Have you ever played the "Pin the tail on the cat" game? I have played it numerous times in school. Every time I, or someone else pinned the tail at the wrong spot, I used to imagine the cat give a loud, comical squeal.
The internet was full of poison for people like me this week. Well, it's usually like that but this week I probably read more sad, heart-breaking stories about women than usual. It's like some sort of barrage has broken and now we are flooded with uncountable stories of horrifying things done to women and children.
To be honest, none of those stories have prompted me to write this post. It's something much more trivial, something quite silly. This morning I saw someone of my acquaintance declare gleefully on a social network that feminists must be jealous and so they do not like Lara Croft, the tomb raider games. It was irritating in a prickly sort of a way, nothing to cause any anguish but something that cannot be ignored either. It was probably meant in a funny way and feminists are often accused of not being able to see a joke. So, I find myself, who was really upset last night from reading a deeply disturbing story about the life of the widows in Vrindavan, here on the verge of defending feminists who may or may not justly think that Tomb raider is sexist. I won't.
I don't like to get into debates about whether tomb raider or any other game, comic, movie or image is an awful, exploitative portrayal of women or not. I don't see how it makes a difference to the life of a woman who is thrown out by her family when her husband dies. These aren't the kind of families who are led by people who play or are even exposed to tomb raider. These are devout, god-fearing, hymn chanting and tradition following families who throw out their women to the wolves. I think this is about as fruitful as the bra burning movements of the 1960s. It merely keeps us and others diverted from attacking the root of problems, from reaching people who are a lot more dangerously and deeply entrenched in misogyny, and from thinking of practical ways by which women can actually get free of the chains of patriarchy. These derisive jokes on women and feminism, the perpetration of stereotypes of women in the media seem to me to be only symptoms and sometimes we get so caught up in these symptoms that we expend valuable energy into engaging with them. We have precious little time and energy left to tackle the bigger mental malaise, which produced the symptom in the first place.
It's quite tempting to give a piece of my mind to everyone who calls feminists idiotic, jealous, man-haters. But if I were to go by the experience of the earlier feminists, I'm not sure if it got them very far. We are still bound by our misogynistic, traditions and cultures. We are looked upon with suspicion even by women who truly need this movement to go on. I'd like to attack but I'd like to put my energy into an attack that will cause a little more than a flutter. I'd like to pin the tail right.
It's a lot more difficult to say how this can be done. What was that which if it hadn't been missing, would have made the life of a widow in Vrindavan different? Why is it that a widow in this age is still thrown out of her home because she is considered the most inauspicious of all things in our damned religious texts but a widower may remarry? What will become of the 21,000 and counting, widows in Vrindavan?
I don't have an answer to my questions but I'm going to think hard about this and probably do more ramble writing.
-An angry, disgruntled feminist
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