This might be a good opportunity to pause and think.
About what?
Well, in the middle of the mayhem of discounted shopping, happy hours at the poshest pub in town, the endless run of romantic comedies on daytime television, a lethal overdose of Jennifer Aniston and Amy Adams, it is hard to forget that another of the so-called 'Day's is around the corner: Women's Day.
Everywhere the media is abuzz with discussions centred on women's safety, women's rights, women's health, with multinational corporations exerting subtle pressure on our dads, husbands, sons and lovers to be nice to us, women, this once-a-year at least. In other words, every one seems to be cashing in on the immense commercial opportunity such a well timed egalitarianism might open up. The image that it constructs, of the modern woman, in the process, happens to be totally silly and vacuous as a consequence.
A woman comes off as a creature who has to be endlessly protected, monitored, and infantilized by the state and society in order for her to survive in this adverse world. Mary Wollstonecraft, the great grandmother of sexual revolution in the west, lamented precisely this sorry state of affairs back in the 1790s in her A Vindication of the Rights of Women. the more things change, the more they remain the same, don't they?
What all this commercially fuelled effort to prioritize woman-centric products and services does, in a self-defeating way, is to construct an inescapable and insurmountable matrix of what Betty Friedan called 'the feminine mystique'--the trappings of femininity that help perpetuate its passive and intellectually bankrupt stereotype. Interestingly, the liberated woman, downing a drink or two with her girl gang is just another extension of that safe stereotype. It poses no real threat to the patriarchal status quo. It is like a child's mimicry of an adult activity while the grown ups indulgently look on, at least until the child turns violent and starts damaging property.
And what happens when the child gets out of hand? Genuine subversion of conventional morality, a radical reorganization of the status quo: revolution, in short.
Try to remember what the suffragists did at the beginning of the last century and the scale of public outcry it provoked. Think about the media hostility that was unleashed on the Second Wave activists who were simply asking for the right to be recognized as equals in every sphere of individual and collective existence. Nothing wrong with that demand, right?
In recent past, we still remember the Riot Grrrls manifesto with its extreme aesthetics; it is a different matter that the movement failed and fizzled out within a decade,and even on purely aesthetic grounds it was never particularly promising, still a failed revolution does not become politically irrelevant and pointless, just because it failed.
What is common to all these feminist initiatives is a determination to forcibly appropriate the means of power: political, economic, social and cultural. Practical and discursive.
They were just trying to lay claim to what is inalienably theirs: their own bodies and minds. And dominant power never tolerates such disobedience, such genuinely subversive agenda undertaken by the governed class. It would arrest and force-feed a suffragette on hunger strike; it would shoot down an activist who tries to introduce literacy among the young girls in a remote tribal province, and more subtly but equally insidiously, shout 'slut' or 'dyke' in the face of a feminist punk rocker or try to stall the release of a film made by a woman director because it dares to go where the angels fear to tread: female fantasy and sexuality. The official reason cited for the decision is that the film is 'lady-oriented' which can harm the moral health of an 'incredible' nation.
'Lady oriented'? Is it an apologetic euphemism for a murkier 'woman-centric'?( Let's not even go as far as gynocentric) The way the embarrassed Victorians whispered about 'the lady parts'?
Patriarchy has always remained scared of the power of fantasy. A woman's imagination is the true terrorist, the marauding mercenary that detonates the deadliest of the explosives to raze its most complexly constructed facades to the ground. And it is the most imaginatively gifted among us-- the woman artist-- who undertakes this task: to enunciate the collective fantasy of femininity to live in a freer world where the barriers and boundaries restricting us have been conquered. The Virginia Woolfs, The Sylvia Plaths, The Amrita Shergils, the Lady Gagas are doing just that.
In her famous 1975 essay Laura Mulvey ('Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema') pointed out that the default subject-position in popular culture is inevitably gendered male, and the gaze every time is essentially a male gaze that interprets the cinematic experience in commercial cinema. This subjectivity is shaped by patterns of desire that are socially constructed and phallic. It renders the woman into a passive object that becomes a playground for its phallic fantasies. This, I think, is true of the entire history of western culture itself where the female is a fragmented male, a castrated male. Impotent, in the most profound sense of the term. Eve, after all, is carved out of the rib of Adam. She is secondary and derivative in status. Passive and silent, in an ideal world. Randomly look at three celebrated art-works post Renaissance: Titian's Venus of Urbino, Da vinci's Mona Lisa, Picasso's Les Damoiselles Avignon. The woman = a passive subject; the male = the active artist with agency. Isn't the equation water tight?
Changing this paradigm involves a 180° turning around of the perspective, which is not easy. The female avant-garde is a lone crusader, a frontier- explorer who breaks new aesthetic grounds to make hitherto uncharted areas of consciousness habitable for her sisters and daughters. Sometimes, she knows that she is destined to be defeated: Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath had to live with the stigma of insanity for being 'different'; Kathleen Hannah had to regularly endure verbal violence form sexist hooligans among her audience during performances, Wollstonecraft had to go to the edge of suicide to know that a woman must pay the price for being fiercely original in a deeply reactionary society.
And yet, how difficult is it to understand a woman's soul? The unfortunate mystification surrounding it is ancient and trans-cultural. Just break on through to the other side. It is simple and beautiful: the mind of a woman who is creative and free. That is what makes a woman beautiful-- her independence and imagination. Her intellectual and emotional adventures: as mothers, daughters, lovers, or artists. As thinking humans.Without it, her jewels are futile. Do not get us diamonds or exotic holidays for Women's Day. Just listen to us. Understand us. Gift us your empathy and respect, because as Molly Neuman said, we are not anti-boy, we are just pro-girl.
About what?
Well, in the middle of the mayhem of discounted shopping, happy hours at the poshest pub in town, the endless run of romantic comedies on daytime television, a lethal overdose of Jennifer Aniston and Amy Adams, it is hard to forget that another of the so-called 'Day's is around the corner: Women's Day.
Everywhere the media is abuzz with discussions centred on women's safety, women's rights, women's health, with multinational corporations exerting subtle pressure on our dads, husbands, sons and lovers to be nice to us, women, this once-a-year at least. In other words, every one seems to be cashing in on the immense commercial opportunity such a well timed egalitarianism might open up. The image that it constructs, of the modern woman, in the process, happens to be totally silly and vacuous as a consequence.
A woman comes off as a creature who has to be endlessly protected, monitored, and infantilized by the state and society in order for her to survive in this adverse world. Mary Wollstonecraft, the great grandmother of sexual revolution in the west, lamented precisely this sorry state of affairs back in the 1790s in her A Vindication of the Rights of Women. the more things change, the more they remain the same, don't they?
 |
| Mary Wollstonecraft: the Great Grandmother of Modern Western Feminism Picture Courtesy: http://www.feministsforlife.org/herstory/marywollstonecraft/ |
What all this commercially fuelled effort to prioritize woman-centric products and services does, in a self-defeating way, is to construct an inescapable and insurmountable matrix of what Betty Friedan called 'the feminine mystique'--the trappings of femininity that help perpetuate its passive and intellectually bankrupt stereotype. Interestingly, the liberated woman, downing a drink or two with her girl gang is just another extension of that safe stereotype. It poses no real threat to the patriarchal status quo. It is like a child's mimicry of an adult activity while the grown ups indulgently look on, at least until the child turns violent and starts damaging property.
And what happens when the child gets out of hand? Genuine subversion of conventional morality, a radical reorganization of the status quo: revolution, in short.
Try to remember what the suffragists did at the beginning of the last century and the scale of public outcry it provoked. Think about the media hostility that was unleashed on the Second Wave activists who were simply asking for the right to be recognized as equals in every sphere of individual and collective existence. Nothing wrong with that demand, right?
In recent past, we still remember the Riot Grrrls manifesto with its extreme aesthetics; it is a different matter that the movement failed and fizzled out within a decade,and even on purely aesthetic grounds it was never particularly promising, still a failed revolution does not become politically irrelevant and pointless, just because it failed.
What is common to all these feminist initiatives is a determination to forcibly appropriate the means of power: political, economic, social and cultural. Practical and discursive.
They were just trying to lay claim to what is inalienably theirs: their own bodies and minds. And dominant power never tolerates such disobedience, such genuinely subversive agenda undertaken by the governed class. It would arrest and force-feed a suffragette on hunger strike; it would shoot down an activist who tries to introduce literacy among the young girls in a remote tribal province, and more subtly but equally insidiously, shout 'slut' or 'dyke' in the face of a feminist punk rocker or try to stall the release of a film made by a woman director because it dares to go where the angels fear to tread: female fantasy and sexuality. The official reason cited for the decision is that the film is 'lady-oriented' which can harm the moral health of an 'incredible' nation.
'Lady oriented'? Is it an apologetic euphemism for a murkier 'woman-centric'?( Let's not even go as far as gynocentric) The way the embarrassed Victorians whispered about 'the lady parts'?
Patriarchy has always remained scared of the power of fantasy. A woman's imagination is the true terrorist, the marauding mercenary that detonates the deadliest of the explosives to raze its most complexly constructed facades to the ground. And it is the most imaginatively gifted among us-- the woman artist-- who undertakes this task: to enunciate the collective fantasy of femininity to live in a freer world where the barriers and boundaries restricting us have been conquered. The Virginia Woolfs, The Sylvia Plaths, The Amrita Shergils, the Lady Gagas are doing just that.
In her famous 1975 essay Laura Mulvey ('Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema') pointed out that the default subject-position in popular culture is inevitably gendered male, and the gaze every time is essentially a male gaze that interprets the cinematic experience in commercial cinema. This subjectivity is shaped by patterns of desire that are socially constructed and phallic. It renders the woman into a passive object that becomes a playground for its phallic fantasies. This, I think, is true of the entire history of western culture itself where the female is a fragmented male, a castrated male. Impotent, in the most profound sense of the term. Eve, after all, is carved out of the rib of Adam. She is secondary and derivative in status. Passive and silent, in an ideal world. Randomly look at three celebrated art-works post Renaissance: Titian's Venus of Urbino, Da vinci's Mona Lisa, Picasso's Les Damoiselles Avignon. The woman = a passive subject; the male = the active artist with agency. Isn't the equation water tight?
 |
| Subject Picasso, Object Women courtesy: https://www.moma.org/explore/conservation/demoiselles/ |
And yet, how difficult is it to understand a woman's soul? The unfortunate mystification surrounding it is ancient and trans-cultural. Just break on through to the other side. It is simple and beautiful: the mind of a woman who is creative and free. That is what makes a woman beautiful-- her independence and imagination. Her intellectual and emotional adventures: as mothers, daughters, lovers, or artists. As thinking humans.Without it, her jewels are futile. Do not get us diamonds or exotic holidays for Women's Day. Just listen to us. Understand us. Gift us your empathy and respect, because as Molly Neuman said, we are not anti-boy, we are just pro-girl.
