feminist blogs

It’s been monday here for a couple of hours now, which means my week here is over. The thrilling, insightful post I should have been writing this evening (instead of watching the Wimbledon finals) will probably be up at my blog sometime in the near future.

So before I go, who else watched the finals? Were they not the best in recent years? did anyone notice the attractive umpire? Thoughts?

Er. Bye. It was lovely to meet all of you. :)

I recently visited a friend in Hyderabad. A couple of hours after I’d arrived we decided to walk to a nearby restaurant for dinner (this was evening. Eight-ish.) and we were walking along, talking about literature or gender or football or something when a man zoomed past us on his motorbike, going in the same direction as we were. As he passed us, he reached out a hand behind him, grabbed by breast, let go, and went off. Ros was looking at something in the other direction so she hadn’t seen him.

That’s the boring part. The interesting, scary bit is my complete lack of a reaction. Ros hadn’t seen it, and for some reason I didn’t bring it up. I did nothing, I didn’t run after him and yell or swear or anything. I turned to a friend and continued a normal conversation and did it so convincingly that I don’t think she even noticed anything wrong.

And this is what really scares me most about the kind of harassment that one faces for being female in public. I worry that I’ve gotten used to it because I can just shrug it off, or if I’m a bad feminist for just letting it go and not doing more. I need to fix this.

I first saw Rakhi Sawant in an awful music video a few years ago, in which she played the bespectacled-but-miniskirted secretary to an improbably attractive boss.I don’t think she was particularly well known back then (I’d certainly never heard of her). Now she’s famous and practically everyone I know hates her.

Rakhi hatred is especially interesting to me because of the number of issues of class and gender it brings up, so many that one post couldn’t begin to cover them. (By which I mean I know this is very incomplete and don’t yell at me later). Conservative critics dislike her because she is willing to wear revealing clothing and doesn’t act apologetic enough about it. The ‘liberal’ upper classes can’t disapprove of her sexuality (though they hastily tell us they think she’s ugly) or they’d lose their liberal cred. But she’s mockable for not having had that much education, for being ‘crass’, loud, often ignorant, and in some circles, for not speaking fluent enough English. As a result, anything she says is taken as a joke. We’ve managed to turn her into a mere punchline. I often suspect that she’s invited onto talk shows and the like purely so that the hosts and the audience can collude in mocking her. I missed the episode of Koffee With Karan (popular talk show/ self congratulatory, autoerotic exercise featuring a successful bollywood director and his friends) on which she appeared, but I’m told that it started out that way. I did see her on a Serious talk show (NDTV’s The Big Fight), where the topic of discussion was role models for Indian women. It was ugly, the other panelists and even the host were smirking at her in a way that was rather obvious. [At one point someone in the audience asked a question about women altering their bodies to look a particular way. Actress Dia Mirza, all pretty and eyebrowplucked and legwaxed, smirked and said that all such questions should be directed at Rakhi since, you know, she was the only one who had done anything of the sort.]

I told a friend of mine that I planned to write this post, and he seemed rather surprised. He said he’d thought that, as a feminist, I would disapprove of her – surely by being skinny and exposing her body she was participating in society’s sexualisation of the female body? And maybe he has a point, but Rakhi Sawant has done more for feminism in India than just about any other media personality I can think of. She’s talked about the casting couch and her experiences with it, something very few women in the industry would do, considering the kind of pressure they’re under to appear virginal and untouched. She’s talked about the eating habits she’s inculcated to stay as skinny as possible (since her income depends on her staying that way), and about her experiments with plastic surgery.

And perhaps most importantly, the Mika episode. Indian musician Mika (not to be confused with the adorable Mika Penniman) kissed Sawant at a party. She says it was forced, and all the video clips and pictures seem (to me) to indicate that this was the case. She sued. Nothing came of it, really – it’s hard enough to have someone found guilty of sexual assault as it is – when you’re Rakhi Sawant it’s so much worse. Responses ranged from a) Rakhi Sawant, LOL b)She didn’t make enough of a fuss at the time/That’s not how *I* would act if someone sexually assaulted me (because, you know, we all follow a sort of rule book for behaviour when something like this happens) c)It’s Rakhi Sawant. She probably wanted it at the time/she’s doing this for the attention. Etc. Mika, however, made a humorous music video about the incident (yes, this nauseated me too). Everyone stopped caring after a while. But it’s important to me that she sued. Compare this to the high profile Aishwarya Rai – Salman Khan relationship. Everyone seems to know that he assaulted her, but she’s never done anything about it; it’s as if it never occurred to her that he could be punished. Then Rakhi Sawant storms in and demands that maybe men should be held legally accountable for their actions. And India laughs it off because it’s Rakhi Sawant.

On the NDTV show Continue reading at Feministe …

Via India Uncut, this story about a woman in Gujarat who protested against dowry harrasment by walking along a road in her underwear, carrying bangles (an important part of marriage in many parts of India) and a baseball bat.

The protest (especially the baseball bat) made me smile a little, till I read the comments. These fall into two groups, broadly. The first group is of the opinion that while dowry is bad, her “nudity” is far more shocking and she should have found a more socially acceptable way of protesting (because that would’ve gotten her media attention, heh) instead of resorting to “indecent ways”. A subset of this group believes that someone daring enough to do this cannot have been harrassed and is far more likely to be the harrasser, because “ultra-modern girls” in India are regularly filing false charges against their husbands and in-laws, and all the laws are biased and won’t somebody think about the men? (quote: “Time has come where media (like CNN-IBN) should take up a debate on such emerging issues, else if the emerging menace of the wife’s torture on men is not capped, BOYS WILL STOP MARRYING BECAUSE OF FEAR OF HARRASEMENT.”)

The second group are more supportive (as in, they think dowry is an awful thing and she was right to protest) but most of their comments go on and on about the terrible, shameful thing the poor woman has been forced to do, the awful depths to which she has had to sink, etc.

Oh, and? The police are planning to arrest the protester. For indecent behaviour.
The news can be terribly depressing.

One of the consequences of being the only literature person in a room full of doctors (parents’ friends, usually) is having to come up with endless recommended reading lists for their children. A lot of Indian parents, and I’m not sure if this happens elsewhere, seem to believe that there’s something inherently virtuous about the act of reading that raises it above ‘lower’ art forms like movies, videogames, comics (which aren’t real reading, apparently) and the like. They want their children to read, but they’re not sure what.

I love doing this. In bookshops I spend more time in the children’s section than I do in the adult’s; something most bookshop owners seem to find suspicious.

After my exams earlier this year my brain briefly rebelled and for a time I could only reread childrens books. I’ve come to love Tamora Pierce’s Tortall books - what a wonderful way to introduce children to issues of gender (and class, but mostly gender) and do it realistically and still be wonderful and entertaining.

I’ve also been recommending China Mieville’s book-for-young-adults Un Lun Dun to a number of people, for various reasons (none of which include making him feel lots of gratitude towards me, at which point we will get to talking and he’ll find out that we like all the same books and..no, it’s nothing to do with that. At all.)

Er. So what’s your favourite children’s book and why?

India’s presidential elections are a couple of weeks away (on the 18th of this month), and a woman, Pratibha Patel, is contesting. This is, of course far less interesting than the U.S presidential elections and Hilary Clinton, since the Indian president a) isn’t elected by the public and b) has very little power to do anything anyway. Our current president has spent much of his time writing execrable poetry and motivational texts.

Since they don’t actually have much of a role to play, the choice of president is often an exercise in tokenism. We have had presidents from minority/disempowered castes, religions, etc before, and though they have been quite good ones, one suspects that their real function was to prove what an equal society we are. I have heard people say smugly of India that the fact that we have a Muslim president, a Sikh Prime Minister and Christian power-behind-the-prime minister proves that we are a diverse and egalitarian country (it also gives the Hindu right wing something to feel oppressed about) regardless of what normal Sikhs, Muslims and women may experience in day-to-day, nonpolitical life.*

It also makes things far easier to pick a president when no one wants to vote against a particular candidate for fear of being seen anti - *insertminoritygrouphere*ist. The ruling coalition is currently accusing the opposition of being anti-woman for…er…opposing Patel’s candidature.

And now all sorts of sinister things about Patel’s past have been raked up, and various blogs are carrying an anti-Patel banner, and it’s all gotten very interesting.

I’m not really that interested in who finally becomes president (though if the allegations about Patel are proved true I’d really rather not have her as nominal head of my country) but I find her candidature rather interesting in the wake of a lot of the debates over Hillary Clinton and the question of whether feminists should vote for her purely because she is a woman. A lot of the arguments don’t apply to Patel, for obvious reasons. The only one that might is the idea that having a female president will somehow normalize the idea of a woman in power for a lot of people – that we need more female authority figures so that people can stop seeing it as an extraordinary thing. (We did have Indira Gandhi. I’m not sure how her years as Prime Minister have improved my position as an Indian woman, though I’m extremely thankful I wasn’t alive during them)

I don’t know. It’s not like I get to vote on it, anyway.

* Patel claimed a few weeks ago that her being nominated was proof of Indian society’s respect for women. The newspaper I read chose to quote her on the front page. Unfortunately they also chose to print various rape reports a couple of pages later.

(Hello, Feministe readers!)