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...

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. 

children's "lingerie", an oxymoron?

Scandals hold up the best possible mirror to society. Through the moral, aesthetic or ethical limits that a scandal may push, we are forced to connect to the most righteous side of ourselves. Scandals are rarely about the subject at hand but about the levels of tolerance, hypocrisy and contradictions we practice on a daily basis. Recently, a french company that is claiming to make lingerie for children aged 4 to 12 years has become a subject of a lot of uproar and bashing. Jour Apres Lunes has photographed a lot of young girls prancing around in frilly underwear, tank tops, bikini tops with make up and oversized pearls on. They are also in the heels of a controversial photo shoot in French Vogue. Whats the problem? Well, television pundits, bloggers and critics seem to find these young girls overly sexualized and their adult-like, flirtatious stances have been deemed "a pedophile's dream."
 

While it seems like the perfect opportunity to vent at the French and their loose sexual mores, it is also time to reflect on something France's most prolific philosopher once wrote. In Mythologies, Roland Barthes has a small vignette on Toys where he observes, "All the toys one commonly sees are essentially a microcosm of the adult world; they are all reduced copies of human objects, as if in the eyes of the public the child was, all told, nothing but a smaller man, a homunculus to whom must be supplied objects of his own size." He argues that toys prepare and embed the child into an adult world from the earliest possible stage. We turn our children into consumers, not creators or innovators. In every single culture in the world, nothing could be farther from the truth.

hating on online dating!

Trust the New Yorker to take on a hip, progressive subject and give it an unnaturally depressing, smug and aged spin. Nick Paumgarten recently chose to tackle the epic phenomenon of our times - online dating. As we excitedly began to read, the very beginning signaled trouble! The dull historical approach became evident with the first sentence:

"In the fall of 1964, on a visit to the World’s Fair, in Queens, Lewis Altfest, a twenty-five-year-old accountant, came upon an open-air display called the Parker Pen Pavilion, where a giant computer clicked and whirred at the job of selecting foreign pen pals for curious pavilion visitors. You filled out a questionnaire, fed it into the machine, and almost instantly received a card with the name and address of a like-minded participant in some far-flung locale—your ideal match." [ Read article here]

It was not just that Paumgarten was referencing antiquated notions like World Fairs, pen-pals, staid pavilions and machines that whirred but the fact that it seemed like this article had very little interest in the tantalizing psychological and social intensities of online daters that make this phenomenon exciting. Instead, he chose this fuddy-duddy historical route talking about programmers and pseudo-science behind it all. We were not wrong in getting all of this from the first paragraph.

straight people, get a life!

Ever gotten that sense of self-revulsion and embarrassment when you find your hands automatically clicking on a predictable and shallow advice column on dating, sex, love or relationships? I must confess that it is a rare day that goes by when I haven't clicked on some pseudo-psychology column written by seemingly eminent PhDs and supported by the most suspicious of surveys. Why are these little columns so addictive?  

At the surface level, there is the obvious - anyone involved in dating and love issues is often in puzzling, murky territory and and there is nothing wrong in resorting to some pop psychology suggestions to figure out if things are working out or wondering if you're reading every line and signal wrong. Sounds harmless enough so far. But....

It is the actual advice and the reality about straight men and women that it posits which is deeply perturbing. These days, I find that people are bored to tears about any debate that harks back to gender relations, gender representations and gender equality. The idea that kiosks filled with women posing half-naked, half-starved on magazine covers are being objectified, or the fact that the US is weak on strong female leaders, or that our obsession with celeb weddings and princess gowns keep us confined in a tight heteronormative bind are all notions that people roll their eyes at. The list of excuses is long and analytically abortive: so passe, so lame, we are so over it, this aint the fifties, I already fulfilled my gender bender college course requirement, I have a gay friend....so on and so forth. 

Nothing reflects the backward and constantly regressing mode of our heterosexual selves as these advice columns. Loosely speaking,they are divided into a few main categories - dating, understanding men and sexual tips. The sexual tips category more or less fulfills the role of erotica, the highly narrativised tips are meant to titillate and offer a little sneaky reading pleasure. While it is not exactly a progressive way of discussing sex, at least the focus on female orgasms redeems these passages a little bit. 

pure bullshit of pregnancy tourism!

This astounding story showcases, in a single sweep, so many things that are wrong with the world; racism, poverty, ignorance, raping an indigenous people.. the list can go on. Without doubt, the idea of the pregnancy tourist seeking a racially pure seed is primitive and disgusting. But we have heard of the white American couple desiring adoption or surrogacy that leafs through a catalogue for the blond, Ivy-leagued, so-called superior sperm. So how is this any different?! What makes this phenomenon more egregious I imagine is the hark back to colonial plundering, the holocaust or other past racism of epic proportions. Circa 2011. Just want to say, I feel very sharminda.