On this day, August 19, 1920, Tennessee became the 36th state in America to ratify, 50 to 46, the amendment extending equal suffrage to women in America.
While there is no cut off date for historical events like these, it could be said that the first agitation for women's suffrage was launched in 1839, when Lucretia Mott, a Pennsylvania Quakeress, was upset because she was denied a seat along with her husband to a world slavery congress held in London.
In 1920, there were around 26,000,000 women eligible to vote in the United States.
The historical trajectory of the women's suffrage movement can be found here.
Recently I saw the trailer of the National Theatre of London’s forthcoming play Medea. First to appear is the back of a woman’s head, lush with dark hair; then comes the distant laughter of children against the background of a dense forest through which the woman, now shown in noire attire literally and figuratively, walks holding the hands of the children. The children evanesce leaving the woman alone, stranded. She turns to look at us; her face is contorted with emotions I can best identify as sinister, exuding ominous foreboding. It’s the face of Medea; all the familiar threads of the disquieting, the darkening and the threatening hang loose, waiting to make the fabric of the totality of what we recognize today to be the figure of the Western literary canon’s poster child for the mother from hell. The face could very well have belonged to Lady Macbeth the mannish wife in Shakespeare’s great tragedy of Macbeth, who famously taunted her husband’s manhood with the image of herself as the woman who is virile enough to dash the head of a baby suckling at her breast. But Lady Macbeth didn’t have any children; she was merely hypothesizing; one could be certain that had she had “babes” she would not have had the heart to break their heads. Euripides’ Medea, on the other hand, kills her children—all four of them--to earn eternal damnation in the annals of motherhood.
Yet, Euripides did not conceive of Medea as the sum total of her filicidal instincts. Around the time Euripides composed the wondrous tragedy of this doomed heroine of mythology, the maternal bond between mommy and child was not as culturally fetishized as it is today. How would Medea have been judged back then in the Greece of 3rd century B.C.?
The first time I had closely read Euripides' Medea, it was as a young English major, in India. The professor who taught us ancient Greek drama, had, in his own way, forewarned us about the pitfalls of reading literary texts out of context. He meant that we just might not be able to access the real kernel of Greek drama, without knowing any Greek and without having any idea of the moral universe to which these plays were literary responses.
To better understand what I read, I took a fast and furious tour of the Greek alphabets; I also did a quick read of Robert Graves' Penguin edition of the Greek myths to get a hang of concepts like oikos, daemon and hamartia, among others. Armed with a fragile, but what at that time, seemed an adequate notion of the Greeks as a whole, I approached the big stars of the Grecian dramatic pantheon, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.
What stood out, for me, was the spree of inter-family killings in these plays. To goad a son to kill his own father was a rather routine act of a Greek mother and wife, as is evidenced by Clytemnestra's nagging of her son Orestes to slay his father Agamemnon upon his return to Thebes from the 10-year Trojan War. But the killings in the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles were done for the sake of preserving a higher moral order, in the scheme of which mere familial love paled into insignificance.
So, when I read Medea, I was baffled. In this most celebrated of the tragedies by Euripides, Medea is a woman, who kills her children, not for any higher moral purpose, but putatively to seek personal revenge. The story of Medea goes thus: She is a barbarian—counterpart of the modern foreigner—who’s married to Jason, a Greek and has children with him. They live in the Greek city of Corinth. The play opens with a wrathful Medea, furious at having learned of Jason’s plan to marry Glauce, the daughter of Creon, the king of Corinth. An angry barbarian female is a threat to national security, and to preempt harm, Creon exiles Medea. The play ends on a note of sad mayhem. Medea knifes her children to death and poisons both Creon and Glauce. Medea then flees to Athens with the bodies of her dead children.
Blood is shed in Medea, but compared to fellow Greek tragedies the number of bodies felled are fewer. However to our very modern bourgeoisie sensibilities, the one momentous act of filicide committed by Medea has the impact of a million slaughtering on the battlefields of Troy.
As purveyors of modern adaptations of pre-modern literature, we are intolerant of some of the familial acts therein (we have less compunction in approaching Oedipus’ incestuous act with a lighthearted, almost jocular attitude) and relatively forgiving of others (Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his pre-teen daughter Iphigenia is just fine); our somewhat dour sensibility crucifies the slaying by Medea of her children as extreme monstrosity, the product of a psychopathic mind. Emphatically, in our eyes, Medea is a rotten mommy cum psychopath bundled into one, a pin up for motherhood gone horribly awry.
Witness the frames of references within which the ancient Medea typically pops up—every time there is news of a maternal filicide, in Texas or more recently in Utah, discourses in the media illuminate the horror of the act by invoking Medea. Medea could well nigh be a byword for the cannibal-mom, a woman deranged, scorned, fallen into postpartum depression and a woman who ill-deserves the sacred mantle of motherhood to begin with. Snapped, the Documentary series aired on Oprah Winfrey’s Oxygen Network, have women who “snap” because male hypocrisy has reached a critical mass in their lives and they can take it no more. The women who snap go on a homicidal rampage and the ghost of Medea flits across the TV screen like a Tasmanian devil overdosed on anti-estrogen.
Yet, the ancient Greeks would not have beheld Medea as a mad woman that ought to be locked up for good in the attic and from whom the neighborhood children ought to be protected. In light of the cultural mores as portrayed in Greek drama, the cruelty, in itself, ought not to have raised eyebrows—Medea’s slaying of her children is no more or no less scandalous than the inadvertent slaying by Oedipus of his father.
What, I presume would have aroused the moral chagrin of the literary Medea’s contemporaries, is the fact of her outsider-status, and the fact that she dared to marry a Greek despite being a Barbarian. In the traditional myth of Jason and Medea, the couple’s marriage was not recognized by the state as a bonafide marriage, and it could be surmised that the children of the interracial union were perceived as half-breeds, the mulattos of the time. According to a version of the myth, the children were killed by a mob of furious Corinthians because Medea had killed their king; it could be that the mob fury was a manifestation of a collective xenophobia.
Perhaps Euripides’ tweaking of the myth was intended to give Medea a bit of agency in sealing her own fate. To make Medea the slaughterer of her own children affirms the fact that she is a barbarian, bound, at the slightest provocation, to deviate from norms of civilization. One can’t help but feel that her filicide in the play is a reflection, not simply of her failed motherhood, but primarily of her barbarism; in other words, what Medea does fulfills an apriori stereotype of her.
In Euripides’ Medea, the eponymously named heroine is a doubly marginalized figure of the woman and the barbarian, a hyper-second class citizen by virtue of both gender and race/citizenship. In the play, as in life, she would have been judged as such, not on the basis of her maternal instincts.
One hopes that National Theatre’s production of Medea desists from reducing this most fascinating of all female protagonists in Western literature, to one thing or the other, for Medea remains firmly etched in my memory as a study in grief and rage in context.
"Everything" says Eleanor, the teen daughter of Clara and the narrator of Neil Jordan's fascinating film, Byzantium, "is cold outside of time".
There is enormous maternal warmth though, not outside time per se, but within the mother's heart. The film charts the ends to which Clara, the human-turned vampire would go to protect her daughter from harm.
As a "warm" woman and mother, Clara is a misfit in the "cold" zone of atemporality. But neither mother nor daughter travels into this zone out of free choice.
The women are victims of circumstances that through centuries have befallen women who are shown to be a persecuted minority in a world dominated by men.
Vampirism is a refuge from a predatorial society for mother and daughter. At least being out of time grants them biological transcendence, for biology is the woman's worst enemy in a world where they are primarily food for the male sexual appetite.
Clara and Eleanor are immortal, as is customary of vampires; they are seemingly young but really are 200+ years old. Clara was but a mere wisp of a poor English girl, an orphan, making a living by selling shells and sea cockles during the Napoleonic wars. A brutish captain of the English army covets Clara and sells her into prostitution. He then goes on to repeatedly brutalize her till Clara gives birth to Eleanor and also falls ill with tuberculosis.
Despite a life of inhuman suffering, Clara loves her child and gives her up to an orphanage to protect Eleanor from getting similarly brutalized by nasty men.
In the meantime, however, Clara gets hold of a map that leads to an island where, inside a cave there resides the power of the "faceless" disembodied saint who converts humans into vampires if they are willing to "die". The "death" is a figurative one, a code for immortality and perpetual youth. The map was meant for the captain who had brutalized her because the vampiric legion is an all-male legion open to only men of high-birth.
By stealing the map from the captain and shooting him in the leg, Clara, by virtue of her "low" birth, her gender and her profession, becomes the quintessential interloper into the brotherhood. She goes to the cave and transforms into a vampire, illness-free, immortal and stuck at the ripe young age of 25ish for eternity.
To wreak vengeance on Clara, the brutal captain rapes Eleanor and infects her with a venereal disease. Clara is flabbergasted by this event; she kills the man and to save her daughter from certain death takes her to the cave.
Eleanor is thus converted to a vampire as well.
The film begins in the present, when mother and child are shown to be fugitives, always on the run, hunted for eternity by the brotherhood.
With its perceptive gender inflections, Byzantium is a wholly refreshing take on the vampire genre. The teen-pandering Twilight series has all but diluted the woman's place in the universe of vampires, by making them subservient to males. Even Bram Stoker's Dracula, which had a powerful male at the center of the action, reduced women to vessels for the master's life-bequeathing sperms.
Byzantium has a saucy, sexy, powerful woman, who is confident in her own sexuality, as the ur vampire. From her originates the actions.
In Byzantium, the vampiric demesne is shown to be filled with the same kinds of social biases that afflict the human world. Power is what the members of the brotherhood lust after, not women, but as in human societies through ages, the pursuit of power is peculiarly gendered: Men seek it, men exclude women from it and ultimately men overpower women with it. The disdain which the leader of the brotherhood for Clara doesn't diminish an iota for 200 hundred odd years. This kind of unabated contempt is eye-opening to say the least. As a prostitute, Clara was an outcast in human society; she is also an outcast within the brotherhood. There is no winning (of respect and equality) for the female sex.
One would think that the vampiric domain, being a domain that goes against the grain of everything temporal, would be a domain free of human bigotries. But the brotherhood has a poor opinion of women like Clara and believes that she is undeserving of the noble mantle of a vampire. The stench of male privilege emanates from this brotherhood. Here's an eye-popping instance of this stinky privilege: Between Clara and the Captain who is irredeemably immoral, the brotherhood chooses the Captain because he is a man of some birth and learning (as a result of his status). Clara, on the other hand, is a thoughtful, vivacious woman with a primal loyalty to her daughter. Yet, her gender is an automatic disqualifier.
It's at the very end that Clara expresses her pent-up (for over two centuries) outrage at the utter disrespect she gets from the brotherhood. She tells Savella, the brotherhood's leader, that she has, for 200 years resented the brotherhood's relegation of her to a position beneath the worst of the blood sucking, conscienceless vampires.
In his poem Sailing to Byzantium W.B. Yeats writes of a man's quest for eternal life; Byzantium is historically the site of timelessness as through time it has survived under various names such as Constantinople and Istanbul (and many prior and in-between) under the ebb and flow of global empires. Symbolically Byzantium is the elemental life that goes on ceaselessly despite the march of history.
Neil Jordan's Byzantium is an old, going-out-of-business hotel in a seaside resort just outside of London. The hotel becomes a metaphorical battlefield--of decisions and unfurling--for both Clara and Eleanor. The story reaches a crescendo and a crisis in this hotel; the owner of the hotel is a man whose mother has just died and left the failing business in his hands. He is a soft male who shows signs of having been ruled by a mother all his life and with the departure of his mother, he is at a loss of how to navigate life. Clara becomes the surrogate mother to this weak man; but the man is highly sympathetic to women and constantly reassures Eleanor that she is safe in his house.
The course of destiny within time has come full cycle in the hotel Byzantium; the hotel is momentarily a brothel, a space of female empowerment of a strange yet potent kind. Clara reigns in the hotel Byzantium till the moment when Eleanor betrays her and all hell breaks loose.
The film ends on a note of triumph for Clara; she defeats the orthodoxy of the brotherhood through guile and perseverance and saves her daughter's life for eternity.
Celebrated Nigerian novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's talk on feminism in Africa is interesting, dazzling even, peppered as it is with sharp humor and anecdotes that one can easily relate to, especially if the audience is a female from any part of the globe, of any class and ethnicity.
A few things Adichie said struck me as gem-like utterances:
"The problem with gender is that it prescribes what we should, instead of recognizing how we are."
"Women are not born with cooking genes."
"Men ought to know how to cook if only because it's risky to delegate the task of nourishing oneself to the hands of others."
"Women and men, both should strive to unlearn the lessons of gender they have internalized."
"The Nigerian saying that women have more 'bottom power' than men and therefore rule the world, is based on a belief that is degrading to women." ['Bottom power' is the local slang for sexual power; means women get things done by manipulating men through sex].
While I was highly impressed by Adichie's experience of being a feminist in Nigeria, I also thought that she spoke of a crucial social issue of power, gender and justice like a celebrity would. The tone was too catchy to be true; her body image was too desirable to not please, and most importantly, she is advocating feminist values post ipso facto, after the fact of her celebrity status.
Turn to Gloria Steinem now: At 81, having been one of the lighters of the fire of the women's movement in the 60s, Steinem at 81, comes across as a spokesperson of an idea of women, not as a celebrity who makes a mark on her audience because of how famous she is.
Steinem's thoughts are exquisite yet mellow enough not to find place as captions on mugs and T shirts, but to quietly embed themselves in the loamy soil of one's consciousness.
Steinem's characterization of women as a perpetual "immigrant" group who are always falling behind because they have to negotiate structures of powers in societies from which they have been historically excluded, is brilliant.
Equally memorable is the "pink ghetto" phrase: Women typically are founts of cheap labor in capitalism; it's no surprise that the healthcare industry (especially home health care) and food industry, among other industries, are dominated by women. The jobs pay little to nothing.
Steinem focuses on the exploitation of women, not simply, as Adichie does, on how they are victims of a gender-bias.
On any given day, I'd choose La femme Gloria over all the other la femmes who come and go these days.
Does giving "emotional support" to a householder (from another) constitute what's defined as "house work"?
Does planning ahead of time and purchasing stuff through navigating a tight budget for the household, constitute contribution toward "house work"?
Or, is just cleaning, in the traditional sense, organizing closets and other kinds of tangible labor that goes into keeping a house as some say, are the only forms of "house work"?
The Case For Filth is a revealing piece of writing and gives lovely responses to the intellectually confounding definition of "house work."
One observation that stands out in my mind is about house work around the task of cleanliness; while cleanliness feels highly organic (my house is "clean" because I am clean"), it really is constructed, as "the relativism of hygiene over time is amazing."
Hail to actress and Indian popular culture's prima donna, Sharmila Tagore, for recognizing this vital truth of India:
Traditionally, we as a nation have tended to view a woman either as devi (goddess) or as property of man but never as an equal.Treating a woman as a devi is pretty ingenious because then she has to be on a pedestal and conduct herself according to the noble ideals a patriarchal society has set for her. Women seem to like being on that pedestal and despite their inner urges cling to this ideal of being perfect at great personal cost. So, in spite of the outstanding advancement of both men and women, mindsets have been slow to change. And these mindsets have influenced our cultural spheres, and have been celebrated in festivals like karva chauth, raksha bandhan, Shiv ratri, appealing to a man’s ego in protecting and indulging the women in his family. So it is not surprising that a mass, popular, highly visible media like cinema, particularly Hindi cinema, has perpetuated these cultural myths.
On contemporary Bollywood's packaging of the woman as "modern", Tagore muses:
They also reduce modernity to a matter of packaging. A modern woman is defined by her westernized attire. She looks modern but when it comes to making informed choices, she chooses the conventional. The moment she is to be presented to society for marriage, her sartorial style undergoes a complete traditional overhaul, because now she is expected to become part of the collective, her individuality discarded for the sake of the community. It is implied that the modern woman who asserts herself and her independence can never bring happiness to anyone, nor find happiness herself. Often, in the first half of a film a lot of new and dynamic ideas are introduced, only to be diluted and compromised in the second half.
But cinema, especially Indian cinema, is largely a passive reflection of social preferences, values and attitudes at large:
Today, in India ‘women’s empowerment’ is a government slogan; it is a feature of every party manifesto. Yet, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, Indian women, seemingly protected by law, celebrated by the media and championed by activists, remain second-class citizens, most obviously in rural areas, but in some senses everywhere.
I enjoy watching Miss America beauty pageants, especially the part where the final contestants are asked questions about poverty, International politics and education, to name a few grandiose topics.
The all-round pretence is that the responses, which supposedly manifest the woman's intellectuality and social and moral compass, will be the clincher. The woman who gives the best answer will win the crown of America's most "beautiful" female (under 21 and under 140 lb of body weight).
My pleasure is perverse: it's generated by the ways in which the contestants, usually very thin and tall women, hem and haw, and usually stumble in their "spontaneous" responses.
My pleasure, as Aristotle would say, is entirely dependent on the contestants' slipping and falling, to make me laugh, when answering questions of social, moral and political gravity.
This year there will be more pleasure in store because I hear that a record number of women had auditioned for the beauty pageant. The pageant will be held in Atlantic City, a location that has historical resonance because this is where feminists had gathered to protest the blatant sexist crudity of the pageant in 1968.
I hope one of the questions this time is about Syria's Bashar Assad and chemical weapons and what the bone-revealing beauties (I swear, their shoulder bones stick out of their flesh, I've seen it) think of Vladimir Putin's ascension from rogue politician to global peace-broker.
It's said that women's "beauty" is celebrated in the Miss USA and other beauty pageants across the globe.
Courtney Martin, a writer on women's health and other issues, says that it is any self-respecting woman's duty to protest the particular image of women's beauty that the Miss USA pageant sells.
Why? Because:
Authentic, messy, transcendent beauty cannot be scored. It isn't tamed, plucked, planned, premeditated or rehearsed, and people like Donald Trump, who own the Miss USA beauty pageant, aren't purveyors of it.
Real beauty is about resilience: Girls and women who have been through something and come out the other side with an idiosyncratic scar or a hard-earned wrinkle, like the first lines of a powerful story. If there were a pageant where girls were asked, "When did you really get lost and how did you find your way back to yourself?" I would be there myself.
Beauty pageants should die because they are money making machines fueled by female insecurity and submission.
Beauty is an organic process, not a contest.
The gang rape of a Mumbai journalist bears eerie resemblance to many other recent gang rapes of young women in the Indian metropolises.
The female journalist had been photographing a particular site for a Mumbai magazine; she was accompanied by a male colleague. As was the case with the gang rape of the physiotherapy student in Delhi late last year, the male colleague was beaten and tied up, while the perps dragged the woman to a nearby area and raped repeatedly.
All of the perps were mid to late teens who lived in what journalist Robert Neuwirth would call (fancifully) "shadow cities," or in plain old English, unauthorized shanties.
In short they hail from poverty, and sub human living and life-conditions. They are victims of the great Indian poverty which like a ever-expanding juggernaut is rolling on side by side with an economic boom.
The inequality between the boomtowns and the shantytowns are growing by the hour, as it were. Worse still, the shantytowns too are booming, in a purely physical and numerical, not economic, sense of growth, in the shadows, literally of luxury high rises and obscenely opulent hotels and office buildings.
In the India of the old economy, the poor used to live in spatially segregated colonies or slums: the "jungles" of poverty, as an Indian saying goes, signifying everything chaotic or poor with the metaphor of the jungle, grew in the outskirts of affluence in a Jagirdari style. This was horrific in and of itself, but the new economy has brought hordes of the "jungle" dwellers smack into the midst of the oases of extravagance.
One theory (mine) is that this spatial yoking of extremely unequal and therefore culturally heterogenous life conditions and peoples is accentuating the victim status of those already victimized by poverty. The young men who resort to gang rape emerge out of shantytowns and take out their anger at the system and whatever apparatus the system is supported by on young women, usually of the educated and the upwardly mobile kind.
I hate to oversimplify, but it looks like the "janwaars" as Indians would describe men like these--poor, psychically anarchic and sexually voracious and brutal--are living in too much proximity of their economic better halves and venting their wrath through sexual violence on women.
Why not brutalize the system, instead of the women?
Maybe, just maybe, distorted gender relations and patriarchy, aren't the only causes behind this emergent culture of sexual brutality against women in the cities.
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?
Well, I mention "America" because being a market-oriented society, America usually sells a bit of everything to everybody as long as there is a demand (even for the poor there is crack, outsized dreams of making it big someday, and cheap, fatty food to be sold).
So, I was surprised to learn that there is a dearth of playful lingerie for 60 and above women in this nation.
Joyce Wadler does a hilarious turn on this particular paucity in the American market.
She says she had modelled her middle-life sexuality image on Mrs. Robinson, the older seductress played by Anne Bancroft in the 1967 movie, The Graduate. Mrs. Robinson wore black, lacy bras and panties. At that time Bancroft was a mere 36 and her character may have been in her early 40s. Late thirties to mid-forties was in the cougar-range back then (wasn't that much back). By the time Wadler turns 60ish, the black lace thingie has passed; a 60ish female in 2013 can't be seductive in the lingerie that adorned the body of a 40 something in the 60s.
She has to close page, chapter and book on Ms. Bancroft and peer into the current smouldering images of Victoria's Secrets models. But those women, though vastly younger and stick-like-ier than herself, are not really about the messy act of sex per se. They are always getting ready for sex and wouldn't want to get into tangled limbs and body fluids for fear of wasting the sheen on their amazing hair or the gloss on their pouty lips and the carefully arranged lingerie on their silky bodies.
Besides, as Wadler reminds herself, she doesn't want to look farcical (it isn't clear whether Wadler thinks the VC models are farcical or the notion of she trying to be like them is).
The writing is engaging; which leads me to my usual cross-cultural question? Why can't imagine women from India, in their 60s be playful?
Director Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue is the Warmest Color won the 2013 Palm d'Or, at the Cannes film festival.
The story has a lesbian theme. It's about the developing relationship between two students, one of whom has her hair dyed blue. When she reverts back to the color blonde, the relationship is destroyed.
The film is based on Le Bleu est Une Couleur, a graphic novel by French artist Julie Maroh.
Maroh criticized the liberty the director took with her comic to reduce the love scenes into a spectacle of lesbian pornography.
In her blog, Maroh had to say the following of the controversial scenes:
[It was] a brutal and surgical display, exuberant and cold, of so-called lesbian sex, which turned into porn, and [made] me feel very ill at ease. Especially when, in the middle of a movie theatre, everyone was giggling [...]The heteronormative laughed because they don't understand it and find the scene ridiculous. The gay and queer people laughed because it's not convincing, and [they] found it ridiculous. And among the only people we didn't hear giggling were the potential guys [sic] too busy feasting their eyes on an incarnation of their fantasies on screen.
I am quite taken by the erotic quality of the scene above; the girls weave a gossamer web of eros around Sartre, Bob Marley and philosophy in general. The indication that the girl on the left is turned on by people who take a stand, is clear when she upholds Bob Marley's "Get Up, Stand Up," as a signature song of commitment. I guess, the other girls reversion to being a blonde turns her off for that reason.
I feel like Maroh predicates lesbian love on something cerebral, so that the "heteronormative" don't get away with the notion that only grotesque sex binds same-sex relationships.
Mahraganat (I may have misspelled it) is a popular form of street music in post-Arab Spring Cairo.
Poor young men from Cairo's poorest areas compose songs that sound like they're straight out of a Bollywood movie, but have real, meaningful lyrics about life and politics.
Politics, according to one of the popular singers is not just about big events like the Presidency (didn't E.M. Forster say the same?), but about the lives of ordinary folks. Politics, the singer says, is enacted every day in the slums where people struggle to keep their body and soul together.
This is all very excellent, but I noticed that this new form of youth-expression in Egypt is plagued by the old virus of segregation. There are no women in the wild gathering of young males, and the commentator says, somewhat discreetly, the women are celebrating "elsewhere."
The poor boy-singer who speaks bravely of life itself as politics, is blithely blind to the fact that separation of men and women too is part of that politics.
An eye-opening video on the treatment of women who serve in the U.S. army as "second class citizens" and sexual objects.
But the more astounding revelation from the video is the fact that one out of 5 male army recruits is sexually assaulted by their seniors as well.
The military, by definition, is, as those interviewed in the video say, a culture where power through violent means and conquest are the civilizational norms. Rape, whether it's of a woman or a man, is about that.
The night was soggy, Houston autumn, frogs like squeeze boxes wheezing in and out. Her neighbors' nakedness seemed sad and enervated. Breasts flat on her chest, a kind of melted look to her flesh, ankles thick on splayed bare feet.
I had scribbled these lines down from the March 26, 2013 issue of the New Yorker. I'm not sure who or what wrote it, but the lines stood out to me as the description of a woman in a bind about her own body.
This according to the New York Times' blog India Ink:
There is some evidence that Indians are more actively seeking pornography on the Internet than citizens of many other countries:
New Delhi, population 16 million, was the city with the highest-worldwide percentage of searches for “porn” in 2012. Dallas was the second highest.Google searches for the word “porn,” as a proportion of total Google searches, have increased five times between 2004 and 2013 in India, according to Google Trends. Over that period, India ranked fourth worldwide, after Papua New Guinea, Trinidad and Tobago, and Pakistan.
One of every five mobile users in India wants adult content on his 3G-enabled phone, one 2011 study by IMRB concludes, and pornography Web sites rank among the most popular in India. Sunny Leone, an Indian-origin Canadian porn star, became a popular in India after appearing on the “Bigg Boss” house here in 2011.
While the "good" news (for those Indians who measure their superiority/inferiority as a culture vis a vis their neighbors) is that Pakistan still ranks higher than India in the porn-search statistics, the bad news is that this search isn't passive. The deep and rising interest in pornography could be behind what many have dubbed the "rape epidemic" in India.
I'm not surprised by the spike in pornography downloading in India. Indian males have been fond of pornography for a long time, it's only now that technology can track and evince these proclivities and formalize them as cultural practices.
But what confounds me is how a proposed "banning" of pornography in India would solve the problem of rape. Rape isn't just a sexual or an impious act, it's an act of extreme violence that could happen when women are typecast as an overly submissive species, not just in pornography but in mass culture.
Pornography is ubiquitous in popular Indian culture. Bollywood, the most hegemonic of all Indian popular cultural forms, is pornographic at its core, as it objectifies women like no other movie industry in the world does. Bollywood-Porn, like other kinds of pornography, divests the female of her individuality, by making her an object mostly that males can variously ogle at, lust after, wolf-whistle into oblivion, imagine as passive receptacles of their seeds, etc.
The woman in a typical Bollywood fare is an object that exists only to titillate the male organ.
Sociologist Ashis Nandy had observed years ago that we Indians should not underestimate the power of popular culture, by which he meant Bollywood, to shape our notions of socialization and sexualization. Indians have continued to ignore the effect Bollywood has on the Indian mind and now that sexual crime against women and girls have become a grave social problem, they turn to single out pornography as the sole villain.
Listen to the song, and if you don't understand Hindi, just study the body language of both the girl and the boy; the scene is deceptively framed within the traditional Indian festival of holi, when Indian males get a chance to freely touch the bodies of females with whom they allegedly "play" holi. But its a pornographic scene; observe the manner in which the relationship between the boy and girl is shown to transform in a few seconds, from being asexual and/or friendly to one of lust and extreme desire. The boy lunges forward and begins to chase the female with such ferocity that it doesn't look like the celebration of spring anymore.
A generation of Indian males are raised to watch this as popular entertainment and you get the picture of what it does to their mind regarding women.
And don't be fooled: "Balam pichkari" has been corrupted from Krishna's time into symbolizing the self-spraying male organ. The male organ has been represented by several objects over time in Bollywood--as a syringe, as a "danda" or a stick, and here as a "pichkari" that wants to wet the object.
The 2004 Austrian Nobel Prize winner and agoraphobic, Elfriede Jelinek has written a monologue from the point of view of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The play is Jackie.
The New Yorker Magazine describes the play's heroine as witty, fun, funny, catty, and a paranoid nut job.
Jackie riffs for eighty minutes on the pleasures and horrors of being a Kennedy icon, and on death. Jackie is shown to drag around dummies emblazoned with the names Jack, Bobby and Ari.
Holland Taylor plays the role of former Texas Governor and famous alcoholic Ann Richards, in a new play Ann. Holland has also composed the play.
Richards was governor from 1991 to 1995 and died in 2006. She had once barked at President Bill Clinton, saying "I'm as strong as mustard gas." She is best remembered for her salty, down-home wit, and the play, according to critics, spills over with her indelible gumption, as Texan and tangy as barbecue sauce.
Jackie and Ann, both powerful women, not in the simple sense of being in positions of power, but in the broader sense of displaying the strength and courage of individuality and the humility of being fallible at the same time.
Male writers have traditionally praised female beauty and some of the paean have reverberated through time.
In Shakespeare's play, Antony and Cleopatra, one of Julius Caesar's Roman courtiers Enobarbus says this while beholding Cleopatra aboard her barge:
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety
other women cloy
The appetites they feed: but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies; for vilest things
Become themselves in her: that the holy priests
Bless her when she is riggish.
In Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, the eponymous hero can't take his eyes off Helen, when he sees her conjured up face:
Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
From fretting about the face of Helen launching ships, we may have descended (or degenerated) into joking about beautiful female faces launching, or procreating rather, a thousand "cubist" children.
In a New Yorker review of Danny Boyle's new movie, Trance, critic Anthony Lane isn't impressed by the film per se, but is smitten by the beauty of its heroine, Rosario Dawson.
He is, shall we say, hypnotized by the actresses' perfect facial features:
When the Lord God forbade his worshippers to bow down before any graven image, Dawson's face was exactly the kind of thing He had in mind. No other star can boast of such sculptured features [...]
But Lane isn't just praising the present of Ms. Dawson's beauty; he goes on to envision future vessels for that beauty as well:
When [the other pretty face James McAvoy] and Dawson make love, in Trance, one strong bone structure pressed against another, it's like a clash of major religions. What if they had a family? The kids would be practically cubist.
Annu Palakunnathu Matthews, a Professor of photography at Rhode Island University, has a creative way of critiquing sexism in Indian popular culture, a.k.a. Bollywood.
In a project called Bollywood satirized, Matthews uses digital technology to make changes on Indian movie posters and make a commentary, in turn, on Indian gender norms and stereotypes.
Ms. Matthews recalls being the victim of sexist attitudes as a young girl growing up in India and says she felt very angry at the tiresomely repetitive posters that inevitably showed women in various postures and moods of subordination to the men. They were shown to either cry, or laugh (because they were in love) or sing, or rescued from a dangerous situation by a sturdy male figure.
The poster above is not an alteration of an existing movie, but a representation of a real incident--that of the recent gang rape in India's capital of New Delhi, in which a young woman and her male companion was brutalized in a moving bus. The woman went on to die.
There were myriads of responses to the incident and the most terrifying one's were from the officialdom and the politicians of India. Abhijit Mukherjee, Member of the Indian Parliament and son of Pranab Mukherjee, some Minister or the other in his career of acute sycophancy in the Indian Congress hierarchy, said that women ought not to wear anything but "long overcoats" when they venture out in the streets after dark. By "long overcoats" Mr. Mukherjee clearly didn't mean a fashionable Burberry, but some sort of a loose overall like a bloated top of a salwar kameez, is my guess.
The poster above is a meaningful recreation of the anachronistic-ness of Indian male politicians where women and modernity is concerned.
Can you tell that the young lady in the image is about to embark on an erotic adventure?
I think I can, by glancing at the implement she is apparently trying to girt around, what I assume are her loins.
The image is an illustration from the French enlightenment philosopher and writer Denis Diderot's book named The Indiscreet Jewel. Women speak boldly and frankly in the book about their sexual desires and about what excite them sexually.
Published in 1748 in France, The Indiscreet Jewel is said to be a precursor of Eve Angler's Vagina Monologues.
Diderot was an ace enlightenment thinker and was known for confronting courageously the unconscionable and uncomfortable issues of his times. One of the issues was an openness about women's sexuality. But he was also an outspoken critic of religion, racism and slavery.
His positions on most political, religious, social and sexual orthodoxies made him very unpopular in the eyes of the Catholic Church. He was denied a burial spot.
On the eve of his 300th birthday, French President Francois Hollande has decided to honor Diderot posthumously by granting him a symbolic reburial in the Pantheon a massive neo-Classical Church in the Latin quarter of Paris.
According to Mr. Asaram Bapu (a popular Hindu Guru) and other "conservatives" in India, the following items (it's a list-in-progress) are responsible for the epidemic of sexual violence and harassment of women in the nation:
1. Skirts
2. "Revealing" clothing
3. A lack of overcoats on girls (?? somebody has been reading Gogol?)
4. Junk food
5. Astrology
These are the current list of things that "lure" women out of the house and put them in the path of trouble.
I wonder if this gives "junk food" a bad name!
I also wonder how junk food made it to this particular list.
