Sindhu Shankar is not a feminist, she doesn’t even like them. When asked to speak about them in an English Class years and years (think two) ago all she had to say was that She was not one, that her friend Ramsub is one and that feminists are crazy, out of control women who muddle up their issues by running after dogs in Calcutta. (Another classmate also speaking about his distaste for feminists had compared them to the always overzealous PETA and Sindhu had muddled up the issues by hearing that it was the feminists who were chasing dogs).
So there you have it. Sindhu Shankar is not a feminist, Feminists muddle up Issues and lastly I am one. I agree with 2 of the above suggestions and disagree with one. Firstly I agree with the last statement, I am a feminist. I also agree with the fact that Feminists muddle up issues and lastly I do not agree with Sindhu about her status as a feminist.
Perhaps Sindhu thinks she is not a feminist because the definition of a feminist is muddled and confused, but anyway this post isn’t about why Sindhu thinks she is not a feminist but rather about why and how I think I am one and my muddled views on what feminism means to me.
Feminism for me is about correcting the cultural lag. Years and years ago (think hundreds) physical strength was a rather important quality for anyone with ambition or a family to provide for to possess. A job on the battlefield entailed wielding 100kg swords and wearing armour which weighed 200 kg (sourced from Fort guides across India) and at the same time being able to lift your hand and legs to strike and run away respectively. A job on the field also required strength, as anyone who has tried to guide an obstinate 200 kg Bull to plough a field will tell you. But find me someone who has guided an obstinate bull across a field, hah! You can’t! And therein lies the rub. Tractors, technology have made physical strength on the field redundant. Machine guns and tanks have made strength on the battlefield redundant. Technology has progressed and levelled the battle err. Playing field for the sexes, we, humans haven’t progressed quite as much.
Ok farming and battling don’t remain preferred professions anymore, so why are and why were women blocked from the remaining and now more popular professions. You see years and years ago (in the hundreds again) women spent most of the productive part of their lives producing – children, they spent 9 months of a year pregnant and another 3 months breast feeding and trying to cheat the infant mortality rate of that time. This ravage on her body continued from puberty to 27 when in a tragic but routine miscarriage she passes from this hell on earth to better things in heaven (for having fulfilled her duty as a woman on earth so admirably I presume). No wonder women were confined to the house – being a woman was a full time job, it involved being pregnant, facing off day after day with an army of brats, the household chores and to top it all off, they were routinely risking death. It’s no wonder they weren’t allowed to work outside the house, who wants a hormonal pregnant lady looking after their accounts? And which employer wants an employee who might die just as the 50 foot elephant palace commissioned by the Maharjah is about to be completed.
But you know it’s not like this anymore, we have contraception now, there’s a little piece of rubber out there which has done more for civil rights than any other person or thing in the world. Today women in the “quiverfull” (what god gives we will accept – it’s a sin to use contraception) movement make headlines, “Denver woman gives birth to 18th child” and there are debates about what she’s doing to her body, her life, her children and the global food crisis.
So you see the technology is in place, yet the attitudes haven’t changed, that’s your cultural lag. Technology has freed women from the house, given them time (both within their lifetime and by extending their lifetime) and they have nothing to do, can’t they be allowed to work outside the house? Technology has blurred the lines between the genders, and yet age old thoughts, stereotypes and functions of gender continue to apply.
It’s no answer to say that giving birth is a divine right or the divine function of women, and that women are acting on their basest jealous natures by coveting what is rightfully the men’s domain. To that you need to refer to the bible, when Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden, they were both given punishments, Adams was to toil and Eves was to give birth. Men have helped alleviate women’s punishment, it’s only fair that women return the favour and help alleviate some of men’s burden.
Feminism to me is about allowing men and women to do what they want – stay at home, go out and work, enjoy random sex, enjoy a secure marriage. It’s about helping them to do what they want - Men supporting wives who want to work, changing the laws for a more egalitarian society, raising awareness. It’s not about raising girls like boys but about raising Boys and Girls alike, by teaching both daughters and sons the same values and skills and valuing them the same. It’s about women enjoying the same freedoms as men and men being subjected to the same standards as women. It sounds like equality talk and is equality for the most part, but feminism for me is also about recognizing how far we are from the above utopia, it’s about being aware as a woman woman of the problems I might face, learning to be independent and proud of my gender. Occasionally it even means acknowledging my weakness as a woman and need for help and sometimes it means revelling in my superiority as a woman.
My identity as a feminist was born when I was 10 when my mom gave me “the talk” about sex. Not the Physical act of making love or procreation but the more insidious, the much more delicate one – of sex as a stereotype, as a mental block, as a societal imposition. Bred and raised on Enid Blytons’ (Betsy may to the Five Find Outers) I thought I had grown up on a steady diet of boys and girls having adventures, but that wasn’t so. My mother casually pointed out certain glaring gender stereotypes (too many to enumerate, but the gist that comes out is that Girly things – bad and boyish things – good, only girls who want to be boys have adventures or do things, the rest stay home and hold hands). My whole world came crashing down and I had to rethink my identity as a girl, this grew into awareness about gender stereotyping, restrictions, and finally my identity as a feminist.
Being a feminist is something intensely personal to me, I have never read any feminist manifesto or books or even Wikipedia articles. I don’t know of the history of feminism or the various brands of feminism, My feminism is guided by me, what I see around me, what I hear around me and what is happening around me. It’s guided by my gut, the discussions I have with others and the occasional editorial or blog I might read.
The Enid Blyton episode showed me how the books I read and the movies I watch can influence me and others around me, so I started critically analysing gender roles in them and forming my own opinions. It means that I wait eagerly for the next Tamora Pierce Novel and pull my hair out at the success of Stephanie Meyers inane Twilight series. It meant that I began to notice the 2 sisters , (several aborted sisters) and 1 much younger brother pattern, realized that as a family of three sisters we were rather unique in India and wondered what my paternal grandmother thought of it (she came around to it eventually). I supported abortion and was thrown for a toss when I realized that a beautiful poem that was my mother’s favourite was actually anti-abortion, female foeticide began to trouble me and I became passionately pro-life. Today the right to abortion, contraception and washing machines are the most important rights a woman can have in my opinion (my mothers’ poem was reinterpreted). I am inspired by women all over the world, and saddened by their mistreatment. My grandmother, my aunts all serve as examples I want to follow and when I have daughters (adopted of course!) I’ll point out the strong women in my (and their) family, just as my mother did for me so that they too have close examples to follow. I agree that there is misuse of the dowry acts but I still want them to exist so that that one woman who wants to use it rightly can. I object to stereotypes and got infuriated (and slightly hysterical) when a classmate told me that girls shouldn’t swear but it’s Ok for boys. The quiverfull movements give me bad dreams, the Taliban, LDS in Utah, The Ram Sene and VHP give me nightmares. The men over at saveindianfamily make me laugh with their Rama-Sita-Ravana analogies. The Ramayana enthralled me at age 9 (story!), infuriated me at 13 (agni pareeksha!), and leaves me wondering at age 20 (Sita refused to come back to Rama, Rama had only one wife!). Lastly I get upset when girls say they aren’t feminists, there are so many definitions of feminism out there (all muddled up as Sindhu Shankar would say) that every woman with self respect, dignity, independence, or striving for it, is a feminist. When a girl says that she is not a feminist or doesn’t like feminism, to me it means that, that girl has no identity as a woman, it means she is ignorant or indifferent to the problems that women face, it means she is content and willing to conform with the stereotypes that exist. I think Sindhu Shankar is a feminist.
So there you have it. Sindhu Shankar is not a feminist, Feminists muddle up Issues and lastly I am one. I agree with 2 of the above suggestions and disagree with one. Firstly I agree with the last statement, I am a feminist. I also agree with the fact that Feminists muddle up issues and lastly I do not agree with Sindhu about her status as a feminist.
Perhaps Sindhu thinks she is not a feminist because the definition of a feminist is muddled and confused, but anyway this post isn’t about why Sindhu thinks she is not a feminist but rather about why and how I think I am one and my muddled views on what feminism means to me.
Feminism for me is about correcting the cultural lag. Years and years ago (think hundreds) physical strength was a rather important quality for anyone with ambition or a family to provide for to possess. A job on the battlefield entailed wielding 100kg swords and wearing armour which weighed 200 kg (sourced from Fort guides across India) and at the same time being able to lift your hand and legs to strike and run away respectively. A job on the field also required strength, as anyone who has tried to guide an obstinate 200 kg Bull to plough a field will tell you. But find me someone who has guided an obstinate bull across a field, hah! You can’t! And therein lies the rub. Tractors, technology have made physical strength on the field redundant. Machine guns and tanks have made strength on the battlefield redundant. Technology has progressed and levelled the battle err. Playing field for the sexes, we, humans haven’t progressed quite as much.
Ok farming and battling don’t remain preferred professions anymore, so why are and why were women blocked from the remaining and now more popular professions. You see years and years ago (in the hundreds again) women spent most of the productive part of their lives producing – children, they spent 9 months of a year pregnant and another 3 months breast feeding and trying to cheat the infant mortality rate of that time. This ravage on her body continued from puberty to 27 when in a tragic but routine miscarriage she passes from this hell on earth to better things in heaven (for having fulfilled her duty as a woman on earth so admirably I presume). No wonder women were confined to the house – being a woman was a full time job, it involved being pregnant, facing off day after day with an army of brats, the household chores and to top it all off, they were routinely risking death. It’s no wonder they weren’t allowed to work outside the house, who wants a hormonal pregnant lady looking after their accounts? And which employer wants an employee who might die just as the 50 foot elephant palace commissioned by the Maharjah is about to be completed.
But you know it’s not like this anymore, we have contraception now, there’s a little piece of rubber out there which has done more for civil rights than any other person or thing in the world. Today women in the “quiverfull” (what god gives we will accept – it’s a sin to use contraception) movement make headlines, “Denver woman gives birth to 18th child” and there are debates about what she’s doing to her body, her life, her children and the global food crisis.
So you see the technology is in place, yet the attitudes haven’t changed, that’s your cultural lag. Technology has freed women from the house, given them time (both within their lifetime and by extending their lifetime) and they have nothing to do, can’t they be allowed to work outside the house? Technology has blurred the lines between the genders, and yet age old thoughts, stereotypes and functions of gender continue to apply.
It’s no answer to say that giving birth is a divine right or the divine function of women, and that women are acting on their basest jealous natures by coveting what is rightfully the men’s domain. To that you need to refer to the bible, when Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden, they were both given punishments, Adams was to toil and Eves was to give birth. Men have helped alleviate women’s punishment, it’s only fair that women return the favour and help alleviate some of men’s burden.
Feminism to me is about allowing men and women to do what they want – stay at home, go out and work, enjoy random sex, enjoy a secure marriage. It’s about helping them to do what they want - Men supporting wives who want to work, changing the laws for a more egalitarian society, raising awareness. It’s not about raising girls like boys but about raising Boys and Girls alike, by teaching both daughters and sons the same values and skills and valuing them the same. It’s about women enjoying the same freedoms as men and men being subjected to the same standards as women. It sounds like equality talk and is equality for the most part, but feminism for me is also about recognizing how far we are from the above utopia, it’s about being aware as a woman woman of the problems I might face, learning to be independent and proud of my gender. Occasionally it even means acknowledging my weakness as a woman and need for help and sometimes it means revelling in my superiority as a woman.
My identity as a feminist was born when I was 10 when my mom gave me “the talk” about sex. Not the Physical act of making love or procreation but the more insidious, the much more delicate one – of sex as a stereotype, as a mental block, as a societal imposition. Bred and raised on Enid Blytons’ (Betsy may to the Five Find Outers) I thought I had grown up on a steady diet of boys and girls having adventures, but that wasn’t so. My mother casually pointed out certain glaring gender stereotypes (too many to enumerate, but the gist that comes out is that Girly things – bad and boyish things – good, only girls who want to be boys have adventures or do things, the rest stay home and hold hands). My whole world came crashing down and I had to rethink my identity as a girl, this grew into awareness about gender stereotyping, restrictions, and finally my identity as a feminist.
Being a feminist is something intensely personal to me, I have never read any feminist manifesto or books or even Wikipedia articles. I don’t know of the history of feminism or the various brands of feminism, My feminism is guided by me, what I see around me, what I hear around me and what is happening around me. It’s guided by my gut, the discussions I have with others and the occasional editorial or blog I might read.
The Enid Blyton episode showed me how the books I read and the movies I watch can influence me and others around me, so I started critically analysing gender roles in them and forming my own opinions. It means that I wait eagerly for the next Tamora Pierce Novel and pull my hair out at the success of Stephanie Meyers inane Twilight series. It meant that I began to notice the 2 sisters , (several aborted sisters) and 1 much younger brother pattern, realized that as a family of three sisters we were rather unique in India and wondered what my paternal grandmother thought of it (she came around to it eventually). I supported abortion and was thrown for a toss when I realized that a beautiful poem that was my mother’s favourite was actually anti-abortion, female foeticide began to trouble me and I became passionately pro-life. Today the right to abortion, contraception and washing machines are the most important rights a woman can have in my opinion (my mothers’ poem was reinterpreted). I am inspired by women all over the world, and saddened by their mistreatment. My grandmother, my aunts all serve as examples I want to follow and when I have daughters (adopted of course!) I’ll point out the strong women in my (and their) family, just as my mother did for me so that they too have close examples to follow. I agree that there is misuse of the dowry acts but I still want them to exist so that that one woman who wants to use it rightly can. I object to stereotypes and got infuriated (and slightly hysterical) when a classmate told me that girls shouldn’t swear but it’s Ok for boys. The quiverfull movements give me bad dreams, the Taliban, LDS in Utah, The Ram Sene and VHP give me nightmares. The men over at saveindianfamily make me laugh with their Rama-Sita-Ravana analogies. The Ramayana enthralled me at age 9 (story!), infuriated me at 13 (agni pareeksha!), and leaves me wondering at age 20 (Sita refused to come back to Rama, Rama had only one wife!). Lastly I get upset when girls say they aren’t feminists, there are so many definitions of feminism out there (all muddled up as Sindhu Shankar would say) that every woman with self respect, dignity, independence, or striving for it, is a feminist. When a girl says that she is not a feminist or doesn’t like feminism, to me it means that, that girl has no identity as a woman, it means she is ignorant or indifferent to the problems that women face, it means she is content and willing to conform with the stereotypes that exist. I think Sindhu Shankar is a feminist.
12 comments:
brilliance :D methinks sindhu is quite a feminist herself... who was the ridiculous classmate by the way?
personal opinion is that feminism is an inner thing anyway... Reading feminist history and manifestos don't make you any more a feminist... and feminism redefined.. show this to the MCPs that inhabit our college.. they'll try even to pick this apart and exert their testosterone over it...
Guess Sweetie, you know his name! I had a rather explicit status message after that....
"..when I have daughters (adopted of course!)"
why 'of course'?
Very tangential, still, it'd be nice to know. :)
in order to be sure that they're daughters! because my moms friend has an adopted daughter, my aunt has one and I suspect I am one, Kinda like the whole Idea, plus my gynae very obligingly tells me that I will need fertility treatments and I'd rather go to an orphange. There you go, three reasons, pick the one you like.
this is something I had written on Orkut a long time ago in response to both sannoy and arpita sarkar,
ok -giving up your seat to a girl- this one is tricky, it started out as (i wouldnt call it chauvinism) but chivalry, at a time when women were actually physically weaker, where men were essentially saying "we know we’re stronger than you but that doesn’t mean we're going to take advantage of that instead it means we're gonna protect you" they had chivalry for women and a code of honor for men don’t fight someone obviously smaller than you, so it worked both ways. Now chivalry needs to be done away with and replaced with just a code of honor which works both ways for men and women… and its happening.
• Maybe you get up for girls in busses, but my experience in busses shows me that mostly men don’t care now, in fact in DTC busses they’ll be sitting in the seats reserved for women (it doesn’t bug me).
• Another observation is - I see girls getting up for older women, once a guy with crutches came on( his leg was deformed) no guy gave up a seat, instead a gal gave up a seat, another time I saw a lady give up a seat to a woman who was trying to stand in the jolting bus with a small baby in her arms
So I think the thing these days is that you should try and be helpful no matter what sex, eg. Don’t give up your seat to that cute young thing give it up to that old guy (he needs it more than her!)
And yeah this inbuilt thing about giving your seat up to a girl, it might be irritating to a few girls infuriating to other girls and appreciated by other girls. But yeah there is some sort of latent chauvinism present over here, it’s going away but it’s a hangover which will take some time to pass.
Ah! I loved this one! Agree with you on all of it! :)
and it reminded me of old times... our dear dear swaroop sarkar! :)
I am a proclaimed feminist myself (the feminism you make reference to in your post). As a show of my distaste in reserving local train bogies for women, I travel general on most occassions (the exceptions being when my shoes give away and I cant run to the general). The reaction my presence in the general compartment invokes is mixed. It varies from the 'why are u here when u have an entire compartment to your gender' to 'ah, woman of substance eh' to 'who is your man, amongst the 2 on either side of you.' Once it so happened that on a packed general compartment, I was shown no chivalry (chauvinism) . I stood my way back home. progress if i may say?
Bingo Ramsub... I think Sindhu Shankar and I have had this debate before as well.. As much as she'd hate to admit it... She is a feminist...
This reminds me of a Socio class discussion on feminism. One Mr. Sannoy Das happened to point out how in "common parlance" feminists were these frustrated, ill tempered women shouting slogans and running their anti male and at times anti female (Ms. India) propaganda hand in glove with the media... Oh and he was quick to add how "The feminism Arpita Sarkar talks about is a rare brand of feminism which is virtually non-existent.."
This actually turned out to be my Eureka moment for I realized why so many feminists world over refuse to call themselves feminists.. "Feminism" itself has been painted with these horrible stereotypes that most people hate to associate themselves with...
Me thinks most feminists just face this 'nomenclatural' identity crisis because calling yourself one would mean counting yourself as one among those frustrated women who appear on TV and are quick to slam everything with a Y chromosome in it.. But like it or not... They are feminists and feminists they'll be :) :)
PS: Praveen Togadia ranting on about Hindutva on television does not stop the other 80 crore sane Hindus in India from calling themselves "Hindus" ...
I wonder why some attention seeking bitches should stop feminists from admitting they are feminists...However, here I think the entire debate lies in the definition of 'Feminism' itself...
What the F word means to you and me is not necessarily what it means to these "Feminists in denial" :) :)
It makes me happy to know another feminist, even if she's yelling from rooftops about how she despises "Feminists"! (Yes Sindhu.. I am glad I know you) As Shakespeare put it... What's in a name anyway?
@ swordfishh attention seeking bitches? ouch! that apart, I wouldn't stop calling myself a feminist just to differentiate myself from certain "women" who have opinions different from mine for whatever reasons. and I would definately not stop calling myself a feminist for the sake of one sannoy das or a million other mis-informed men.
There is a nomencalture problem, but like you mentioned one togadia has not stopped millions of people from calling themselves Hindu - now would I want them to. in fact if they stopped calling themselves hindus, that would be tantamount to admitting that togadia is a true and proper Hindu and that they are something else. In such a situation you need to assert your hinduism even more fiercely (without going to nuts about it.... anyhoo......) similarly if I stop calling myself a feminist or if muslims stop calling themselves muslims because of some terrorists, that would be a sad sad thing indeed.
Its a very sad thing indeed..
I actually missed out commenting on this one?
Sorry Ramsub, not all of us stay awake in class. One tends to nod off and then when woken up and asked a question, give a highly irrelevant muddled up answer.
Flattered you actually remember it and amused you think that what I answered in class was actually in response to the raging debate I was quite obviously oblivious of. :)
And Divi & Sarkar, I don't think I'm feminist, that's what matters.
@ sindhu, this was first sem, I know exactly how befuddled you were, but it made for a good start. also, thou art a feminist no matter how much you hate it, stop trying to fight it.
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