The Boring Hypocrisy of Knee-Jerk Outrage

Recently I met an old and dear friend for coffee. We got chatting about life and loves. Coming off of a bad break up, he announced to me that he’s taken marriage off the table for himself for the near and foreseeable future. He then proceeded to ask me to introduce him to some cute “fast” girls who wouldn’t mind just, you know, having a good time. I bristled at the suggestion and curtly told him I’m not really a pimp and find it hard to be complicit in his characterization of some women as such. He thought I was being such a bore. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard well-educated, well-travelled and seemingly liberal male friends or acquaintances make such disturbing remarks. And its not men alone. I often find women to be great supporters of these ideas. Not too long ago I was having dinner with a few close friends and the discussion turned to strippers and bachelor parties. The women on the table were the loudest in support of strip clubs, about how they have frequented them and how it’s a “choice” women should be free to make. When another friend made a few valid points about how anti-feminist they were, she was promptly made fun of. Of course all these women were "cool, liberal chics"! I have also heard a lot of women say how they are not feminists or political in a cute, coy way. Something to suggest that they are not one of “those” women… (as in your head wont hurt talking to me). I’d love to find out how these women would feel if they lost the privileges they enjoy as successful women in a liberal society entirely due to the strides made by feminists and political activitists over the years. Well here I go giving everyone a headache again. Now if something as sickening as the recent rape in Delhi takes place, I have full faith in these very people to wake up and shout themselves hoarse in protest. I’m aware that my examples don’t seem egregious or devastating. But attitudes matter. At all times. These light comments and attitudes are insidious and the fact that they happen amongst an educated strata of folks is a cause for concern. How are we to expect any progress in turning societal attitudes if these notions persist?! Women ought to be respected at all levels, at all times and one does not have to be confronted with an epic incident to have a political consciousness about it. So you may be a bore because you cant join in the joke of calling someone a slut, but be rest assured that you are consistent.

cosmo and the taliban

On facebook, a friend posted what I'm assuming is a satirical Cosmo cover of a veiled Taliban woman. In her tag with the image, the friend expressed what we're all thinking, "truly racist and trashy but a little bit funny." While there have been similar horribly mean-spirited stereotypes passing off as satire in the past, I have been trying to figure out what is the fine line that this pink cover is treading that makes you complicit in a guilty laugh. For example, here below is yet another Cosmo-based satire about the Taliban:

This above "cover" is a good starting point to understand the difference between the black&white one and the color one. The Cosmotaliban is focused only on a demeaning depiction of a women under Taliban rule - they don't speak, Muslim fashion is dull and "same old" and the worst of it, the allusion that this woman enjoys and submits to the "5 favorite unequal treatments." There is nothing funny about this because its primary intention is to be nasty to the woman. 

Meanwhile the pink Cosmo cover is able to really poke fun at the Cosmopolitan brand itself. If you look at the Fergie cover, you see the typical issues Cosmo aspires for western women to be interested in - how to make your man happy in bed, how to lose weight (but without much effort), that most pressing question, "why is love harder in the winter" and how to be stressed out without being a bitch (cos god forbid a woman expresses anger or aggression). And then the most popular type of feature - "what is the guy really thinking?" and in this particular research breakthrough "what his hug reveals." The Cosmo about Taliban is able to hone in on these particular cheap preoccupations of the actual magazine. While completely adhering to every possible racist, rude stereotype of Taliban (guns, hostages, stoning, child marriage) it still manages to express it in the utterly flakey, sex-obsessed, heteronormative language of Cosmopolitan - the kind that seeks to empower women while mainly being concerned with making slaves of male agendas and of course, of consumerism. 

What do you all think? Weigh in with your comments below...

the changing avatars of the chick-lit heroine

The last decade has seen the emergence of the what is popularly called the "chick-lit heroine." It began with bestselling books such as Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City and Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones Diary. Since their success was assured, young women authors were given obnoxiously large advances for chick literature and these include Devil Wears Prada, Something Borrowed, Nanny Diaries and the like. The "chick lit heroine" soon become an easily identifiable and staple character of urban culture. In fact, these women were everywhere: 30-something, single, exciting career, great friends, interest in fashion (read shoes), excessive white-wine drinking ability, a loveable clumsiness, looking for mr. right, dating many mr. wrongs. 

Sadly, a lot of fairly cool chick-lit books were turned into movies that focused on the romantic trajectory often ending with finding love as opposed to offering a real insight into what these books were really doing - dismantling the space of cliched romance novels of the Harlequin variety. Instead of unrealistic escape narratives where women are being discovered and swept off their feet by counts, dukes, industrialists and other unreasonably successful, somewhat rough yet tender-hearted hunks, we had a career-minded woman who did not want to settle for the wrong guy and for whom her friends had become the new urban family. While the romance novel remained undisturbed in popularity and sales, the new comedy of manners called chick-lit had been born and it offered a counter-discourse within women's writing.

As the chick lit sales and production stabilized, as more and more of the books turned into movies and became a common feature at airports, beaches and young women's homes, the chick lit heroine began to go through some new avatars. The first shift was the emergence of similar narratives from African-American (not to be confused with urban lit dealing with the complexities of street culture deriving from hiphop lyrics and ideologies), Indian, Asian and Hispanic communities. These were still middle-class tales of city life whether yuppie black women in Atlanta in Scenes from a Sistah or an Indian woman coming of age in New York's fashion industry in For Matrimonial Purposes or the tough dating situation for Chinese-American singleton The Dim Sum of All Things who lives with her family or then  Tamara Contreras who chooses singledom in LA over family and a traditional, Mexican fiance in Hot Tamara.  Primarily the story of a white urban girl, the narratives slowly began to mirror female dilemmas in various other communities. At the same time, a post-singlehood narrative also began to emerge. There came mommy-lit that dealt with the travails of what happens after you have everything you've ever wanted. These were stories of juggling love, career and now, a baby. The frazzled but adoring mommy narrative has certainly seeped into our collective consciousness as well and it can all be traced to these books. Chick lit in whichever form is about the many choices offered to the modern woman as opposed to fixed traditional roles, and the ways in which she successfully navigates these many spaces

But lately I feel that something has ruptured the hard shield of optimism that seems to have kept this "chick" persona afloat in fiction and in real life. The recent article by Kate Bolick on marriage as a declining option for women caused a stir on the internet and led to many spin-off opinions and debates. Bolick dissects the second-wave feminist idea which elevated "independence over coupling." The article claims that women now, "keep putting marriage off." Bolick rattles off some impressive statistics: "In 1960, the median age of first marriage in the US was 23 for men and 20 for women; today it is 28 and 26. Today, a smaller proportion of American women in their early 30s are married than at any other point since the 1950s, if not earlier. We're also marrying less – with a significant degree of change taking place in just the past decade and a half. In 1997, 29% of my Generation X cohort was married; among today's Millennials (those born in the late-70s to 90s) that figure has dropped to 22%. Compare that with 1960, when more than half of those aged 18 to 29 had already tied the knot." 

Competitive career trajectories, economic independence, the ability to raise children without a husband, lack of religious pressures and an inequal sex ratio between men and women have led to this decline. The quest for love does continue, of course, and unconventional family structures have certainly are starting to emerge all around  us whether its same-sex marriages or families, single parent homes, fathers as primary care-givers or just single living. 

launching "warscapes" magazine

Warscapes, an online magazine of art, literature and politics will be launching November 8th, 2011.

Warscapes provides a lens into current conflicts across the world through fiction, poetry, reportage, reviews, art, photography, conversations and retrospectives of war literature from the past fifty years.

For the launch event, there will be a screening of Battle of Algiers followed by a talk with Saadi Yacef, writer, guerilla and filmmaker on whose memoir the movie is based. Buy tickets here...

The Warscapes inaugural issue will feature
excerpts from

Madeleine Thien's latest novel on the Cambodian war and genocide, Dogs at the Perimeter 

Joe Sacco's graphic novel from Palestine, Footnotes in Gaza

plus

An essay reflecting upon Hollywood, Pirated Videos and Child Soldiers from the Congo by Emmanuel Dongala
Four Poems by Somali poet Ali Jimale Ahmed from his volume, When Donkeys Give Birth to Calves: Totems, Wars, Horizons, Diasporas

...and reviews of books, films and performances.

www.warscapes.com

eastern promises from a western lens

scooter india

At a recent Diwali celebration here in Manhattan, I found myself in the midst of the all-too-familiar debate on India’s or Asia’s ascent versus America’s decline. Furious arguments were exchanged lauding the rise of the “East” and statistics brandished on world economic shifts. Some of us argued that no matter any economic shift (which in itself is fairly arguable), the cultural imperialism of the West still stands sound and until that changes nothing can really shift. The debate then quickly devolved to the question of Indian identity and whimpered down when someone announced that “I feel Indian because its as simple as I miss my help in the kitchen.” Ouch! The irony of this is I’m sure not lost on you. The desi swish set pontificating the benefits of living in posh Bombay or Delhi versus Gramercy Park and concluding that India is where its at. This irksome debate managed to assuage some of that nostalgic dull ache that resurfaces in me on occasions like Diwali...where I wistfully long for a Bombay that I left; that I know doesn’t exist in any place except my imagination. 

Sumedh Munghee on the other hand decided to not only live out the debate we were having, but also blog about it, and New York Times loved it so much that they decide to post it. The thing is Mr. Munghee was so driven by all these feelings of nostalgia and inspired by Friedman’s flat globe that he decided to move back from the U.S. and settle into urban India. Unfortunately, even though he surrounded himself with all things Western-like, he found that he was quickly deteriorating into a savage Indian. This horrific realization got him to pack his bags and return to the burbs of CA, but he kindly added an ode to India’s future success something he will regrettably have to bow out of since it entails being Indian in India. I’m not going to recount some of the atrocious statements in his blog post. I’ll leave that to your reading displeasure. But what ran as a common thread for me between this article and the debate was the acutely narrow accounts or ideas of economic or socio-political shifts coming from a privileged and mobile set of Indians having utterly Westernized, classist and bourgeois perspectives. Apart from having no real intellectual depth, it is appalling that the discussion never accounts for the vast section of Indian society below the upper crust. Munghee’s dehumanized maid, for instance, did not really get the memo on India’s economic boom and has anything really changed for her in the last decade?! I think not. When will we stop viewing Eastern promises through a Western lens?

feminist dead ends

I was surprised when the usually discerning and perceptive feminist blog Feministing recently brought attention to the article about how the six big differences between men and women have been debunked. Below is my paraphrased version of these supposed myths vs realities. 

Men want "sexy," women want "status": U-Michigan psychologist Terri Conley and colleagues claim that when in an actual situation of finding a mate (such as speed dating) these differences evaporated. 

Men want many sex partners, women want far fewer: Apparently this myth exists due to some mathematical errors. Calculating an average does not offer clear data. Men need to affirm masculine ideals and thus tend to inflate numbers. However, when told that they are being given a lie detector tests, they are truthful and it turns out that men and women sleep with an equal number of partners in their life. 

Men think about sex more than women do: In empirical data provided by a study in the Journal of Sex Research, psychologists asked research participants to record their thoughts throughout the day. Men thought of sex 18 times, women 10 times "but men also thought about food and sleep proportionately more than women. That suggests sex doesn't hold as vaunted a position for men as you might expect."

Women have far fewer orgasms than men do: Again, a mathematical error. While it seems like men have more orgasms, women are not far behind and are likely to have as many when in a committed and considerate relationship. Women just do not do that well in hook-ups. 

Men like casual sex more than women do: While studies show that women turn down casual offers whereas men do not, the problem here is that women being propositioned by strangers do not imagine he is any good in bed. "When women are asked to consider a hypothetical offer from someone more familiar or very attractive, they become much more receptive. Likewise, gender differences in one-night-stand interest evaporated when men and women were asked to consider sleeping with someone famous."

Women are pickier than men: Here psychologists’ claims that womens’ picky attitudes are bound to dating rules. Since men conventionally are meant to make the first moves, it allows women to be choosy.

Now that we are done with our salacious pop psychology fix for the day, lets get to why this particular article does not deserve praise from feminists at all. On the one hand, living in a real world defined by conventions and rules when it comes to mating between men and women, these supposed differences may be weighing on our minds and to know that some of this is untrue might be empowering. But really, empowering only in a witty-bar-repartee-prehookup-banter kind of way. The biggest hindrance to the debate about feminism is the entire framework of difference. By this I mean a preoccupation with the ways in which men and women differ and in what ways can we prove or disprove those differences. All the six myths above – being with a lot of partners, focus on looks, frequency of sex, embracing casual sex – all these are problems that are really about constructions and constrictions of masculinity and by extension, they affect women’s lives. 

For the article to be feminist, it would have to use a reverse strategy and we could then arrive at the more relevant questions – for example, what are women’s issues and anxieties with regards to sexual fulfillment or how are women with multiple sexual partners judged or labeled and it’s impact on a collective psyche, or what are the challenges women face when finding partners of equal standing in terms of looks or income. By addressing these questions with a women-first approach, we can really delve into something as opposed to squeezing women into the limited space given to them in discourses of masculinity.

Popular culture tends to extract the most schematic, brief and simple points from theories propounded in academic ivory towers. There is indeed a small victory in being able to enter a mainstream internet space and have in-your-face, bold ideas about women and men come to the fore in a normalized way. However, even with great advances in feminist thinking, we still remain under the sway of what I’m calling “biology fundamentalism” – quite simply that men and women have natural, biological differences and those lead to social inequalities. Biology, an honorable study in itself, is constantly used as a tool to propagate horrible prejudices whether applied to homosexuality, interracial intercourse, racial supremacies and many others. It seems that there is still a carte blanche of biology fundamentalism with regards to gender where there is a merry and relaxed attitude towards conversations about men and women being embedded in natural difference. There is no need for Judith Butler to rap us on our knuckles to remind us yet again that biology is socially constructed too and examples of that are all around us.

The simplicity and brevity of feminism as experienced in the mainstream arena obfuscates the complex and difficult process it took for feminist thinkers to arrive there. To take somewhat masculine preoccupations as an a priori and to view them as women-centric is first of many hurdles. What may be groundbreaking for pop culture can become a dead-end for feminism. 

most powerful africans...

Forbes put together a list of the most influential African celebrities. For those like me, who are bored of Justin Bieber, Pregnance, Brangelina and other non-erudite celebs, here is much hipper list dominated by genius musicians and talented writers. Chinua Achebe tops the list with Youssou N'Dour and Salif Keita in the top ten. Here they all are...

fashion faux pas?

It seems that the fashion industry just cannot get it right whether its the most minimal use of dark-skinned models or insane trends such as Vogue Italia's "slave" earrings or Michael Kors' foolish safari suits. Even the most talented and intellectual designers always mess it up when it comes to Africa. Alexander McQueen's primitivization of Africa or Christian Dior's utterly idiotic fetish of Pharaohs. However, it is much more disconcerting when celebrities who have probably encountered a lot of resistance to their own skin color while climbing the ladder of success refuse to say NO to most absurd manipulations of their own images. 

Just a few months ago, Beyonce allowed herself to be photographed in blackface. Somehow because she was in France, she was convinced it was edgy to be painted into an ebony colored "African queen." Some critics and bloggers said that since she is an African-American, it was hardly a big deal, completely ignoring the fact this is an insidious historical legacy and simply must not be touted as hip or normal. At the obverse end of same debate, behold Rihanna who has appeared on the cover of Vogue UK with her skin clearly whitened. Rampant racism, c'est toujours trendy?!

dudes, bros and the women they hate to love

-written in joint disdain by Bhakti & Laxmi

The Story with the Stats

I recently watched I Don't Know How She Does It, a movie where a frazzled Sarah Jessica Parker juggles career, kids, marriage and friendship. The film was about the current state of affairs that the modern mother has found herself in. Though light in its tone, I was surprised by the careful and critical depiction of the genre of books known as mommy lit. The commentaries by Christian Hendricks resonated with me; they were tough, sarcastic and undeniably feminist. While it espoused a cliche, white heteronormativity, it was refreshing because it was not about landing some guy but about doing well in career and with your kids. When I looked for reviews on rottentomatoes.com, it only rated at 17% from critics. It was not the first time I had come home from a women-centric film and found that it rated atrociously, with critics saying the harshest possible things. When it comes to dude movies, however, its a completely different story. Take a look at these revealing stats:

Knocked Up 90% - A story about a set of greasy, unfortunate looking young men who smoke pot all day and the grimiest of them all ends up with a hot babe with an amazing tv career. 

I Love You Man 83% - A story about a vulnerable (read pathetic) guy with no friends who friends out with a greasy, sleazy guy who waxes eloquent about farts.

Hangover 78% - A story about some attractive and some greasy, potbellied guys who take roofies in Vegas and do things like pull out their own teeth and trash their hotel room. Some of them still get hot babes, especially the tooth guy.

And then here are stats for the equally annoying chick films...please note that these are not romantic comedies but female-bonding films even though critics constantly rate them based on romance criteria. 

Baby Mama 63% - A hilarious, hip movie about a woman trying to have a baby and the comedy of surrogacy that ensues. Starring attractive, profilic, insanely talented women like Tina Fey and Amy Poehler

Sex and the City 1 - 49% and Sex and the City 2 - 15% - An occassionaly funny, mainly sappy movie with fabulous fashion and talented actresses propounding (though poorly) some feminist ideals. 

Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 77% An extremely charming coming-of-age film about teenage friendship that shockingly rates less than Hangover!

Lets forget about the pot-bellied, pot-smoking, trash-talking dudes for a moment and see how their six-packed, ball-dunking, trash-talking bro counterparts rate: Best Man 71% or The Brothers 63%. While the bros do poorly compared to the dudes in our pathetic society that lacks the most basic critical tools to understand African-American context or culture, they still rate higher than sisterhood movies. For example, the less recent How Stella Got Her Groove Back 48% or Phat Girlz 23%. 

To understand the exceptional case of Bridesmaids, read here. 

Machismo to Mess-ismo 
What is the malady at hand? Well, the most obvious issue is the unadulterated worship of male chauvinism. While the trend towards chauvinist narratives is hardly new, it is the particular form that it has taken which poses a big problem for us women who have to deal with the outrageous trends that arise in real life thanks to the fictive lives in these movies. Once upon a time, masculine ideals were perpetrated through dashing action heroes who were sauve and skilled. They beat a villain to pulp, sipped a martini and swirled breathless girls to tango music, all in a days work! What kind of role models do these overweight, jobless, broke, vulgar, messy and crass guys espouse? It seems that socially we have taken a turn for the worse - from the raw machismo of the previous times, we are now applauding farting, unkempt hair, lack of focus or ambition and a porn collection. 

Trash Talking
The direct outcome of these films is that men feel it is now okay to take trash-talking about women to the next level. Characters of women in most of these films have gone from adorable bimbo or nurturing angel to that of brittle bitch who stands in the way of anything the man may enjoy such as bachelor parties, porn, guys nights, pot parties and other shallow and vulgar pastimes. Attractive women that these men have miraculously snagged interrupt every possible moment of male camaraderie. The first topic among the male friends focus on how to "get" women, that is, how to get laid without getting the woman in question to fall madly in love with the greasy guy. The second focus is on pure women-bashing. All these women are desperate to get married, have kids, they are constantly in the pursuit of plotting home-making, plotting monogamy and mainly snooping and stalking even though not a single one of these characters seems remotely eligible for so much attention to be heaped on them. Though the men in dude movies are clearly losers, thus vulnerable and thus lovable, it is the bro movies which astound a little more. These hunky African-American males are all ivy-league educated, moneyed guys with all kinds of worldly experience, success and an erudite vocabulary, yet they spend their male bonding time mindlessly dissecting women in a manner that seems to hark back to the middle ages. Women-bashing is rampant here too but almost worse because the characters are supposedly so classy. 


Overall, it is so sad that these ineligible males view themselves as prized candidates whom women are waiting to entrap. They are chronically contriving to keep these women off and are perennially playing these women to keep them in check. These are such unlikely scenarios but the tragedy is that they have started to pass off as truth. Men romanticize these mindsets and  it is changing the fabric of relationships and courtships for the worse today. Some months ago, the New Yorker article on Anna Faris made a big splash by exposing sexism in Hollywood. The moguls of dude comedies claimed to follow some basic rules for date nights. I quote: "1) Men Rule: Men decide which movie a couple will see on any given weekend, and any hint that a film involves fashion, pedicures, or female troubles is "man-poison" --- 2) Men are simple. Don't confuse them: Men just don't understand the nuances of female dynamics...Male movie-goes care chiefly about the male star and his buddies --- 3) If a woman is the star, it better be a romantic comedy." Hollywood may swear by these rules but it is upto women to take date night into their own hands. Real women have never been more different than their on-screen avatars. They are stronger, more successful and less likely to settle than ever before. There is an embedded subjugating tactic within these films that I would urge women to not respond to. As for the men, I only have a simple question: Do you really want to be like these guys? I sincerely hope not. 

love and other demons

I was recently asked if any piece of art or writing I consumed particularly resonated with my state of being at the time. The first thing that came to mind was Orhan Pamuk’s exquisite love story, The Museum of Innocence. Through the protagonist, Kamal Bey’s eyes, Pamuk journeys the entire gamut of emotions that loving fosters with a writing that is both real and magical at the same time. I don’t admire this book only because I am a silly romantic but because it managed to restore my faith in love and passion. The novel has anything but a fairy tale end leaving all its characters exhumed by the passions that drive them. But when I took it up, I was beginning to feel weary by the pragmatic notions of time and tracks, things that had no particular significance to me by themselves, but the discourse of which I could not escape. It was tiring to have to constantly justify a stance which in my mind seemed the most natural or logical, that one must always pursue love for its sake and not as a conduit to things that follow in its wake. If the former happens to bring about the latter it is one thing, but to pursue it in a pragmatic manner would kill my soul I often argued. I would like to share the following two excerpts from the book. The first speaks of passion (even though the protagonist had not fallen in love yet, or didn’t think he had) but manages to be exalting, sophisticated and intensely romantic. The second one is an uplifting passage and something that always calms my sense of disappointment and impatience with any given situation. I don’t think I can ever stop believing in love even if I never actually find it and no matter all the disappointments I have been dealt. And I will always be grateful to Pamuk for the kinship he offered me through his beautiful novel. 

“I would like to say a few things about kisses, though I have some anxieties about steering clear of trivialities and coarseness. I want to tell my story in a way that does justice to its serious points regarding sex and desire: Fusun’s mouth tasted of powdered sugar, owing, I think, to the Zambo chiclets she so liked. Kissing Fusun was no longer a provocation devised to test and to express our attraction to each other, it was something we did for the pleasure of it, and as we made love we were both amazed to discover love’s true essence. It was not just our wet mouths and our tongues that were entwined but our respective memories. So whenever we kissed, I would kiss her first as she stood before me, then as she existed in my recollection. Afterward, I would open my eyes momentarily to kiss the image of her a moment ago and then one of more distant memory, until thoughts of other girls resembling her would commingle with both those memories, and I would kiss them, too, feeling all the more virile for having so many girls at once; from here it was a simple thing to kiss her next as if I was someone else, as the pleasure I took from her childish mouth, wide lips and playful tongue stirred my confusion and fed ideas heretofore not considered, and the pleasure grew to encompass all the various personae I adopted as I kissed her, and all the remembered Fusuns that were evoked when she kissed me. It was in these first long kisses, in our lovemaking’s slow accumulation of particularity and ritual, that I had the first intimations of another way of knowing, another kind of happiness that opened a gate ever so slightly, suggesting a paradise few will ever know in this life. Our kisses delivered us beyond the pleasures of flesh and sexual bliss for what we sensed beyond the moment of the springtime afternoon was as great and wide as time itself. Could I be in love with her? The profound happiness I felt made me anxious. I was confused, my soul teetering between the danger of taking this joy too seriously and the crassness of taking it too lightly.” 

“Thus, did we enter what I have called the happiest moment of my life. In fact no one recognizes the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it. It may well be that, in a moment of joy, one might sincerely believe that they are living that golden instant “now”, even after living such a moment before, but whatever they say, in one part of their hearts they still believe in the certainty of a happy moment to come. Because how could anyone, and particularly anyone who is still young, carry on with the belief that everything could get worse. If a person is happy enough to think he has reached the happier moment of his life, he will be hopeful enough to believe his future will be just as beautiful, more so.

But when we reach a point when our lives take on their final meaning shape, as in a novel, we can identify our happiest moment, selecting it in retrospect as I am doing now. To explain why we have chosen this moment is to acknowledge that it far in the past, that it will never return, and that awareness, therefore, of that very moment is painful. We can bear the pain only by possessing something that belongs to that instant. These mementoes preserve the colors, textures, images, and delights as they were more faithfully, in fact, than can those who accompanies us through those moments.”