constant threat of sexual violence. our culture not only condones all these, but also treats them as normal. domestic violence is a serious problem, the extent of which is very difficult to gauge because of the social baggage attached to it. according to the UN,

every 26 minutes a woman in India is molested,
raped every 34 minutes,
harassed every 42 minutes,
kidnapped every 43 minutes,
killed every 93.

(of course, in nearly every report you read you will see the fine print bewailing the fact that most crimes against women are under-reported, and what is shown is a conservative estimate.)

increasingly, caste panchayats, or caste-based village councils, extrajudicially punish inter-caste marriages with public lynching of couples or their relatives, murder of the bride or the groom, rape, public beatings, and other sanctions. This is particularly common if either bride or bridegroom is a Dalit.

- Human Rights Watch (2006)

what sexual or reproductive rights? an educated woman may be able to discuss simone de beauvoir’s ideas, may be able to write poetry and prose about her sexuality, but it isnt going to ensure that she is treated with respect by society. the maid servant and college girl alike get felt up on busses, and have men leering at them. they may both also die in some of these street encounters.

in fact, the educated woman's environment includes more unacknowledged violence, greater fear and consequences of stigma (especially where diseases like hiv infection are concerned), a weaker social support network, and increased conditioning by the additional media sources we are able to access. but yes, we have the dubious distinction of at least being recognised by mass media. its an eloquent commentary that even in tv soaps, men struggle with professional setbacks to their careers and relationships gone awry, while women deal with more complicated issues like personal relationships, estrangement from their children, coping with blackmail and personal assault etc. (UN report, 2001), problems that are not any less difficult to deal with or eliminated by schooling.

education hasnt made our lives safer or happier - it may at best have helped us be more aware of our rights and of their constant violation, giving our anger a clearer direction. but for the most part, we lead surprisingly similar lives. plus theres a more valuable and genuine education to be had than primary schooling when women put their heads together and share ideas to come up with solutions to help themselves. in this process, when we are able to speak to each other so freely, we will also be able to pick out the best benefits of our education and filter those to place at the use of the community of women. so its important that we keep reaching out to each other and not let society drive a wedge between us and other women, telling us how little we have in common because one is "Educated" and the other isnt.

patriarchy doesnt make the distinction of education - it merely hates all things female.

us and them

2006-02-20T08:20:00.000-08:00

i very often find, when discussing something like patriarchy, that people who believe it’s a non-issue come up with a line like “why don’t you do something for homeless children or dalit women instead of spending so much time on feminism and antipatriarchy?”. other than the fact that feminist concerns include the very same homeless children and dalit women – its not an either-or – that’s just a rotten way of trying to fragment the community of women again.

Feminism is hated because women are hated. Anti-feminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defence of women-hating. – Andrea Dworkin

buddy-bonding amongst men is so strongly built-in in a patriarchal society, that typically, when a woman is in trouble and turns to the man she knows personally, he often ends up trying to find every conceivable excuse he can to absolve the perpetrator of whatever crime – anything rather than acknowledge that yes, the woman has been hurt, and her rights violated.

a decent guy would feel upset and bothered that he's being forced to take such a call - he shouldn’t, it isn’t fair on him - but it’s a minority who feel secure enough about their masculinity to respect the person before the system and say to hell with the pseudo-macho stereotypes thrust on men.

so at the end of the day we have decent men feeling miserable because theyre coerced into non-choices like that, and women feeling traumatised because they don’t get support or respect from even the men they know.

patriarchal conditioning runs so deep, that sometimes, even women turn against each other and ask the same stupid questions like “what were you wearing that he was tempted to rape you?”. when women put womenkind first – before a race, economic class, country, caste or religion, we move much closer to helping each other and getting somewhere.

The sight of women talking together has always made men uneasy; nowadays it means rank subversion. - Germaine Greer

...... which is naturally why we women keep being taught to be hostile to each other. from the institutionalised mother-in-law daughter-in-law fights, to the stories of female bosses being bitches, we are regularly bombarded with messages about how two women who are talented and intelligent cannot get along well and how they will inevitably fight, gossip viciously and slander each other - and such a total lack of sense and maturity is “normal” and commonly accepted.

The K Brigade

2006-02-12T15:54:00.000-08:00

To say that media and the million soaps that TV brings to our homes everyday has a profound impact on society, would of course, be the grossest understatement ever. Interesting however, is, why it has this effect and at such a scale.

Take hindi serials for example. Most of them are part of the ever growing K-family. Most depict huge and very rich joint families where the men all work in the family business and most of the women sit at home, form teams against each other and hatch plans of doom. The woman who goes to work, is , in all probability the vamp. The prototype vamp has her own custom background score, she makes fashon statements with wierd makeup and more wierd innovations to the traditional sari or salwar kameez.
Its a woman's world inside the idiot box. They fight, they bicker and they bring justice to the world. Men are props, often confused bungling souls who have no clue why they are there and when their characters are going to be killed or when they are going to be brought miraculously back to life, almost always with amnesia and in the vamp's house.

Ask the average viewer why they watch these soaps and they say they "identify" with the characters. Identify with who? Is the real world a woman's world? In the real world will the bungling male let the more intelligent female take charge and make decisions?

They identify with, Ba being sympathetic to Tulsi. They identify with Savitha or Tulsi ( depending on which side of the line they are) even as both the characters fight over Mihir and they identify with Tulsi's wrath when Mandira tries to "steal" him. They identify, also, with Parvati feeling angry at the "other woman", not saying a word to Om and leaving the house and of course with all the puja Shaina does to keep Kunal away from Ramola's evil eye.

Its strange however that stronger points like Tulsi standing up for her daughter-in-law in a lawsuit accusing her son of raping the daughter-in-law recieves no such "identification".Parvati's support for her daughter, turning them against the whole family recieves no such applause either.

Worse by far, is this tamil soap portraying a family of 5 sisters and their widower father. Each of them is married and each has a different kind of marital problem.A middle class set up periliously close to the average urban middle class family. A set up which almost all of the tamil speaking population identified with. Disastrous because it portrays the woman as the typical "pativrata" who will spend all her life crying in a household that shows her no respect, with a husband that couldn't care less and will beat her up at every possible opportunity. People freely spewing dialogues that ,translated, go something like " Your education has spoilt you". She will take it all, cry lots of silent tears, bear his children and get beaten some more for not bearing a son.Another will show a very smart divorcee , smart enough to run a business of her own but still reduced to tears because she is not with her "husband" any more.

Essentially media slots all humans into three types of people. Men,"good" women and "bad" women.Three distinct species, the women-kind fighting for who the Men will listen to. A media student ,an ardent fan of all the above mentioned soaps, found herself locking horns with me. On being asked why media never tires of dishing out such trash she simply said " Because it sells". Point taken. Don't you think , as mass media , with so much impact, you should be thinking of something that would also help society grow? She stared at me with a blank expression on her face, trying to suppress the irritation she was probably feeling by now and said as simply as before " No, that won't sell".

bharatanatyam as constructive feminist rebellion

2006-02-05T00:12:00.000-08:00

(this post was contributed by a feminist i know - an ex-blogger, M.)

There are many of us women who have been cajoled and coerced into joining Carnatic music classes, or Bharatanatyam at some stage in our lives. We usually look back at it as a folly of youth – something you got pushed into by an adult, who firmly declared “It’s our culture and you must learn at least a little bit of it when you’re young.”

Groaning and reluctant, many of us may have endured the phase with a leaden face. Then during adolescence, it’d be the first casuality of the power to choose – it’d have been dropped like a brick, because it was traditional, stick-in-the-mud stuff: uncool and boringly conventional, like thair sadam.

Here’s the crunch: that’s a standard view of dance and music, from a conventionally
rebellious angle. Yep, it takes more than unthinking rejection to make a genuine rebel. And some rebels traced a flaming path based on what they chose to embrace rather than reject – like music and dance.

Much has been said about Rukmini Devi Arundale in he last year or so because Kalakshetra just celebrated her birth centenary. Given her background and the society she lived in, she was a rebel alright – the strange thing is that the most horrifying thing she did was to want to learn bharatanatyam.

At that point of time, society had forgotten that the original pursuit of art was to enable the commoner to experience the divine. Dance was simply entertainment provided to the male viewer, and the dancer (devadasi) occupied a vulnerable, marginal position in society. This state of affairs, combined with a virulent strain of Victorian prudery acquired from our colonial past, ensured that the art form itself fell into disrepute. Both devadasis and their dance were banned.
Fortunately, there were some who were so entrenched in their ways, that they refused to give up their identity. They continued to practice secretly and teach the next generation if they could. But dance (‘sadir’ as it was then called) was a dirty word.

Then came a remarkable man called E. Krishna Iyer. He felt that the art form as such was beautiful, and worth saving. So he persuaded a lady of devadasi descent to perform at the prestigious Madras Music Academy – she was the legendary Balasaraswati.

Rukmini Devi was so impressed by what she saw, that she too decided to revive the dying art. So she gathered the remaining exponents of the art form and founded the Kalakshetra to revive and propogate sadir. It soon became an art form that could hold its own in any perfoming space in the world. But first, in order to delink it from its ‘unacceptable’ past, particularly in order to win Indian societal approval, sadir was re-christened as Bharatanatyam in a historic meeting held at the Music Academy.

Contrary to what you might expect, this lead to an irreconcilable difference between Balasaraswati and Rukmini Devi. They held diametrically opposite views on the essence of dance: to the former, the sexual led to the spiritual whereas to the latter, dance had to be ‘sanitised’ in order to be acceptable and elevated - the sexual had no place.

Fortunately, the former was a brilliant dancer and held her own, so dancers today still have access to varied compositions and can move from the sexual to the spiritual : a complete psychic bridge exists.

It is this spectrum of attitudes that makes the medium of bharatanatyam impressive. It also bridges the chasm that divides the conventional, patriarchally acceptable narrative of relationships and the unconventional, feminist ones – there are compositions about wives and husbands, prostitutes and patrons, about faithful partners, and promiscuous ones where the lover may be faithful and the husband, a philanderer. All of them speak realistically of what it means to be a woman. It is this richness of content and space for the female narrative that makes bharatanatyam resonate for women - from the docilely conventional to the fiercely rebellious.

So learning those old-fashioned adavus may be just the first step in a culturally conscious act of feminist rebellion.

fairy tales and stereotypes

2006-01-31T19:08:00.000-08:00

when i was a kid, i had a pretty nifty collection of story books. i loved reading, and on each of my birthdays, at least one of my numerous relatives used to give me a story book. whether it was a book with those colour illustrations on one side with the story printed in huge thick black letters on the other side, or those small satisfyingly thick books with fine print, books were an obsession with me. and so I got to thinking about the stereotypes we feed our children.

the heroines are almost always pale, slender and wilting uselessly from atop a tower, waiting for a hero to come and transfer them from the captivity of a witch’s tower to the captivity of a castle. it seemed all they were capable of doing, was languishing. if i remember right, one of ‘em even opted to wait a hundred years than lift a finger and help herself!

the tales gently and inexorably instilled those stereotypes in our heads: be figure-conscious, fairer is more beautiful. also, if youre a woman, be helpless. be inert. show no initiative – above all, never try to change or help your circumstances.

i think the most damaging tale for a kid to read, is probably cinderella. cinderella didn’t want to tell the prince she was poor, because a prince couldn’t marry anyone other than a (beautiful) princess. read into another caste. read into even a different socio-economic strata. same principle. but that’s not all - the prince who loved cinderella enough to rummage through his entire kingdom for her couldn’t even recognise the love of his life until she was dolled up again to match the glam image in his head. only when she was in her evening finery did he propose to her. moral of the story: if you want to find your prince and live happily ever after, appearances are everything.

those were the english stories – of our native folk tales, sita was depicted as the picture of paralysing virtue, solidly bolstering the stereotypes of Virtuous Wife, Obedient and Helpless Woman and - this gets me the most - the Husband’s Property, to be exchanged, stolen and shifted around like loose change. (the Ramayana is separate-post-worthy so im skimming over it for now!)

so there we have it. all the young women were this insipid, uninspiring kind. the ones that actually did something, were the evil old hags. the witches, the shrews, the mantharas – if a woman had a spark of intelligence she would promptly cause untold trouble and strife in the kingdom!

one gasps and turns to “alibaba and the 40 thieves” for support. (there’s patriarchy for you by the way – margiana saves the day, and what do they do? they name the story after the man!) but alas, a clever woman just isn’t as acceptable as a pretty dimwit. so while margiana fades into obscurity to the extent of her name changing from version to version, jasmine (Aladdin) lives on....

ahoy and welcome!

2006-01-31T03:26:00.000-08:00

There are several blogs which speak brilliantly about feminist perspectives and issues. The way things are right now, most of these are not Indian, and most of them (quite reasonably) speak from a different cultural orientation. India’s is a unique circumstance. if nothing else, because of the sheer size of population. if nothing else, because of the number of languages, terrains, cultures and the complex social structuring. Because so many religions and power groups coexist. a feminist perspective in India would be incomplete without inclusion of these factors.

if we speak of women being the weaker group in society, our caste problem complicates the issue: the women of the so-called “lowest” caste get the worst deal. it is tempting to say that today we are a fairer, and more equitable society than we were 200 years back. but if we pay closer attention to the plight of dalit and tribal women, we’d figure that’s quite a hollow claim. living in a city, its all too easy to be disconnected from what happens outside our air conditioned ultra-luxurious offices and homes.

while feminists globally argue over abortion and whether the legal system should be pro choice, we in India would probably first have to consider the overwhelming absence of decent reproductive healthcare for millions of Indian women, an unknown scale of domestic violence, and a terribly patriarchal society. however, in contrast to most of the world, we also have the advantage of having once had a very feminist culture – much of our patriarchal conditioning has happened only relatively recently.

I call myself a feminist because I deeply respect the feminine, and appreciate and identify with most of the feminist concerns. I do not however claim that label in the sense of being able to fluently expound all of feminist theory or being able to defend or explain all of the viewpoints encompassed by feminism! this blog is more about discussing the issues that feminism deals with, with as much of an Indian perspective as we* are able to bring in.

(*nb: the "we" is this time not a royal we, but a genuine one! - this blog is going to be fed with the ideas of 2 women and 2 men as of now. )

UPDATE: make that 3 men. the whole team is assembled :-)