Green With Unwanted Attention

14 May

I had written a few months back about the sexism prevalent in women’s dress-codes at work. Perhaps today’s incident has put the issue more firmly at the forefront of my mind now. Dressing up for interviews is always daunting; and never more so when the brief is to wear smart casuals (its less of a dress-code and more of a quagmire that only the most practiced wade through without sinking on nine out of ten occasions) that also shows off  my personality.

So I decided to risk it with my green skirt! Spring-time and eye-popping colours and all that. Of course I dressed it down appropriately with sober black shoes, opaque tights and high neck top and a jacket. Walking down the street I felt so dapper! That was until a hoot and a call of ‘Hi there, gorgeous’ hit my blushing earholes. Now, I am not usually the type such comments are often directed to. I, thankfully, pass by unnoticed when inappropriate and objectifying male attention is being doled out on the streets. So this not only caught me by surprise, but also made me doubt the appropriateness of my interview attire.

Was it the skirt? I fidgeted with it until it was as long as it could be. Stretch for me a little more, baby, there’s a good girl! Was my makeup too much? Blusher too dark? Heels too high? Bag too bright? What in the goddamn world was wrong with ME? I almost rushed back to my apartment to change. I felt obscene!  (In case this sounds like an over-reaction, I was even followed to the tube station by this very ‘complimentary’ admirer.)

This reaction was compounded by the fact that my mother asked me to take a PICTURE of what I was wearing so she could see if the creepy masculine attention it attracted was justified or not. Bless you, mother, but I would please like to get out of the habit of chastising myself (my attire, behaviour, lateness of the hour I choose to return home) for what is obviously a type of behaviour that is intended to make me uncomfortable, and is hence intentionally anti-social and inexcusable. For the umpteenth time, ‘my skirt is not an invitation’!

(While editing this blogpost I noticed that I was all too eager to point out the specifics of what I was wearing in what I can only assume is a defensive attempt to avert blame. I do resent this self-censuring and self-policing impulse that, unknown to me, has obviously been hibernating within me, waiting for a catcall to surface.)

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#Julia: What’s in it for me?

7 May

I have been following the conversations and controversies regarding Obama’s ‘The Life of Julia’ campaign introduced last Thursday with great interest. Ever since I read Latour’s Politics of Nature: How to Bring Politics into Democracy in 2010, I have been interested in topography of (or in) political communication. Obama’s campaign, with its savvy inclusion of technological objects and channels, is an interesting case study for this. So here are my thoughts on this:

  • Political jargon and policy stands are often out of reach of the voters who struggle against the volume of information that is produced daily in the political field (which is interlinked with economic and international happenings, which add to the complexity.) to make an informed political decision. My first thought about the Julia campaign that it was a good attempt to ground these policy debates by situating it within the day to day life(-time) of an individual – a woman, Julia.
  • My issues with the campaign lies with the fact that the everywoman chosen by the Obama camp should resemble so closely the white, heteronormative, middle class, law-upholding American female ideal. I would have liked to see Obama’s policies regarding crime prevention and rehabilitation, support for single mothers, runaway teenagers, etc. be weaved into this narrative. There is no excuse for not doing so given the current technological capacities to tell stories with multiple diverging story-lines.
  • Having said that, I do disagree with Obama’s critics who claim a dislike for the campaign based on the fact that it sends the message that American women are incapable of making it on their own without the government’s ‘cradle-to-grave assistance’. The campaign is a rhetoric – logically speaking, in a means based benefits system, once Julia’s (or individual X’s) standard of living and opportunities available to her has been raised, at an early period of her life hopefully, she would not require governmental support, at least to as great a degree. Moreover, I do see such critique as coming from the relatively privileged upper middle class, white feminist quarters and do think they are baseless given the fact that according to initial reports, American women seem to respond well to the campaign and are not insulted by it.
  • Another critique of the campaign is that it is willfully misleading as it dodges the specifics from the Obama campaign but nails down Romney’s based on specifics. This I do take more seriously. Of course, the ‘infographic’ is stained by party political rhetoric. Its accuracy is under question, and rightly so. I do think, however, that were voices from other, competing or otherwise, were linked to this narrative (or conceivably on a separate and relatively neutral platform), it would provide an easy, one-stop (but not one-voice) snapshot of the political information that the voters would need to make decisions in the upcoming elections.

So in short, a promising start of the use of web and modern imaging tools to bring a campaign to life, but disappointing in view of the number of tools and digital narrative capacities that have not been tapped yet in order to create a very rudimentary form of a political map to help guide the votes. What did you think of the infographic and the uproar #Julia caused in the media? Do you find this interesting as a form of political communication, like me, or do you think the campaign and the discourse around it is mostly gender-related (the discourse surrounding it is certainly quite gendered)? Or do you want to discuss the policies in the infographic – do you see social security dominate these conversations?

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Gay Marriage: Who is it for?

8 Apr

This post was originally written and published for the British cheeky feminist blogzine The High Tea Cast.

Those who know me, know that very little else on the internet gets under my skin as Brendan O’Neill’s articles. It might be because in his articles he inducts ideas I support in a logic stream that, to me, seems almost perverse and twisted. For that I say, “Well done Brendan”. At least you are helping me to think beyond the ‘left’ and ‘right’ ideological boxes that I long assumed the world’s opinions were divided into.

Take, for example, Brendan’s recent Spiked Online article on gay marriage. He claims that the issue of gay marriage is a bad idea, not only because it erodes traditional institutions in place (the classic conservative argument against gay marriage), but also because he doesn’t think ‘the gays’ actually want it because gay activists once campaigned for their right to live outside these institutions. He doesn’t think the gay marriage issue is ‘populist’ enough to be given much weight as there has been ‘no leaping in front of the Queen’s horse, for the right of gays to get hitched’. As is typical of him, he smells an ‘elitist’ agenda at play here.

However, I would really like to know where you get off dividing the (post) post-modern consciousness into ‘populist’ and ‘elite’. He blames conservative ‘political parties’ and ‘massive corporations’ as having an elitist interest in regaining their sanctity by rallying support for this issue. I find this quite problematic as by adding an elitist tag to a particular political demand he is downplaying its legitimacy.

Continue reading →

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Why I Will Be Walking the #SlutWalk

1 Apr
  1. SlutWalk started on April 3, 2011 in Toronto, Canada, as a protest march reclaiming the word ‘slut’ and against instances of rape and sexual harassment being correlated to women’s appearance, clothes and behaviour (victim-blaming). It quickly spread across major cities of the world.
  2. Share
    Slut Walk London 2011 Part 1 *WeAreChange*
    cabl3guy2012
    Sun, Apr 10 2011 17:12:02
  3. What appeals to me about this campaign is the way it addresses the dichotomous and paradoxical way women’s sexuality is conceptualized in society. But not everyone agrees.

  4. Continue reading →

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Gender Folding and Pre-Teen Kissing

3 Mar

ImageThis article has been published collaboratively by LSE Equality and Diversity and LSE Engenderings blogs to mark LGBT History Month 2012.

I kissed a girl. I liked it. Long before I had heard of lesbian sex or desires or even contemplated issues regarding sex or gender consciously. She was just a person who I found attractive and who had previously made me blush by publicly announcing that I was the prettiest girl in the class. The kiss, or the attraction preceding it, never made me question my sexual or gender identity. At that age we were already talking about the boyfriends we would have, and although a boyfriend was something I wanted, she was what I desired. Desired in a way that had more to do with the electricity in our mutual gaze and her ‘devil may care’ attitude than with an interest in her ‘lady bits’.

In later years, while reflecting about what this fact might signify about my desires and how it fits into the narrative that informs my sexual and gender identity, I realized that it is a representative slice of the fluid way I experience desire and project it on to the fabric of my identity. By then, of course, I had started to question and reorganise my experiences conscious of (and often rebellious against) the social concepts of gender and sexual orientation. Continue reading →

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On Rogue Hemlines- The Feminine Body Goes to Work

18 Jan

A pencil skirt and pumps in the British winter? That’s right, I have been interviewing with some companies this freezing January. And as a part of putting my best foot forward, I have, of course, read through countless articles about what to do (or not do), say (or not say), and wear (or not wear).

I have never been one of those who cringed at the thought of donning a suit for work. In fact, being a young executive in a start-up digital media agency in the image-conscious Dubai, I have always been quite conscious of what my work wear communicated to my clients and co-workers. We are told to let out ‘femininity’ show through the severe lines of formal wear. But to beware of the occasional cleavage, distracting jewelry or a hemline that refuses to be shy.

In fact, in this rather scintillatingly written story about Debrahlee Lorenzana, is hidden a gem of conventional wisdom – women in the corporate world have been entrusted with the responsibility of keeping their ‘femininity’ out of their workspace. The repurcussions of not following this adage is seen as a moral panic caused by unruly female bodies in a workplace where men who carry out the important duties are too distracted to concentrate. It is our responsibility to cover up the offending body parts or risk being thought of as unprofessional. Continue reading →

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Dependently Yours, Married Woman.

7 Dec

 If you, like me, have followed the discussions and controversies around Kate Bolick’s article republished in The Guardian on 27th Nov, and have seen the battle lines being drawn around it passionately and with intense verboseness (examples here), you must be wondering why I am so late in jumping on to the bandwagon. Well, since the UKBA has decided to grant me leave to remain in the UK (and to work), I have been job searching ferociously, a priority which in my head easily overtook the niggling feeling that I should not neglect my blog in the process.

So here I am, about a week and a half late, trying to find a way to enter the conversation only to find that the various other voices in the medley have now made it a complex multifaceted issue that is tough to pin down. The fact that the original article itself did not have a primary strand of argument, and meandered into various interesting but confusing tangents, does not make this task any easier. I am therefore going to approach it in a way that I hope will be both manageable and interesting to my readers. I am going to isolate and tackle the issue in the article that rouse the strongest reaction in me given my current mental and situational disposition. I do not think this is her central argument at all, and you should read the original article and read the following extract in context. However, for the purposes of my argument, here we go:

“If, in all sectors of society, women are on the ascent, and if gender parity is actually within reach, this means that a marriage regime based on men’s overwhelming economic dominance may be passing into extinction. As long as women were denied the financial and educational opportunities of men, it encouraged them to “marry up” – how else would they improve their lot? Now that we can pursue our own status and security, and are therefore liberated from needing men the way we once did, we are free to like them more, or at least more idiosyncratically, which is how love ought to be, isn’t it?” Continue reading →

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Devil in the Details

21 Nov

“The only opinion that matters when it comes to our marriage, is ours”, says Valenti, the founder of the website feministing.com, in an article about her ‘big feminist wedding’. A comment by MrsZang to this article also mentions, “Frankly, it is refreshing to hear about someone who really doesn’t care what pressures friends and family put on a couple when they decide to get married and just do what they want anyway.”

I had a similar opinion before I realized just how deeply my parents had been hurt as a result of my putting my foot down in order to be a subversive bride. I chose not to be given away- my partner and I arrived together without much ado or special music. We didn’t exchange rings. I didn’t hold the bouquet during the ceremony, although it was lovingly made by a neighbour, as I am not a flower-bearing kind of a girl. I think I went too far when I didn’t even put either of my parents’ names down as a witness (whereas my partner chose to put his mother’s name down as a witness), thereby banishing any involvement they might have had in the ceremony. My parents flew in from outside the UK the night before the wedding, and they didn’t know anybody else in the party as well, so they understandably felt quite left out.

Now I tried explaining to them that it really does not matter, and that my wedding day isn’t really a big deal, before I realized that to them it was. And that while ironing out the details that irked me with their meaninglessness or patriarchal symbolism, I had let that day become exactly what I did not want it to be- my big day. As MrsZang perceptively observes, “After all, it is the couple who will remember every detail of the day for the rest of their lives.” I don’t know if I will, but no one else will remember the details for sure. So was fussing over the details really worth the trouble (and sometimes the pain)? Does it really make a political statement that people will remember and be affected by? Or were my parents’ feelings a casualty in a battle against patriarchy that didn’t quite hit the mark? Continue reading →

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How To Write Your Own Wedding Woes

11 Nov

Frankly speaking I am quite perplexed about my upcoming nuptials this weekend. I have been told feeling jittery is to be expected. My concerns have also been met with a swift dismissal from some quarters- ‘needless fuss over nothing’. But the scraps of ‘nothing’ have been building up in my mind. Never having wanted to marry, I found myself despising the necessity of ‘legalizing’ my relationship, as well as accepting the legal boundaries of marriage, in order to even continue my relationship in the same country as my long term partner. In a way, I suppose I felt my choice to marry had been made from a position of weakness, or coercion of circumstances, and therefore not a ‘free choice’. So last night I took to the internet to browse stories of other women plagued with the same concerns as I. Continue reading →

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A ‘Fragile Feminist’ Protest against Allegations of Weakness

8 Nov

Although Spiked Online is one of my favourite weekly reads, I did not find the editor Brendan O’Neill’s latest article published in The Telegraph quite savoury. Of course my disagreement with his views did not reach quite the red hot anger levels of this blogger, but it did stir me up and forced me to reconsider what exactly is the problem that the ‘Stamp Out Misogyny Online’ campaign aims to address and how O’Neill has both overstepped the marks of a rational critique of a movement as well as angered a specific group of people with his arguments.

First of all, despite my initial interest upon reading the title of the article about its content, the first line left me cold- universalizing ‘modern feminism’, establishing connections between feminists and Victorian maladies confidently, and blatantly assuming that feminists are exclusively women (not male, as well as anti-male) with a weak stomach for the coarseness that comes as a part and parcel of interacting, publishing, socializing online. I suppose I could have taken it as a joke if the entire article did not echo this sentiment. But O’Neill does not do his arguments (raising these arguments in an inoffensive and unbiased way might have been useful for the ongoing debates about internet security, online etiquette and abuse) any favour by colouring them with such bias (‘fragile feminists’, ‘delicate sensibilities’,Victorian maladies specific to women and suggesting weakness, a suggestion that those who don’t agree with what is going on should go and read The Lady, etc.). Continue reading →

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