Will the Real Feminists Please Stand Up?

Today, an activist has become a person who ‘likes’ a cause on social media.

We live in strange times. The difference between reality, the virtual world and hyper reality has left us confused about the codes of behavior. We don’t know what is expected of us in various modes. Further, we normally don’t know the difference anymore and have nothing to hold on to when we navigate from one world to the other.

Today, news gets created by the media. Activists are little more than self-opinionated individuals. And Google controls what one sees and influences our choices by showing us ads that help them turn a profit. The world as we know it is changing as we speak.

In this context, I would like to quote Baudrillard, who argues that a simulacrum ( a representation of something) is not a copy of the real. But it becomes truth in its own right – it bears no resemblance to any reality whatsoever.

To explain this, I will take up a few small things that have been troubling me… things that are out of sync with reality.

The word ‘activist’, for example , if one goes into its etymology, probably comes from ‘active + ist’.

It meant a person who would ‘do’ something to change the world for the better.

These people were karm yogis (workers) in the true sense of the word. They believed that the path to salvation was through doing their karm (work).

Baba Amte was a social activist. Why? Though born into a highly privileged family, and having developed a successful legal practice, he spent his life setting up ashrams for and rehabilitating people with leprosy.

Cut to the times today.

Today, an activist is a person who ‘likes’ a cause on social media. She wears expensive Anokhi suits, has a lot of ‘activist’ friends on Facebook, and speaks against authority. 

So in that sense, an ‘activist’ today is someone who protests against the ‘active’. I believe that activism has now become a lifestyle. In fact, I am given to understand that there is a term for it now. This set is called ‘slacktivists’.

Extending the discussion to FEMinists and SOCIALists.

I know feminists who live off their father and husband choosing one surname over the other when it meets their convenience (read helps their cause). Women who are financially independent but their salary is their ‘pocket money’, the investment they need to make to be seen as a feminist / socialist.

I know socialists who live in plush homes, travel in chauffeur-driven cars, wear designer clothes, holiday in European and yet sit on a hunger strike in solidarity with Kanhaiya Kumar, the latest poster boy of page 3 socialism.

So, the times today leave me confused, because I don’t know who the feminists are fighting for: The middle-class woman earning her keep, raising her children, supporting her parents, paying her EMIs… Is this the woman who needs someone to stand up for her?

Does a woman who cooks for her family, and keeps karva chauth need to be ‘rescued’? Really?

Has the whole cause become ‘brahmannical’, with entry rights reserved? Where what one wears, what one says, the company one keeps, the places one is seen at and the whole projection defines your orientation, rather than the choices you make and the life you lead?

Now a dilemma… It is a no-brainer that any woman with any semblance of self-respect, especially ‘feminists’, have a justified objection to the objectification of women in the media. They are everywhere, ranting on talk shows vehemently against ‘item numbers’. And if you think about it for a moment, I for one finally don’t have a problem with this phenomenon. Because for the first time it is working in the favour of women.

Now it is not the media or the film director exploiting women with hot bodies in item numbers, but women with hot bodies exploiting the vulnerability of men to get themselves a good deal. I have a lot of respect for such women and believe that they are feminists in their own right.

I think the question is: Who is the real feminist? The ‘activists’ we see on TV or the women making real choices, leading real lives on their own terms?

(The writer is a kathak dancer in addition to being an advertising professional. This is a personal blog and the views expressed are those of the author alone. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)