Women want freedom not protection

Recently the government of India granted the state of "personhood" to dolphins, in an effort to end exploitation of these lovely sea-creatures.

A dolphin will from now onwards be recognized as a "non-human" person in India.

Advertisers and other agents of popular media, have, on the other end of the sentient creature spectrum, been busy granting a similar status to women.

In light of the gang rape and murder of a Delhi college student in December 2012, popular media, according to a blogger on Indian affairs for the NY Times, is making some serious changes in the way it portrays women.

The one clear message that emanates from both videos is that women are "persons" too (like men), and they should be treated as such. The solution to the problem of sexual and other kinds of violence against women is "protection" or its Hindi counterpart, "suraksha." It's never clear as to from what women ought to be "protected."

This is the voice of classic Bollywood writ large.

Bollywood has traditionally conceived of and depicted women as women are conceived of and depicted in patriarchy. In fact so embedded is patriarchy in the DNA of Bollywood cinema that I've often wanted to rename it Pollywood. Bollywood males display their machismo (or "mardangi" in Hindi) by protecting their sisters, mothers, girlfriends and wives from the forces of malevolence (male + violence).

But, seriously, is granting "protection" to women equivalent to granting them personhood?

To grant personhood means that those who are persons are persons by virtue of having liberty or freedom to roam around unmolested, not to freshly incarcerate in the name of protection.

So, I agree with the blogger Snigdha Poonam when she calls the bullshit on the new pro-women propaganda launched on Indian mass media.

Women, she argues, want the freedom to roam, both literally and in a broader sense of the term, without fearing harassment in public and or/private spaces, but these kinds of interventions by popular Indian culture for better gender relations push "chivalry on men, not freedom, choice and equality for women."

Besides, the equating of women with the nation brings back shivers of anachronism. Not the mother India figurine again, the one for whom men live and die?

Really, can't Indian women be talked about rationally and normally for once?