They’re the ones whose mundaneness we marvel at, and whose career decisions we jeer at. Celebrity culture has provided even the most insignificant of us the opportunity to assume roles moral superiority, and fashion critics. If it wasn’t for them, we would have only funny animal videos to fall back upon for small talk.
It’s only logical that we ask them for their opinion on issues and have feelings of outrage or rapt admiration. This is precisely why we started asking every vagina owner who’s been on TV/movies about women’s rights and feminism. It’s like asking every car owner about the inner mechanisms of the vehicle. Or asking every bank account owner about the economy. But since feminism comes under humanities, opinions are much easier to fake.
We love nothing more than when women pretend to be humans by declaring their love for food, requesting to be asked about their work rather than their booties and asking for as much pay as their glorious male peers. It even makes us care about currently-irrelevant women like Mallika Sherawat and her tiff with a reporter, and potentially irrelevant women like Radhika Apte. That’s internet feminism, I suppose.
Another exciting but inconsequential and futile attempt at understanding women’s rights was Homi Adjania’s ‘My choice’ video. As the old saying goes, put it in monochrome and it looks important enough for every man, woman, fish and reptile to discuss. The creators of democracy clearly didn’t foresee the internet and the diarrhoea of opinions that would give an outlet to.
Internet feminism is like an open donation box for crisis relief. It began with good intentions, and if you really dig deep into the box you will find some useful donations that will help the victims. Then there are misguided charitable offerings that were meant to help, but miss the point. But most of the donations will baffle you and make you marvel at the minds of those who thought these things belong to a donation box. At least there’s one field where men and women are truly equal: in being passionate about their vastly misguided opinions.
A recent social media campaign that I came across was published in an online article with the wonderful headline: ‘Social media campaign tries to make a point about feminism, fails spectacularly’ (http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/social-media-campaign-tries-to-make-a-point-about-feminism-fails-spectacularly–eJg8ZlBFoWZ). This came with the hashtag under which the campaign functioned, #BlameOneNotAll. This was also one of those campaigns where women hold up quotes that express how they feel so that men can see how non-intimidating their opinions are and so that they can shove the image into the face of anyone who says “I hope you’re not one of those feminist types…” This is excellent news for ‘meninist’ campaigns, who can now repost these images and claim to be in love with these women.
The campaign posters, some of them as artfully composed as the hashtag, included some gems like ‘My favorite professor and he doesn’t show any inappropriate gesture’, or ‘When my parents are not around, my uncle doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable’.
This is a rather unfair trend. In fact, it has just aggravated gender inequality. You never get to see pictures of men holding boards saying ‘I saw a woman today and she did not invoke me to harass her by dressing provocatively’. Or ‘I have a female colleague and she doesn’t voice her opinions in public.’
tanika godbole 