By Ashley Tellis for Twocircles.net
Now that Women’s Day has gone, women will be forgotten once again for the rest of the year. Rapes will be reported every day in the newspapers, children will be mauled, domestic violence will take women’s lives, tribals and dalits will have acid thrown in their faces and be raped and killed and all will be well with the world once again. Corporations and advertising agencies will look for the next day and the next group of consumers to target pretending that they care. Idiots on Facebook will look for new, un-interrogated stories to paste on their walls and new little nuggets they rob from the internet to show how in the know they are.
This is the landscape of contemporary politics where when things are not reduced to Days – a day for Ambedkar, a day for indigenous rights, a day for women, a day for children – they are reduced to earnest sharings of atrocities on Facebook. That’s not the limit of politics (a rather clichéd point about armchair, one-click activism), it is far more dangerous: it is the language of politics.
I have been teaching young women for most of my adult life and I must admit that these women know nothing about women’s history, have no respect for feminism, make fun of suffragettes and ”bra-burning feminazis” and bow down before men. Literally and symbolically. Phallic worship is all that they are into and they love it. They think it is cool. These women do not realise that they are sitting in a classroom because their foremothers fought for their right to do so.
These women celebrate Deepika Padukone and Kalki Koechlin and think their lives too are all about ‘choice.’ They say they ‘choose’ to depilate their bodies of all hair, ‘choose’ to have men open doors for them, ‘choose’ to marry, apparently, even arranged marriages, and ‘choose’ to be braindead idiots. For them, there are no social structures, no institutions. Everything is a product in a supermarket and they ‘choose’ to buy it or they ‘choose’ to reject it. This is in keeping with the political economy of the times. You make who you are; you are responsible for your own life. What you can do at most for another is share his lynching by an uppercaste mob on facebook. The rest is really his problem. Not the structural problem of a caste-ridden and patriarchy-ridden society of which they are part. They do not see themselves as part of the reason why he is hanging from a tree in Tamil Nadu along with his female partner.
They think Deepika Padukone’s PR stunt about depression is a sign of her amazing courage, they think Kalki Koechlin’s pathetic and exploitative ad draped in a towel spouting ‘feminist poetry’ is political performance art. They actually think these two women are intelligent. They actually do not have a problem or do not even see that two big corporate houses sponsor these performances of ‘feminism.’
These women allow their boyfriends to tell them what to wear, how much to eat, whom to hang out with and whom not to hang out with, how fat they are, how skinny they should be. These women hang out with men who examine their phone messages, use their bank accounts, share all their passwords and some of them even have joint emails with them. These women let these men (whether brothers or boyfriends) police them under the signature of ‘looking out’ for them, beat them and perhaps even dig the beatings but are not honest about it and they marry these men and die happily ever after.
Women have to recognize their complicity with their own oppression. They have to realize that they (just like men) are a bundle of contradictions and that not all of these contradictions are tenable. Some we may be able to live with and some we may not, or rather should not. Dissing feminism (and Women’s Day) and claiming to be strong individuals above any ism, on the one hand, or accepting neoliberal capital’s anti-feminist ‘choice’ version of feminism (and Women’s Day) on the other to justify all their pathetic, conservative positions are contradictions that are unacceptable.
It is the sad and sorry failure of Indian feminism that it has not only not managed to instill any sense of women’s history in young women, it has also not managed to counter the capitalist-patriarchal backlash against feminism that has managed to destroy its legacy and domesticate it into some neoliberal fantasy of conservative ‘choice.’
Ashley Tellis is an LGBT rights activist and academician based out of Tamil Nadu.