When Misogyny Is Not Just Male

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Cliches that only certain kind of women are worthy of respect. Our cinema, our music, our popular culture, our advertising paint women in broad strokes. In most of the family socials like Do Raaste in the seventies, Swarg Narak in the eighties and the Barjatya weepies in the 90s, educated, ‘westernised’ women were portrayed as vamps and finally an autocratic, flawed woman’s reign ended with a slap or a seething lecture. The message being, if only women behaved, there would be such harmony in families. Women ofcourse judge each other all the time because they are made to believe that in someone else’s shame, lies their vindication. Recently an American mother of a teenaged daughter compared the photo of a sandwich to Taylor Swift’s supposedly promiscuous body parts. A woman. Did that. Dani Mathers, a ‘playmate’ obviously in love with her own gorgeousness, stealthily photographed a woman in a gym’s shower stall to fat shame her on Snapchat. Yes, a woman did that. To a woman. The Internet fell apart over the supposedly more important than anything else feud between Kim Kardashian and Taylor Swift with respectable sites asking the readers, “Team Taylor? Or Team Swift?” The Internet ofcourse literally exploded over Milania Trump’s plagiarised  ramble vs Mitchell Obama’s 2008 speech. Though the issue is far more complex than just one woman vs another here.

For years faceless legions of Team Aniston have feuded with Team Jolie online  because you see, the world is not big enough to accommodate all kinds of women. We must choose one kind over the other. Fat vs thin. Married vs Single. Ambitious vs Domesticated. Dark vs Fair. Black vs White. We must pit women against each other to keep things interesting and to ignore real issues. Soap opera empires have been built on conflicts between home makers and home breakers, women who trust and those who lust. And as we mentioned before, everything in our popular culture encourages us to buy into this notion that one woman’s success cancels out another woman’s achievements. We are teaching young girls that beauty contests  are a legitimate yardstick to measure a woman’s value. Men may brawl in streets and wage wars but the phrase ‘cat fight’ is reserved for women because they, we are told, can’t get along with each other. Some of us have come to believe it. Some of us can’t get along with each other because we have been raised to believe that we can’t. Why did the mother of a young daughter slut shame Taylor Swift by posting a terrible picture? Because she has been taught that a woman who has multiple boyfriends has no morality. Why did Dani Mathers fat shame a woman she did not even know? It is because she has been taught or has learnt that only certain kinds of female bodies are desirable. The rest are to be dismissed as jokes.

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We may laugh uncontrollably at Ssumier S Pasricha’s hilariously viral videos about a gossiping matriarch but the insight in the videos is nothing to laugh about. We all know atleast one woman who badmouths her daughter-in-law and the poor relatives who do not have her money and connections. Even in a decently written, progressive serial like Bhage Re Mann on Zee Zindagi, the enemy was a woman. A controlling mother who could not let go of her 45-year-old Chunmun.

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In the 90s, Kavita Chowdhury’s brave and fiercely feminist TV series Udaan touched upon how women are perceived by each other when Kalyani, an IPs officer is trying to crack a case and stumbles upon a woman who was once the consort of a dacoit but now wants the other woman in his life to be punished. Kalyani is divided between her desire to catch the dacoit by exploiting the jealousy card and the guilt of using one woman against another. But then she reasons that it is not that women are naturally envious of each other. It is conditioning. They are always made to feel insecure and not enough and end up perpetuating patriarchal behaviours. A point that activist Kamla Bhasin has made many times that the fight is not with men, but with patriarchy, no matter what gender it comes clothed in. A point that director Navdeep Singh also made when I interviewed him post the release of NH 10, a film that dealt with the complex reality of honour killings condoned sometimes by female members of a “shamed” family.

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The truth is that patriarchy would have a harder time thriving if women recognised ways in which they were supporting it by picking on other women. What actor Jesse James said recently abut white privilege is true about male privilege too. Women are used for what they can do, as domestic beings, as pop culture icons, as trail blazers but the freedom they have is always conditional. True freedom never comes in the now. It is always somewhere else and women have to hustle for it. And sometimes, we give up our freedoms too easily because it is easier to tame ourselves and fit in the moulds that have been created for us. A woman can be a goddess. A bitch. A whore. A slut. A cat call. A troll’s entertainment of the day. A rape victim. A rape survivor. Cold and calculating. Warm and nurturing. What she cannot be is herself. So the next time we see a woman like Taylor Swift or someone closer home overstepping our morality brief or someone with what think is a less than perfect body or life, let us just remember we don’t always have to like or agree with or approve each other but that we can always recognise a woman as a woman. Not as a cliche we have been taught to mock or to hate. Misogyny is mostly male but it is female too and we must recognise it in ourselves even as we battle it everywhere else.

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