My Own Private Feminism.

Chapter 1: No, the Barbie Movie is Not Subversive

Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses. - Audre Lorde

In the 90s, like many other women in their 20s, I binge-watched Sex and The City. I rooted for Mr. Big though he treated Carrie like shit, though Samantha was constantly slut-shamed by her friends, though a deeply regressive stench came through loud and clear. Yet, just like that, thanks to the production quality of its escapist fantasy, with thousands (gazillions?) of other women, I tuned in to that Zombie army of four on its insatiable hunt for Mr. Right – and I ate my own brain in the process. As heartily as I consumed it, I knew there was something amiss – fakenewsy – about its ultimately feeble ode to NYC’s sparkling white, single, working gals. It was ‘liberation’ in boneless chunks. It was edgy with no sharp edges. It was one long ad for gluttonous material and sexual consumption in an utterly self-absorbed, intellectually incurious, environmentally unsustainable, spiritually defunct, and worst of all, obedient, manner: Keep collecting those shoes and orgasms, ladies, because that’s what you really, really want! The entire show rested on one of Feminism’s most mangled laurels: sexual freedom. It was at a family gathering in Calcutta in the 80s – maybe Diwali, I can’t remember – where prayers were being offered to celebrate no doubt the victory of Good over Evil - that my interest in Feminism was sparked. It was at this same moment that my interest in religion and its rickety relationship with morality was sparked too I was 10, maybe 11, and there were grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins, swirling, happy, laughing. There was good cheer, ladoos, pedas, food, flowers, and music. It was grand. I loved it all. The spectacle, the special clothes, the smells, the sounds. Shy, except around this family who knew, understood, and adored me so well, it was only here I was able to be what I truly was – a tigress! And beloved. I settled down on a mat with a full view of pretty gods all in a row, the best seat in the house. Immediately I was asked to push off because the boy cousins had to sit there, where it mattered. It is the custom, they said. I was crushed. Humiliated. Enraged. My team had let me down. Did they not love us equally, after all? After my heart broke, I saw red. Fuck The Custom, was planted deep within my soul. It was my Big Bang. The incense incensed. I pushed off as instructed. Off the mat, out the door, down several flights of stairs, to pace the building’s compound and find my way - thanks to the ease with the English language and ‘Western’ culture that post-colonial Indian elites make sure their offspring have - into the loving arms of Betty Friedan via Madonna and her Black Jesus. I was not taught feminist rage, I was not shown misogyny. I did not read about The Patriarchy. I felt it first-hand. I was inoculated by this relatively fangless event against what was to come with every grope and grab of my body, every fondle and flash from the oily men on the street. I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks. - Sarah Grimké, 19th-century American abolitionist and women’s rights pioneer.

As a teen growing up in Bombay, I thought the ‘roadside Romeos’, the ‘eve-teasing’ - those carefully chosen phrases for the bullying, intimidation and terrorising of women and girls - were something to be borne, like a stench from a gutter. Something to be ignored, to be avoided, steered clear of, not something you could really rally against. Like all my female friends, by the time I was twelve, I learned to walk the distance from the school bus to the school gate with my elbows out (defence) and poke hard in the ribs anyone who got too close (offence). I knew no one was allowed to touch me, and so by the time I was fifteen, I was a one-woman-street-gang, daring any piece of shit to so much as brush against my shoulder, and BAM! My fist would be in his chest, and he on the ground, wheezing. I once shoved a man on Fashion Street for leering at my mother, sending him, his clothes stall and three others down like dominos. True story. In a memorable incident from this period in my life, a postman had fallen down a very long staircase at Victoria Memorial in Calcutta letters a scatter, because I had kicked him. Hard. In the arse. Moments earlier, he had touched mine as we squeezed through a narrow corridor. It took a few seconds for me to recover, turn around, and chase him down. As I looked at him sprawled motionless below, for a moment I thought he was dead. I was terrified. For women, the only alternative to being a feminist is being a masochist. - Gloria Steinem, The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off!, 2019.

Retrospectively, I guess the kick was hyper-fuelled by a collection of things: The balls of the lungi-man-flasher outside the middle school gate that we could never un-see. The cycle-delivery man that stuck his foot out as he rode by to stab my best friend in the crotch as we attempted to cross the road to the sports field to play. The BEST bus conductor who squeezed another friend’s breast so hard she cried. The sweaty beast who swirled his tongue at me from a bus as I walked down Colaba Causeway. The man who would shout ‘Chaddi Pehelwan!’ every morning as a classmate and I trained in shorts at Priyadarshini Park.

Post the Victoria Memorial incident, everyone clapped. Which is weird because I had been quite violent. I was shaking with fear of having thought I had killed a man. It didn’t feel good. But it was very funny. How he scrambled! Ran for his life, afraid he’d be lynched by the righteous mob for ‘violating a woman’s modesty’.

Hilarious! But not really. Because. Because something I couldn’t put my finger on till much later when stories from friends who had been raped (who knew there would be so many?) cast my little skirmishes in a new light. They were links in the same chain. Threads in the same noose. Watch your step girlie, or down ye shall fall, into the gallows. Cross your legs, sit properly. Don’t tempt fate.

Growing up female, this is what I learned: the fetishisation of women’s bodies warps our minds. We are attacked from without (only the degree varies) and we are attacked from within (I am too fat, too thin, too slutty, too frumpy, too this, too that - never right). Food, fashion, marriage, motherhood, career, carer. Everything is loaded. Understanding the full implications of this reality can take a long time, but it’s worth the wait. It will piss you off, but it will set you free. By my mid-twenties, I’d noticed the gag order on women everywhere and become aware of my complicity in it. How afraid I was of pouring myself out. How well I hid. Meanwhile, The Aunties noticed how unmarried I was, but had stopped asking why. They must’ve thought there was something deeply wrong. Which, in my desi microcosm, there was. I was trying to take my own advice. In a 1997 Indian edition of Elle Magazine (in my first ever published piece called ‘Fairy Tale’), I declared: “Before you find the man under the bed, find the woman on top”. Like most girls, I had sent that woman packing myself. But I hadn’t done it without help. I read about global capitalist forces that with their repetitive one-size-fits-all images had implanted deep self-doubt in girls and women across the world and that it was done intentionally, with the help of psychopathic tactics of marketing departments, to keep us sad - and shopping. I thought that their intentions were no more evil than that bottomless bottom line, and like everything else about late-stage capitalist profiteering, it was just that the true human cost didn’t matter. They were not out to get women, we were just collateral damage. Bycatch. But In 1991, the accusations in Pulitzer Prize winner Susan Faludi’s ‘Backlash’ suggested that in a historical trend that occurs whenever women make major gains, the media punished the attempts at escape. Women were, by the 80s, being made to feel they were more miserable than ever, now that they were “equal” to men. Even the most “liberated” ones began to reject Feminism, the movement that had bestowed upon them all their power. It was a true romance: Corporate Culture Weds Patriarchal Culture. A strategic alliance, the most brilliant of all Mergers & Acquisitions. Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage only seeks to adorn its prison. - Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792.

Before Sex and the City’s Carrie and her BFFs exploded onto the scene, Naomi Wolfe’s influential The Beauty Myth had. The theory was that 90s feminism - shattered glass ceilings and all - was a major slip back for the Women’s Liberation Movement. Despite the gains of the suffragettes in the 20s and the second-wave feminists in the 70s, something had been lost. Despite the votes, (not quite) equal pay, sexual freedom and reproductive rights, something was missing. Stolen. Extracted. Or rather, inserted, The Matrix style. By the 90s women came implanted with a bug. A self-tracker. A gift from foot-on-the-neck Patriarchy to a new, colonisation-from-within-kind. But too much has been said already about Kate Moss, ‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’, botox, anti-ageing goop, fairness creams, thigh-gap, and implants. The tall, skinny, blonde standard of the 90s is firmly behind us. Right? Wrong. Barbie’s back. That the film is one long neon cliché that will gift Greta Gerwig and Mattell a bunch more money, landfills a bunch more plastic and Instagram a bunch more toxic content for girls is one thing. But that it has noticeably moved The Beauty Industry further into the abyss is another.

Data shows the Barbie movie is indeed popularizing typical Barbie appearance ideals. The day after the trailer dropped, Google searches for blonde hair dye tripled. Articles on “Where To Buy The Exact Self-Tanner Used On The Barbie Set” popped up in the usual places — Allure, Cosmo — but also on news sites like the Independent, the Guardian, and the Daily Beast. Vogue India published a piece suggesting Too Faced Lip Injection gloss for “pouty” Barbie lips, and board-certified doctors started offering “Barbie Arm Botox” and “Barbie Butt” procedures. I recently received an email about a new contour palette (“Barbie’s Secret To Snatched Cheeks!”) that claims to make users appear as “Perfect As Plastic.” Barbiecore is the look of the summer. - Jessica DeFino, Barbie Has Cellulite (But You Don’t Have To), The Unpublishable. So, No. The Barbie movie is not subversive. Or empowering. Or ironic. Apart from the fact that Ryan Gosling’s Ken is the most interesting thing about it.

Between commercial influences, social pressures, and the constant threat of violence, women have not arrived. We’ve been led up the garden path. The rot is planted early: Cross your legs. Sit properly. Don’t tempt fate. You pretty, sexy, little girl!

Chapter 2: We need to talk about Ken

“Why? Why are you hitting me?” He leaned down and looked me right in the face. “If I didn’t hit you Minny, who knows what you become”. - Leroy to Minny, The Help, Katherine Stockett.

I survived girlhood relatively unscathed. How had I dodged the bullet? Was it because I had most often followed the rules? “No playing at the back of the building” (where mother couldn’t see), “no playing downstairs in the afternoons” (when mother took a lie down), “no going to the yoga centre” (where the manager raised mother’s hackles). And later, “no drink driving” (we will fetch you whenever, wherever) and “no sneaking around” (whatever you intend to do, do it here, under our roof, where we can protect you). Like most girls, I had nightmares of being chased and daydreams of my plan of action were I accosted in a dark alley. Eyeball gouge? Kick in the nuts? Chest stab with pen? Pen-knife to the jugular? What if there were more than one? I was told that most likely a weapon would be used against me. That I would freeze in fear. I learned to play it safe. I learned that the best protection was a dependable man close at hand. Dependable men. Bless ’em. Because I grew up in Bombay with its smaller, relatively less-aggressive males, I realised only much later that the shoving, kicking and cussing I got away with as a teen would have got me raped and killed in Delhi. My social class wouldn’t protect me there, on the contrary, it would perhaps have made it worse. I had heard the stories. From abductions to garden-variety marital hell fires. And at a railway station in my early 20s, I felt its breath on my neck. Returning from Agra with friends from college, I had whacked a towering mountain of a man with a water bottle and made impolite suggestions about what he could do aside from brushing up against us. I received a paan-stained hole of a mouth shaped into a sneer and a look from blood-shot eyes. Murderous – is the only word to describe it. No fear. No shock. Not a single bystander jumped to our defence. We fled the scene. It was a dawning. The beginning of internalising that cultural commandment I had rejected all my life: Sit properly. Cross your legs. Don’t tempt fate. By my late 20s, I had lived on my own in Goa for months and had learned to forgo solo walks in moonlight. I was back in my apartment by dusk with a bag of momos from the Tibetan place, ready for a night of writing, reading, and watching DVDs. Having bolted the doors and windows and checked them again. Twice. The avoidance danger, of stargazing on beaches, of not going where the heart desires, was a small sacrifice, compared to the Pit of Hell. Right? Right. Finally, I had grown up. Accepted. And began to wonder: what was the collective effect of these small sacrifices? Of forever being aware of The Threat? Of always being grateful, indebted – indentured – to dependable men? To what degree have women been infantilised, disempowered, disallowed to be fully who we are, by accepting – having to accept – that the only place we can be a tigress is not in the sacred wilderness we seek, but in a square of astroturf, guarded by father, brother, husband, son? By 2012 my kicking, punching days were behind me. Knee-deep was I now in shiny new babies and mammalian joys: I bore live young! I produced milk! My body was not too fat, too short, too this or too that. My body was a wonderland. Meanwhile, in South West Delhi, a 23-year-old paramedic named Jyoti Singh was having a different experience with her body parts. Six men on a bus had shoved an iron rod up her vagina in a manner that caused her intestines to spill out. It is said she was with a dependable man at the time. One who could not save her. The media called it ‘sexual assault’. It was the Deepest Pit of Hell. Deep beyond a womb annihilated by hate. Deep beyond the reach of newspapers braying for blood. Deep beyond my capacity as a young mother raising two small boys to know what the hell to do with the information. Those men once were babies. What had happened to them? When did it begin? In utero? On tricycles? At the first hint of moustache? In the primordial ocean? The plains of Africa? In the fertile crescent? When? My only sibling being a sister, growing up I’d missed the memo. Or hadn’t paid attention to it: Boys don’t cry. Boys are brave. Boys love sports. Especially football. Also cricket. Boys have short hair. Boys wear boy clothes. And most grotesque of all: Boys will be boys. One afternoon - soon after my babies started primary school - while reading Raising Caine: Protecting the Emotional Lives of Boys, I wept. For fathers, brothers, husbands and sons everywhere. The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead, patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem. – bell hooks, The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, 2004.

In the Barbie film that spawned a head-spinning number of corporate partnerships and cosmetic procedures, Ken knew there was something (apart from genitals) missing from his life. He longs for Barbie’s love, attention and respect. He has low self-esteem and feelings of worthlessness. Every night was Girls’ Night. Barbie had a Dreamhouse and over 200 careers, including some in STEM fields. He? He was Just Ken, his job: ‘Beach’. Barbie had no idea where Ken lived and didn’t care. Ken owned nothing, was nothing. Ken had no power. Ken had The Problem That Has No Name.

The Kens in Barbie Land - the film seems to suggest - are Women under Patriarchy; the Barbies, Men in the Real World. Well, I propose: The Kens in Barbie Land are Everyone under Corporate Capitalism and Barbie is Elon laughing all the way to Mars. This film - feature-length tribute to Bimbo Feminism and America Ferrara’s ‘it’s literally impossible to be a woman’ outburst and all - is not disruptive. It’s a box-office sensation during the historic SAG-AFTRA double union strike. It is The Status Quo. Except. Except for Ryan Gosling, who has delivered a Ken so nuanced and so important, that if they made a sequel centred on him, not only would I go, I’d even buy the sweatshirt. No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility. ― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949

Chapter 3: In Which Midge is Aborted.

The only Barbie I ever owned was a ballerina, blonde and blue-eyed with a frilly white tutu and a tiara stuck permanently in her head. My ballet teacher, unhappy with how I had worn my hairband told me as she adjusted it: “We come here to look more pretty, not more ugly!” I was nine, and that was how I broke up with ballet - and Barbie. If like me, your discomfiture with ‘Barbie as a feminist icon’ has been threatening to disappear into The Great Pink Fart released by the Barbie movie (she broke 50’s gender stereotypes, Barbie for President etc), here’s yet another tidbit that may help clear the air: Midge - the preggers Barbie - was cancelled, not because she had no vagina, ovaries, or uterus, but because she had no husband. Midge was introduced in 1963 (the same year Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking The Feminine Mystique came out) to dispel the idea that Barbie looked like a sex toy. Odd, because Midge looked like… a pregnant sex toy. Which was not in itself odd because Barbie and Midge were modelled on the Bild Lilli doll which was based on a German comic strip about “a post-war gold-digging buxom broad who got by in life seducing wealthy male suitors”. Lilli the doll sold in adult-themed toy stores and tobacco shops and caught the attention of Ruth Handler on her travels. Handler grabbed a few Lillis on her way back home to California where she co-founded Mattel (the first company to ever directly advertise to children). In 1956, Barbie was born in the USA, manufactured in East Asia and hardwired into the minds of little girls all over the world. Sometimes, and where appropriate, she is available in hijab. Let us never cease from thinking—what is this ‘civilization’ in which we find ourselves? What are these ceremonies and why should we take part in them? What are these professions and why should we make money out of them? — Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938) Though ‘Wedding Day Midge’, complete with husband Alan, made an appearance at some point, she was - fetus and all - eventually aborted in 1967, soon after the first oral birth control pill became available and just before the historic Roe Vs Wade judgment was announced by the US Supreme Court. Barbie was right there at the start of Feminism’s Second Wave and boy did she ride it. Too bad Midge wasn’t around to see. I think we would have learned more about what was coming for 90’s women from her than from all the rest put together: Hello skinny, supermom-CEO with thigh-gap, you rich, successful, happy MILF with a full head of hair! I completely understand why Mattel loves Barbie so much. She’s a cash cow. But why are grown women in their 40s and 50s - the ones who have suffered most deeply from the beauty standards and social expectations that Barbie exemplifies - having sleepovers in pink pyjamas and pulling their daughters into the abyss with them? As if it’s not weird enough that a ‘career woman doll’ that claims to make a departure from traditional ‘baby dolls’ that trained girls ‘only’ for motherhood can literally not stand on her own two feet. Fun facts: Anatomically speaking, it’s said that if Barbie were a human, she wouldn’t have space in her torso to fit vital organs let alone a uterus, and wouldn’t have enough body fat to menstruate. Also: Mattel recently released a $55 vintage Midge reproduction doll, giving collectors/entrepreneurs selling the original 1963 model for hundreds of dollars online a run for their money. It’s a doll-eat-doll world out there! In other Barbie movie news: A few days ago it was reported that this was the first-ever film directed by a woman to hit the billion-dollar mark, drawing $459m in the US and $572m internationally (so far). Zugzwang! Market values - the only kind that makes a splash these days - have taught us well. Money is Power. Women have had little access to either, historically speaking, and so, therefore, obviously, Greta Gerwig is Mother Goddess. Feminism Weds Capitalism to Smash The Patriarchy. Or as Missy Elliot said best: | Girls, girls, get that cash If it’s nine to five or shaking your ass Ain’t no shame, ladies do your thing Just make sure you ahead of the game. Women have been making babies since the beginning of time. Mother Goddesses Left to Right: Tlazolteotl, Aztec goddess of sexuality, vice, purification, lust, and filth; Venus von Willendorf, Paleolithic fertility deity, Lajja Gauri, Hindu goddess associated with abundance, fertility, and sexuality; Midge, Barbie’s preggers BFF now available without a vagina, ovaries, or uterus, courtesy, Mattel! Before Gen Z was born, their mothers were told that attachment parenting and extended breastfeeding were best and also that the community support and family structures that it took to achieve this without killing them were disintegrating. Also, mass education was based on an industrial model - a dinosaur that could not prepare their kids for the technological disruption that was coming. In addition, environmental collapse and nuclear annihilation were imminent. And so, along with freshly-minted primates, Gen X birthed what had been gestating since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution: The Age of Anxiety. When my boys and their classmates were not yet five years on the planet, they knew the difference between ‘good touch’ and ‘bad touch’. The data said that all children, male and female (at least up to a certain age) were equally vulnerable to predators. Not only that, we now must slip between the pages of Good Night Moon and The Very Hungry Caterpillar, conversations about gender identity, sexual orientation, race, caste, and class privilege. ‘Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better’ said Maya Angelou. She was right. We were listening. But we were charged with helicoptering and coddling. Hovering and smothering. Not giving the kids room to breathe, to grow, to learn from their mistakes. All true. But consider the options presented to us in the ‘post-truth’ environment we were bequeathed. On one side the not-so-wise old men and women of the global village that had over-protected their daughters, unprotected their sons, wrecked the planet and caused untold suffering to themselves and others by ignoring their mental and physical health. And on the other, the nebulous ‘Them’ of the Parenting Section with the population of a small country. Each generation tends to see the one after it as weak, whiny, and lacking in resilience - Johnathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind

A few years ago, my older son - about eleven at the time - asked me genuinely perplexed: but why do men think they are better than women? To him, surrounded by females who loved him, protected him, fed him, read to him, taught him cool stuff, and not a single creep among the men closest to his heart, misogyny was a mystery. I mumbled. I stumbled. I applied the Feynman Technique (if you can’t explain it to a child you don’t understand it yourself) and I realised it was a mystery to me too.

Yes, I had long accepted that misogyny existed, that we had to Smash The Patriarchy through acts personal and political but I could not see it clearly. I knew it was there only from the effect it had on everything else. How it sucked everything into its gravity and absorbed all the light. Misogyny was a black hole. But what giant stars had collapsed for such an abyss to have formed in the first place? And why - considering Women’s Liberation, the most successful social movement in the world affecting 50% of the population - was it not taught at school? Could it be for the same reason that Climate Science isn’t either? Because by and large, schools exist to create a literate, obedient workforce that will oil The Machine, not an enlightened global community that will topple it?

This rabbit hole took me back to the first time that as a child I slammed into the Status Quo. To quote myself: “I was not taught feminist rage, and I was not shown misogyny. I did not read about The Patriarchy. I felt it first-hand.” It stirred me from my stupor and towards my parent’s bookshelves where I met Betty Friedan, Simone De Beauvoir, Shere Hite, Erica Jong et al. My introduction to Feminism sprang from lived experience, my own, and then that of white, middle-class (mostly) American women.

As a product of British colonialism that’s hardly a surprise. Indians with any means make sure their offspring master the English language, and so for me and countless other Indian women, Western Feminism was the gateway that took us on a journey from Betty Friedan through Gloria Steinham to Intersectionality. Our Own Private Off-White Feminism led us right back to ourselves.

I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other… allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness. ―Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

Around the same time that my son asked me about misogyny, a mom-friend called, distraught. There was something off. Her twelve-year-old son didn’t play Fortnite with the other boys online and constantly sketched - horror of horrors - Niki Minaj! What does it mean? How would this affect his life? What would the other children think? Say? Do? We knew she would have to work hard to make his little world - the one that she could still control - a world in which drawing girls with pink hair is as admired as firing the right weapon for a perfect gunshot to the head in a video game. Their saga continues. He’s holding his ground. She’s the ground beneath his feet. Under the Patriarchy, everyone is under assault. We’re being beaten pink and blue.

We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters. - Gloria Steinham

But we held each other’s hands and we bumbled through, and soon enough came #MeToo. Now we had to talk early about consent. But how early was early? In utero? On tricycles? At the first hint of moustache? A new fear engulfed us. What if it’s too much too soon? What if it’s not enough? Someone’s fourteen-year-old son was accused of sexual harassment by a female classmate. Someone else’s fifteen-year-old daughter sent her boyfriend a disappearing photo that didn’t disappear. The lines were getting blurry. Who to protect from whom?

A flood of flashbacks: That friendly uncle. That affectionate boss. Those opened doors, that protective arm, that chair pulled out. Were those indignities? Rapey, even? What the hell is going on? How must we teach our boys to be? Parents of sons have ‘the talk’. Birds and bees long flown, now it’s about the ‘icebergs of filth’ that float towards them online. We have been warned by none other than Bille Eilish to protect our children’s chances at real-life intimacy in their real-life future. Conversations thicken. What’s right? What’s left? What’s woke? What’s broke? Modern parenting is a freaking minefield.

Chapter 4: Who’s Cleaning Toilets at the Dreamhouse?

Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. ― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949.

’Women’s Work’ is drudgery. Unpaid. Uncelebrated. Yet without it, society would collapse. As I gaze upon the pink abscess called Barbie’s Malibu DreamHouse on Airbnb, I can’t help but think about the people employed to clean it in the Real World while its residents frolic in Barbie Land. Is my house help, paid for her labour, an extension of the massive inequity that makes this fantasy life possible? Or is she the ultimate subversion of Patriarchy because I pay her to set me free, allowing us both to participate in the formal economy? Is it a win-win? Or am I being naive? Both? Here is a 1973 poem (one I would not dare analyse but felt the need to share) entitled ‘Who Said It Was Simple’ by Audre Lorde, self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”, that provides some answers:

There are so many roots to the tree of aner that sometimes the branches shaer before they bear. Sitting in Nedicks the women rally before they march discussing the problemati girls they hire to make them free. An almost white counter passes a waiting brother to serve em first and the ladies neither notice or reject the slighter pleasures of their slavery. But I who am bound my mirror as well as my bed see causes in colour as well as sex and sit here wondering which will survive all these liberations.

Gentle reader, I know what you are thinking: Kenough already! I want to move on. I do! For your sake as much as for mine. I even tried re-reading A Room of One’s Own to exorcise She Who Must Not Be Named, but still, I find myself sinking further into The Great Pink Bog. Clearly, Mattel has got under my skin. I know I must Cold Turkey, so this is my promise: Post this post, no more B word.

But before I burn her at the stake, may I leave you with this fagot for the fire: Magic Earring Ken and Sugar Daddy Ken were the most fabulous dolls of all, and they, along with poor pregnant Midge, were cancelled. Aborted. Banished. Un-Represented! But like whack-a-mole, bash her with a gavel as many times as you please, Barbie shall come back to haunt us again and again. Her Skinny Cis Blondeness won’t go away. Grinning like a banshee, cackling like a witch, screaming like a Siren as we crash and burn around her, she’s here for the long haul. So I acquiesce. Barbie is powerful! And dangerous.

Case in point: A few days ago at a screening of Asteroid City in Bombay, I met a smart, spirited young Indian film actress dressed in a block-printed short-pants-suit and tan Oxfords - in a nod to Wes Anderson. Her friend wore pink trousers and a matching shade of lipstick (in a nod to The Grand Budapest Hotel?). I listened as they discussed the Hollywood strikes, Satyajit Ray’s influence on Scorcese, and how AI might affect the Hindi Film industry.

One of them said Ray thought Indian audiences were daft. The other said, he was right, and that Oppenheimer was meh, brushed over women scientists in The Manhattan Project, underutilized Florence Pugh, and that we’d never know what Japan really thought because the Internet won’t tell us. They loved Bollywood song-and-dance, Hollywood rona-dhona, and everything within and beyond that binary.

They were smart and fun and far from formulaic. They were Hope in the Millennial flesh! But as the doors opened to WesWorld where gentle pastels and bright palettes have been delighting us for over a decade, Pink Pants said how grateful she was to the Barbie movie for ‘bringing colour back’. That’s the power of the repetitive image courtesy a gazillion corporate tie-ups. Hail Goebbels? To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle. - George Orwell, Under One’s Nose, 1946

I love pink. Pink is my favourite type of sunset. Orange too. But will one colour now forever be conflated with a blondified voodoo doll (Weird Barbie wtf?), and the other with a bad case of Hindutva? Will we ever again be able to dress without accidentally summoning someone else’s icky agenda? “Womanism is to feminism as purple is to lavender,” said Alice Walker, and to her scholarship, may I humbly add: Pink is to Blue as Barbie is to Ken, and together, they are the Anti-Rainbow.

Mattel, through their hideous progeny, have made flesh the Oppressive Duality. The one that we should all - beyond the binary or not - be trying to escape. The one that limits our imagination early and often. It stalks us at the toy store, at the department store, at school, at work, at all of life really, telling us what and how we should be. Or more accurately, telling us what and how we should pretend to be.

As a trans woman who writes and thinks a lot about film, I found the [Barbie] movie’s approach both deeply frustrating and strangely resonant. Yes, the film does well by trans people in some regards… Yet the film’s story line and its politics set up a kind of pure distillation of womanhood that seems specifically rooted in the cisgender experience and affords little room for anything outside a rigid understanding of gender. - Emily St. James, for The New York Times

I was introduced to the term TERF - Trans Exclusive Radical Feminist - at a centre for the arts by a 13-year-old girl as we watched a performance by Rainbow Voices, India’s first LGBTQ choir. Her earrings were this shape ♀. She said she was done with Harry Potter because Rowling was a TERF. It was the first time I felt I had to sit at the feet of a child and listen. Which is what I did. And this is what I learned:

I am not a fan of the platform formally known as Twitter where the JK Rowling fracas took place. Nor am I a fan of Harry Potter - aside from the fact that the series fueled an interest in actual physical books for the Digital Generation. I am a fan though, of kids, storytellers, and Feminism, and I realised I hadn’t been paying attention. JK Rowling’s toxic tweet-fest was one thing. But Chimamanda Nigozi Adiche too? I had gifted Dear Ijawele, A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions to so many people! My self-identity was now a-wobble. Dear Audre Lorde, what had I missed? Was I not bad bytch adjacent after all?

♫ Well, I’m not the world’s most masculine man, but I know what I am and I’m glad I’m a man, and so is Lola. Girls will be boys and boys will be girls, it’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world, except for Lola. La-la-la-la Lola. ♫ - Lola, by Ray Davies, The Kinks, 1970.

It was at a ‘Mixed, Gay-friendly’ nightclub in Leeds in the late 1990s that I came face-to-face with the glamorous drag queens that I had until then only read about or seen in films. In my 20s, bolstered by sturdy black Doc Martens, I bowed before their glittering stiletto power, gobsmacked. If their lives had been anything like Tralala’s (that beleaguered transgender prostitute in Hubert Selby Junior’s gut-wrenching 1958 novel Last Exit to Brooklyn) or like that of those depicted in The Crying Game (1992) I would not have known. I had plenty of gay friends but knew no trans people.

Unless you count my mother’s hairdresser - an elderly lady who walked with a limp from being brutally beaten in Calcutta, and who, from what I heard, later died from complications around a botched surgery. My mother would commiserate with her woes while getting her hair done. I’d sometimes overhear them, but I was very young and I didn’t quite get all of it. Later, I occasionally went to a hairstylist who was a trans woman too - but with a very different story. Around my age, she was middle-class, had family support and ran her business out of her parent’s home.

In India, ‘other genders’ have been a part of public life, suffering a setback during British Colonisation when eunuchs, deemed ‘ungovernable’, were criminalised. But I grew up in the 70s and 80s and didn’t know about all that. I saw Hijras beg at traffic lights in deep voices, stuffed blouses, and pretty sarees. We gave them our coins in exchange for their blessings. In a strangely pleasing inversion, boys found them somewhat intimidating. Girls, not really. I gawked at their elaborate jewellery, bright lipstick and evening shadow, but most of all, I admired their audacity. In poverty and in ‘women’s clothes’, they were The Man.

‘Male/Female/Other’ were choices we saw regularly on official government forms and ‘gender-fluidity’ was rife in Hindu ideas and images. But it was not until I read Alice Dredger’s Galileo’s Middle Finger in 2017 that I gave much thought to what “intersex” meant, how intersex differed from trans or asked - where were all these people? They had to be hiding - made to hide? - in plain sight.

By 2020 bathroom bans, puberty blockers, and trans-women in sports began to break the internet and I knew - as a person who identifies as Humanist - I had some catching up to do. I watched Disclosure and the Eliot Page interview. I found Alok Menon, JVN, the glorious Rani Koh-hi-Noor and many others on Instagram. I read about Lili Elbie, the story behind The Danish Girl and most recently, after the uneasy TERF conversation, I dug up Adichie’s offending comment from the 2017 BBC interview.

“Trans women are trans women”, she said when asked if trans women were women. She was mostly paraphrasing the question the interviewer had just asked her. “If you’ve lived in the world as a man with the privileges that the world accords to men and then sort of change gender, it’s difficult for me to accept that then we can equate your experience with the experience of a woman.” Naturally, things blew up, and on her Facebook page, she issued a lengthy clarifying statement. An excerpt:

Perhaps I should have said trans women are trans women and cis women are cis women and all are women. Except that ‘cis’ is not an organic part of my vocabulary… I have and will continue to stand up for the rights of transgender people. Not merely because of the violence they experience but because they are equal human beings deserving to be what they are.

Okay, I thought. She stumbled on semantics. Perhaps a dearth of empathy? Imagination, even? For such a brilliant writer, it was strange. I wondered if she’s been kicking herself ever since. Maybe not. The rabbit hole goes deep and it made me think about what gets lost in these battles. But also, what is found. It wouldn’t be the first time members of oppressed groups that had more in common with each other than not did not see eye to eye. And it won’t be the last.

When Betty Friedan described the deep dissatisfaction with life amongst well-off, well-educated white housewives in The Feminine Mystique in 1963, she was criticised for her lack of attention to issues affecting non-white, poor, and lesbian women. She intensely disliked Gloria Steinham for ‘diluting’ the women’s movement with broader concerns. But that book, whether she liked it or not, created a ripple effect that benefitted all kinds of women, everywhere. It rang a bell so loud that it set in motion feminism’s Second Wave and still reverberates across the world. Imagine if Betty Friedan had shut her mouth for fear of being cancelled.

Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem didn’t like each other. In many ways, they weren’t allowed to: Beginning in the late 1960s, the media pitted “The Mother of Feminism,” as Friedan was often called, against her younger colleague, casting an important social movement as a catfight. It didn’t help that they looked so different: Steinem was and is thin and tall, while many reporters described Friedan with anti-Semitic and sexist slurs. If their fight was shaped by two different visions about what feminism should be, it was also driven by a culture that spent a good deal of time trying to destroy women who fought for equality. - Rachel Shteir, in a review of the play The Fight, New Republic, 2017.

Friedan was “The Mother of Feminism” but Steinham was “The Face”. Steinem was tall, slim, young: hot. Friedan was not. Yes, the ironies abound. But that’s no surprise because individuals and groups are always flawed. Their social movements though, seem to get better with time. Humanity seems to be perpetually in a Baby Vs. Bathwater predicament, but so far - mostly in a two-steps forward three-steps back kind of way - we have learned how to hang on to the baby. I hope the trend continues.

Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud? But what makes a woman a woman? Menstruation? Gestation? Lactation? The tango between estrogen and testosterone that exploded when I was thirteen is now, at peri-menopause, an experimental dance to which I don’t know the steps. I’m ‘growing wings on the way down’ and can’t help but wonder, after decades of bleeding and past child-bearing years, will I cease to be a woman? Also, why do men have nipples? Yes, biology is real and it shapes experience. Mine certainly did. Had I - a biological female - not found a biological male for partner-in-life, we would not have managed to either get married or pregnant so easily and with such a huge thump of approval from all of society. Fact: Most biological females can make babies. Also Fact: Adoptive moms sometimes lactate. Another Fact: Amygdalas of gay dads can blow open as wide as that of biological mums. Fun Fact: For interesting and rather queer evolutionary reasons, men have nipples because women do.

This is where I exist in society. I am just this guy. I am transgender, and I exist. But that is just my sexuality. More important than that is that I perform comedy, I perform drama, I run marathons, and I’m an activist in politics. These are the things I do. ―Eddie Izzard, Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens, 2017. Clearly, there’s a lot more going on than meets between the thighs. Penises, for one, can be turned into vaginas. Who knew the two were made of essentially the same stuff? Under what circumstances penises should be turned into vaginas are matters of deep consideration, way beyond my skill set. I’d imagine though, if a pubescent child said they wanted HRT and a double mastectomy, their parents would be distraught. Yes, there is much to understand. Starting with why culturally, do we seem to want everyone to fall into one of two baskets when clearly the reality is that many of us - maybe most of us - fall between the two? Some of us are not vaguely in basket vicinity! How did we get here? Were we always this way? Unlikely. Just look at the bonobos, living their best lives, solving their problems with pan-sexual love and cooperation in matriarchal societies. Life on Earth seems too subtle for Homo sapiens’ crude cultural excretions, and now, to top it all, we aren’t even allowed to talk about any of it. The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate. - Noam Chomsky, The Common Good, 1998

Lessons learned: Stop talking. Start listening. Be open. Not so open that brain - or heart, or any other vital organ - falls out. Don’t be a bot. Don’t be a sheep. Definitely don’t shut people up. Especially those we may not (yet) agree with. Let trans women be women. Let cis women be women. There is room on the broom for all of us - wicked witches, bad bytches, and whatever comes next. It’s time to excavate The Mother Goddess. Time to stop squabbling, start gestating and collectively birth a civilisation more nuanced than this one.

The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power. ― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949.

I am tired of labels. I am tired of always watching where I tread. One wrong move and I could be canceled. Have my leg blown off. I call a family meeting. I look into their eyes. I am what I am. You are what you are. They are what they are. We are not jars of peanut butter. We need no labels. Could the problem possibly be not that there are too few pronouns but that there are one too many? We are all equally capable of suffering. May our Feminism be Humanism. May our pronouns be Us/We.

Peace out. ☮

Chapter 5 Embracing The Hag.

I began this essay about two months ago with a desire to record what it was like growing up female and ‘privileged’ in urban India in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. I wanted to describe the freedom I experienced, the equality I knew I deserved (thanks to my mum and dad, such a luck of the draw), but also the oppression I felt from prevailing beauty ideals, unspoken societal expectations, and the perennial awareness of the possibility of sexual violence.

These things shape women and girls. It impacts how we how we dress, where we go, what we say, what we don’t say, the choices we make, the lives we live, and who we become - just as it did the ‘unliberated’ women that came before us. Like many writers, I wanted to put all of this down for Someone Somewhere who may, upon reading it, feel unalone, entertained, and hell, maybe even ignited. But that’s not the whole story.

I wrote this for the same reason I write anything - because if I did not, things would simmer and ooze in the cauldron of my soul until I exploded toxic shit upon everything around me. I write because I have to. I write because I need to. I write, also, because unlike that never-ending line of women staring at me from the beginning of Time with their tongues cut out, I can.

For most of history, anonymous was a woman. - Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own.

I am no scholar, but I do know this: Women’s desire to participate in the world outside the home has been maniacally thwarted and carefully controlled, the world over and throughout history. Still is. Our contributions to all aspects of human culture and civilisation - for some unfathomable reason - have been methodically, painstakingly, erased. We have been involved in every Human Rights struggle and Social Movement at least from the French Revolution onwards and unless we teach Women’s Liberation - that mother of all social movements - with as much gusto as we do World War II, The Rise of Nations, (and so on), history will repeat, rhyme and rap us on the knuckles ad infinitum.

So no. I will not waste my breath or your time on #NotAllMen, Incels, Men’s Rights, and the whole Jordan Peterson saga. There’s enough about any of that easily available on tap. Obviously, not all men are rapists, and yes, many women lie, cheat and steal. Good men have been burned at the stake for #MeToo and legions of brilliant lawyers will continue to produce data to defend their virtue or banish them to the ninth circle of Hell - depending on who is paying their fee.

Here on my little Substack, I would like to close the door on all of that. Here we shall be free of any bitch-slapping. Here we shall burn incense, invoke Mother Goddess, love her drooping belly, her breasts full of milk, and feel her power and her glory, forever and ever, amen. At her altar, we shall offer “Women’s Work”, the hours and hours of free labour without which ‘The Economy’ would collapse.

Here we will honour homemakers and caregivers, the ‘just a moms’, the ‘stay-at-home dads’ and the grandparents who hold our babies when we just cannot. We will correct the gross miscalculation of their contributions to the “architecture of life” and eventually, we will dismantle the “worth” delusion that has been ground into our beings over hundreds of Godawful years to serve old and old-school men, and protect their wealth. “Dreaming, after all,” said the glorious Gloria Steinem, “is a form of planning.”

I think the traditional ‘feminine’ arts of homemaking or dressmaking or whatever are shamefully undervalued. They’re doing what I’m doing: making a space for another person to be in. Creating an architecture for life. There’s no greater task but also no more mundane one. - Zadie Smith, Nitch We will clear the fog with care, one shard at a time, like shrapnel. The job can be done by women and girls, by boys and men and by anyone else however they identify, who finds themselves stuck in The Matrix. The fig leaf is off. The old guard, nuts still clanging across the universe, bruised and bloody-minded as ever, can’t stop us anymore. We can study our own absence, we can fill in the gaps, and we can continue our ascent - as we always have - to the higher ground. Let’s go!

Two curveballs came at me as I wrote this essay. The first was the Transgender Rights Movement. The hullabaloo over pronouns reminded me of the one over the prefix ‘Ms’. ‘Miss’ belongs to Daddy and ‘Mrs’ to Hubby. What do we call a woman who does not belong to a man? asked Ms Magazine (founded by Gloria Steinham and Dorothy Pittman Hughes in 1972). Today, Ms. is normal, then it was “extra”. Autonomy (birth control, abortion), Image (The Male Gaze), Identity Politics (suffrage, reservation), Violence (beatings, rape). We’ve heard it all before, we are still hearing it still. And while the jury is out on the demands and dreams of other oppressed groups on so many overlapping issues (Now That’s What I Call Intersectional), perhaps we must do what any self-respecting Mother Goddess / Mother of All Social Movements would do: Hold our offspring tight, tell them we love them just as they are, and whisper in their trembling little ears: take no shit baby, but do no harm. We got you. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric. - Bertrand Russel The other, even more befuddling curveball that came at me while I wrote this essay, was my son’s puzzlement - and mine - at the inability to find a satisfactory answer to his simple question: why do men think they are better than women? To find out I decided I would begin at the beginning: when and where. I had a feeling it had something to do with monotheism and its One True God in Heaven (with penis and balls, apparently), but it seems I was off by at least a few centuries, if not more:

“Yes, women are the greatest evil Zeus has made, and men are bound to them hand and foot with impossible knots by God.” - Semonides of Amorgos, a Greek poet who is believed to have lived during the seventh century BC.

Oh, dear lord. How deep does this rabbit hole go?

“The most common theory points to the fact… that they have used their greater physical power to force women into submission… their strength allows men to monopolize tasks that demand hard manual labour, such as ploughing and harvesting. This gives them control of food production, which in turn translates into political clout.” - Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Oh, brother:

“There are two problems with this emphasis on muscle power… First, the statement that men are stronger is true only on average and only with regard to certain types of strength. Women are generally more resistant to hunger, disease, and fatigue than men… If social power were divided in direct relation to physical strength or stamina, women should have got far more of it. People in their sixties usually exercise power over people in their twenties, even though twenty-somethings are much stronger than their elders. ...Boxing matches were not used to select Egyptian pharaohs or Catholic popes. In forager societies, political dominance generally resides with the person possessing the best social skills rather than the most developed musculature.”

Christ Almighty! Foragers too? What next? Turns out, this: “These deep and abiding male anxieties stem from unresolved conflicts between men’s intense need for and dependence upon women and their equally intense fear.” - David D Gilmore, Misogyny: The Male Malady. Err, no thanks. Back to Yuval: “Recent studies of the hormonal and cognitive systems of men and women strengthen the assumption that men indeed have more aggressive and violent tendencies and are… on average, better suited to serve as common soldiers. Yet, granted that the common soldiers are all men, does it follow that the ones managing the war and enjoying its fruits must also be men? That makes no sense. It’s like assuming that because all the slaves cultivating cotton fields are all Black, plantation owners will be Black as well. Just as an all-Black workforce might be controlled by an all-White management, why couldn’t an all-male soldiery be controlled by an all-female government?” That was it. I could take no more! I had re-read some Simone DeBouvoir and her critics (“she is steeped in The Patriarchy!”). I got distracted by accounts of her suffering at the hands of Jean-Paul Satre. I heard that after all that David D. Gilmore blames women for the perpetuation of misogyny. I found reams of scholarship on the history of Indian Feminism that I knew absolutely nothing about! I froze, I panicked, I pondered the extent to which Colonialism, Imperialism, Corporate Capitalism and my social class have affected my ideas of ‘self’, ‘freedom, ‘free will’. And I was reminded why I left academia. I put this essay on ice. The fantastic Sarah Maple in her Anti-Rape cloak, part of ‘The Sisters of Perpetual Resistance’ residency, for which she was asked to create an ‘object of nuisance’. She then took the cloak on her travels and photographed herself wearing it in various locations and situations. During this break I had a couple of useful flashbacks: In my early twenties, at a nightclub in Bombay in the 90s, I was physically accosted by a man who was hitting on a friend. I told him she wasn’t interested, so he (drunk, presumably) yanked my long hair hard, bent my neck backwards and held it there for what felt like forever, until another man (someone I went to school with) came over, talked him out of it, and rescued me. I was grateful. My friends and I carried on with the rest of the evening as if nothing happened: there was so much life we wanted to live, fun we wanted to have, happy we wanted to be.

A few years later, while I was a student in the UK, at another dark noisy club and another girl’s night I was slapped so hard on my rear that tears sprung to my eyes. I was alone, looking out from a gallery at my friends dancing below. By the time I turned around, my assailant was gone. I saw the back of his dirty blonde head and I wanted to chase him down and smash my glass into his fugly face. But I did not. I was scared. So I pretended it hadn’t happened. Besides, there was so much life I wanted to live, fun I wanted to have, happy I wanted to be. The interesting thing about both these incidents was that when they happened I felt humiliated. I didn’t want to talk about it. All things considered, I told myself, it was No Big Deal, not worth the trouble. That I should just bury it. Which is what - in my shit-kicker boots, black nail polish and multiple piercings - I did. Experiencing ‘the threat of violence’, is nothing compared to actually being raped or having to die in war or of hunger, right? Right. As a modern “liberated” woman I understood that if a slap on the ass or tug on a ponytail is all the punishment I receive for being born biologically female, I was amongst the luckiest women on earth. We are taught well as girls to diminish our rage and so, as women, we become brilliant at diminishing our entire selves. To not make a fuss, to move along, chop-chop! No wonder studies show that women’s intellectual self-esteem tends to go down as years of education go up. We have been studying our own absence. - Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

In this interval, I thought a lot about the lives of women. The women I met for lunch, the women who get shot in the face for knowing things. The women paraded naked in Manipur in July, the video floating around of that 12-year-old girl who was raped a few days ago in Ujjain, and the Women’s Reservation Bill passed not long ago in Indian Parliament. I thought about why I write about the things I do in light of all of these horrors and “more important” issues. Isn’t a woman’s place on the picket line? And here I was banging on a keyboard, talking about lipstick. What was the point, really? And then came my answer: The Personal is Political. I wore it on a T-shirt many moons ago. My little life, lucky as it has been, reverberates with the lived realities of women and girls, everywhere. I write what I write Because. Because The Women’s Liberation Movement is never done and saying something, however small, is better than saying nothing at all. When I was fifteen my elder sister went to Bryn Mawr College and as a result I received, second hand, an education in “The Stranglehold of The Patriarchy / How to Resist The Dominant Paradigm”. The directions we received were: run naked under the stars, look between your legs, use a hand mirror, dive into Big Vagina Energy and once you are there, sit in a circle with your sisters and howl at the moon! I thought they were a bit mad, but I loved them. And I was listening. Now, decades later, well-lodged in middle age, I think I finally properly understand what they meant. We may never know why men think they are better than women, but we don’t have to care. We can use a hand mirror. We can study our own absence. We can fill in the gaps. We can look to Mother Goddess and Wicked Witch. We can go grey. We can wear sensible shoes. We can dance around the fire and feel our magical powers, warts and all. We can Embrace the Hag. And we can wear lipstick while we do it. So though in general I dislike labels, there is one I wear with pride. I do it for the women who were silenced, and for the ones who screamed bloody murder for me to have a say. For them, I will walk softly, I will carry a big broom, and I will go to the Moondance. Everyone is invited.

This is what a Feminist looks like. ♀