A very long time ago, when my mother was still alive and too unwell to venture out of the house, she would regale me with stories of the movies she had seen over the week, or television shows that had captured her attention. As she would break it down scene by scene, sometimes I’d suppress my yawns, wondering why she spoke of little else. Over twenty years later, I’ve come to realise that at that moment, those movies and those television shows were her window to the world. Restricted as she was, because of her health, her only contact with the outside was through the people who visited her sporadically or through these programmes that allowed her to escape the misery of her ill-health.
In the last ten days, this has once again come home to me. On the 1st of January I tested positive for Covid, and was told to isolate until the 10th of the month. For the first four or five days, I was too tired and unwell for it to bother me much. Once I had recovered, however, I felt a bit like a caged animal. Albeit in a very nice cage, surrounded by a loving family. Guess what I’ve done in the past ten days? Yes, you guessed right! Binge watched multiple shows and movies that were on my list, chewed through a few books and newspaper articles, and worked on my own book, of course.
Maybe it’s the fact that I watched these programmes back to back, or that I read a short story that aligned perfectly with what I was thinking, but I felt compelled to write a blog post. I hope you don’t need to suppress any yawns as I detail what I found fascinating and what completely disheartened me, but here goes.
The first show I watched was the excellent BBC miniseries: A Very British Scandal. This was a retelling of the messy, scandalous, and extremely expensive divorce between the Duke of Argyll and his third wife, played by the fabulous Claire Foy. Neither character was sympathetic. They were both vainglorious, petty, cruel, adulterous and thoroughly spoilt. Yet, the difference lay in the way they were treated by society and by the courts. While the Duke’s reprehensible behaviour was condoned, forgiven or lauded, the Duchess was shamed publicly for having the same sexual appetites as her husband. What was good for the gander was most definitely not good for the goose here. ‘Slut-shaming’, a modern phrase, has been used in many other guises over the ages to vilify women if, Heaven forbid, they strayed from the morally upright path designated by men for them.
Yet, it’s not just men who practice these double standards. In the brilliant ‘Mrs America’, also showing on the BBC, it was women who brought down other women. Why? Because in the second wave of Feminism, when America was ripe for the Equal Rights Amendment to pass, a group of mid-western housewives, led by the indomitable Phyliss Schlafly, opposed, created obstacles, campaigned against ERA, and publicly defended their right to be stay-at-home wives and mothers, happy to play second fiddle to the men in their lives. Fighting against the very thing that would put men and women on an equal footing, creating deep political divisions between the Democrats and Republicans based on ‘liberal’ and ‘home-grown’ values, these women were happy to lop off the branch they were sitting on, never once cognisant of the great harm they were doing to their own sex.
In India, patriarchy is thriving, thank you very much. In the subtle, nuanced and careful examination of what’s happening to the forests in India, Vidya Balan’s Chief Forest Officer in the movie ‘Sherni’, is tasked with finding a man-eating tigress. There’s politics and corruption at work here, there’s ambition and a complete disregard of the environment, but there’s also misogyny, blind-siding and a patronising “she’s a little woman” attitude that permeates all her interactions with her male superiors. The end is bittersweet because it shows that the more things change, the more they remain the same.
I am an avowed feminist, and watching women carve out their place in the world, demanding to be seen as equals, gives me great joy. However, when the establishment turns against them, when their own sex drags them down, and when centuries of patriarchy override the little progress that has been achieved, it also fills me with great despair.
What if things were different? So different that they were upside down?
Read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s speculative ‘The Visit’ to examine a world where women are the ones making the rules. The men are stay-at-home dads or working menial jobs. They are fined and imprisoned for masturbation, as that’s seen as a waste of life-giving sperm. They have to turn a blind eye to their wives’ affairs, submit to the indignity of being questioned over their household finances, and harangued for daring to venture out after a certain hour. Their lives, their minds, their bodies are not their own. Can you picture it?
I can bet you a million pounds that a world like that could never come to pass. Men would shout “inequality” until their voices were hoarse. Then, why can’t we, as women living in the 21st century, ask for the same consideration?
Rant over.
The battle carries on.
