By Kashif Mansoor for TwoCircles.net,
Selective feminism
Feminism in its self-avowed celebration of its hallow promises to realise the empowerment has ignominiously flunked to actually understand the basic issue of women emancipation if at all deliberated in entirety. Empowerment going by Merriam Webster and Oxford dictionaries, means giving power/official authority to someone and the freedom to do something. Thanks to modern European philosophers, the idea of freedom has in fact been chained to slavery of narrow perspectives and widely played down.
Deepika in trying to give a push to the movement for women empowerment instead ran down women by basing the 2.35 minute video on the dirty politics of the body, sex and attire choices. The video has become more of seductive voyeurism rather than a clarion call in bringing out the problems of women atrocities and gender injustices inherent in the base of our whole societal structure. Even to have sex outside of marriage is like either falling victim to the lusts of “other” men or you are not skilled at receiving a fair attention from your “own” men, though claiming to dominate and excel above men.
“To wear what you like” has often been seen utterly biased in the narrow context of skinny and scanty clothes. Why cannot the choices of covering in full or what the “other” of womenfolk want to, be HER CHOICES? The Vogue can be accused of selective feminism because at first the magazine caters only to urban elite class of people and secondly the “other” of womenfolk cannot understand such a highly metaphor charged language of the video given the fact that the country is confronting with severe crisis of female literacy.
Both the fashion and Bollywood industry can never be pioneer of women emancipation; they are de facto sanctimonious as they lure females to fall into the trap of consumerism. To have size-zero or 15 is none of Deepika or Sonam Kapoor choices but it is predominantly the choices of filmmakers. They mould and build women into what suits to scenic ambience. The industry of fashion (inclusive of fashion magazines) demeans and belittles our women for the sheer fact that they cannot eulogize the women who are black. This is the dogma of racist feminism.
The domain of choices
I am inflicted by the fact that the Vogue has been instrumental in selective feminism by imposing the MY CHOICES of such women who have access to all modern forms of luxuries and facilities and not invoking into the documentary the voices of the voiceless who have somewhere or the other been subjected to the ghouls of male chauvinism and constrained by the communitarian practices of not having accessibility to get a fair treatment and hearing to their plight. The choices which Deepika and the likes have made are personal choices and thus cannot be construed of as public choices. MY CHOICES cannot be an exact replica of HER CHOICES. It is MY CHOICE to resemble men in vehement protest to ask for equality but it is still HER CHOICE to serenely look what she is and feels confident in her unique-non imitable-copyrights appearance.
Sometimes choices cannot be made at all. The sexual orientations are gender-specific. To unnecessarily quote them as choices is nothing sort of immorality and transcends beyond the natural balance required to keep harmony.
Yet in other cases, choices to be made are subject to a multiplicity of factors like the structure of society, the availability of steering conditions, the feasibility of choices themselves, to mention a few. The nature and mode of social interactions and lack of proper governance sometimes cannot make certain choices be exercised.
It is sorrowful to note that Deepika Padukone has missed out the difference between choices and rights which should have been neatly asserted if the Vogue was really concerned to emancipate our women. It may be MY CHOICE (the elite’s choice) to order an extra Domino’s pizza or bunk classes to attend club parties but it is undoubtedly HER RIGHT (the poor) to be given proper lactation milk and not be aborted at the costs of nasty social institutions of dowry and also be educated.
“You are MY CHOICE and I am not your privilege” does show a highest level of dissatisfaction and wrath that feminism bears as a result of coming in tussle with draconian male chauvinism. And this is true in hard patriarchal society. However men and women are complementary to one another and both exist for and by one another. The underlying message should be “we both are each other’s choices and we both are privileges to each other”.
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(Author is a student of Economics at University of Hyderabad)