# 22. No, The Barbie Movie is Not Subversive.

My Own Private Feminism: Part 1 (of 5)

Jul 31, 2023

Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses.

- Audre Lorde

In the 90s, like many other women in their 20s, I binge-watched Sex and The City. I rooted for Mr. Big though he treated Carrie like shit, though Samantha was constantly slut-shamed by her friends, though a deeply regressive stench came through loud and clear. Yet, just like that, thanks to the production quality of its escapist fantasy, with thousands (gazillions?) of other women, I tuned in to that Zombie army of four on its insatiable hunt for Mr. Right – and I ate my own brain in the process.

As heartily as I consumed it, I knew there was something amiss – fakenewsy – about its ultimately feeble ode to NYC’s sparkling white, single, working gals. It was ‘liberation’ in boneless chunks. It was edgy with no sharp edges. It was one long ad for gluttonous material and sexual consumption in an utterly self-absorbed, intellectually incurious, environmentally unsustainable, spiritually defunct, and worst of all, obedient, manner: Keep collecting those shoes and orgasms, ladies, because that’s what you really, really want! The entire show rested on one of Feminism’s most mangled laurels: sexual freedom.

It was at a family gathering in Calcutta in the 80s – maybe Diwali, I can’t remember – where prayers were being offered to celebrate no doubt the victory of Good over Evil - that my interest in Feminism was sparked. It was at this same moment that my interest in religion and its rickety relationship with morality was sparked too.

I was 10, maybe 11, and there were grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins, swirling, happy, laughing. There was good cheer, ladoos, pedas, food, flowers, and music. It was grand. I loved it all. The spectacle, the special clothes, the smells, the sounds. Shy, except around this family who knew, understood, and adored me so well, it was only here I was able to be what I truly was – a tigress! And beloved.

I settled down on a mat with a full view of pretty gods all in a row, the best seat in the house. Immediately I was asked to push off because the boy cousins had to sit there, where it mattered. It is the custom, they said. I was crushed. Humiliated. Enraged. My team had let me down. Did they not love us equally, after all? After my heart broke, I saw red. Fuck The Custom, was planted deep within my soul. It was my Big Bang.

The incense incensed. I pushed off as instructed. Off the mat, out the door, down several flights of stairs, to pace the building’s compound and find my way - thanks to the ease with the English language and ‘Western’ culture that post-colonial Indian elites make sure their offspring have - into the loving arms of Betty Friedan via Madonna and her Black Jesus. I was not taught feminist rage, I was not shown misogyny. I did not read about The Patriarchy. I felt it first-hand. I was inoculated by this relatively fangless event against what was to come with every grope and grab of my body, every fondle and flash from the oily men on the street.

I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.

- Sarah Grimké, 19th-century American abolitionist and women's rights pioneer.

As a teen growing up in Bombay, I thought the ‘roadside Romeos’, the ‘eve-teasing’ - those carefully chosen phrases for the bullying, intimidation and terrorising of women and girls - were something to be borne, like a stench from a gutter. Something to be ignored, to be avoided, steered clear of, not something you could really rally against. Like all my female friends, by the time I was twelve, I learned to walk the distance from the school bus to the school gate with my elbows out (defence) and poke hard in the ribs anyone who got too close (offence).

I knew no one was allowed to touch me, and so by the time I was fifteen, I was a one-woman-street-gang, daring any piece of shit to so much as brush against my shoulder, and BAM! My fist would be in his chest, and he on the ground, wheezing. I once shoved a man on Fashion Street for leering at my mother, sending him, his clothes stall and three others down like dominos. True story.

In a memorable incident from this period in my life, a postman had fallen down a very long staircase at Victoria Memorial in Calcutta letters a scatter, because I had kicked him. Hard. In the arse. Moments earlier, he had touched mine as we squeezed through a narrow corridor. It took a few seconds for me to recover, turn around, and chase him down. As I looked at him sprawled motionless below, for a moment I thought he was dead. I was terrified.

For women, the only alternative to being a feminist is being a masochist.

― Gloria Steinem, The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off!, 2019.

Retrospectively, I guess the kick was hyper-fuelled by a collection of things: The balls of the lungi-man-flasher outside the middle school gate that we could never un-see. The cycle-delivery man that stuck his foot out as he rode by to stab my best friend in the crotch as we attempted to cross the road to the sports field to play. The BEST bus conductor who squeezed another friend’s breast so hard she cried. The sweaty beast who swirled his tongue at me from a bus as I walked down Colaba Causeway. The man who would shout ‘Chaddi Pehelwan!’ every morning as a classmate and I trained in shorts at Priyadarshini Park.

Post the Victoria Memorial incident, everyone clapped. Which is weird because I had been quite violent. I was shaking with fear of having thought I had killed a man. It didn’t feel good. But it was very funny. How he scrambled! Ran for his life, afraid he’d be lynched by the righteous mob for ‘violating a woman’s modesty’.

Hilarious! But not really. Because. Because something I couldn’t put my finger on till much later when stories from friends who had been raped (who knew there would be so many?) cast my little skirmishes in a new light. They were links in the same chain. Threads in the same noose. Watch your step girlie, or down ye shall fall, into the gallows. Cross your legs, sit properly. Don’t tempt fate.

Growing up female, this is what I learned: the fetishisation of women’s bodies warps our minds. We are attacked from without (only the degree varies) and we are attacked from within (I am too fat, too thin, too slutty, too frumpy, too this, too that - never right). Food, fashion, marriage, motherhood, career, carer. Everything is loaded. Understanding the full implications of this reality can take a long time, but it’s worth the wait. It will piss you off, but it will set you free.

Sharam by Maria Qumar, Hatecopy / Sit Like A Lady by Aesthetics by Nuha

Sure thing, Aunty.

By my mid-twenties, I’d noticed the gag order on women everywhere and become aware of my complicity in it. How afraid I was of pouring myself out. How well I hid. Meanwhile, The Aunties noticed how unmarried I was, but had stopped asking why. They must’ve thought there was something deeply wrong. Which, in my desi microcosm, there was. I was trying to take my own advice. In a 1997 Indian edition of Elle Magazine (in my first ever published piece called ‘Fairy Tale’), I declared: “Before you find the man under the bed, find the woman on top”.

Like most girls, I had sent that woman packing myself. But I hadn’t done it without help. I read about global capitalist forces that with their repetitive one-size-fits-all images had implanted deep self-doubt in girls and women across the world and that it was done intentionally, with the help of psychopathic tactics of marketing departments, to keep us sad - and shopping.

I thought that their intentions were no more evil than that bottomless bottom line, and like everything else about late-stage capitalist profiteering, it was just that the true human cost didn’t matter. They were not out to get women, we were just collateral damage. Bycatch. But In 1991, the accusations in Pulitzer Prize winner Susan Faludi’s ‘Backlash’ suggested that in a historical trend that occurs whenever women make major gains, the media punished the attempts at escape.

Women were, by the 80s, being made to feel they were more miserable than ever, now that they were “equal” to men. Even the most “liberated” ones began to reject Feminism, the movement that had bestowed upon them all their power. It was a true romance: Corporate Culture Weds Patriarchal Culture. A strategic alliance, the most brilliant of all Mergers & Acquisitions.

Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage only seeks to adorn its prison.

- Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792.

Before Sex and the City’s Carrie and her BFFs exploded onto the scene, Naomi Wolfe’s influential The Beauty Myth had. The theory was that 90s feminism - shattered glass ceilings and all - was a major slip back for the Women’s Liberation Movement. Despite the gains of the suffragettes in the 20s and the second-wave feminists in the 70s, something had been lost. Despite the votes, (not quite) equal pay, sexual freedom and reproductive rights, something was missing. Stolen. Extracted.

Or rather, inserted, The Matrix style. By the 90s women came implanted with a bug. A self-tracker. A gift from foot-on-the-neck Patriarchy to a new, colonisation-from-within-kind. But too much has been said already about Kate Moss, ‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’, botox, anti-ageing goop, fairness creams, thigh-gap, and implants. The tall, skinny, blonde standard of the 90s is firmly behind us. Right? Wrong.

Barbie’s back.

That the film is one long neon cliché that will gift Greta Gerwig and Mattell a bunch more money, landfills a bunch more plastic and Instagram a bunch more toxic content for girls is one thing. But that it has noticeably moved The Beauty Industry further into the abyss is another.

Data shows the Barbie movie is indeed popularizing typical Barbie appearance ideals. The day after the trailer dropped, Google searches for blonde hair dye tripled. Articles on “Where To Buy The Exact Self-Tanner Used On The Barbie Set” popped up in the usual places — Allure, Cosmo — but also on news sites like the Independent, the Guardian, and the Daily Beast. Vogue India published a piece suggesting Too Faced Lip Injection gloss for “pouty” Barbie lips, and board-certified doctors started offering “Barbie Arm Botox” and “Barbie Butt” procedures. I recently received an email about a new contour palette (“Barbie’s Secret To Snatched Cheeks!”) that claims to make users appear as “Perfect As Plastic.” Barbiecore is the look of the summer.

- Jessica DeFino, Barbie Has Cellulite (But You Don’t Have To), The Unpublishable.

So, No. The Barbie movie is not subversive. Or empowering. Or ironic. Apart from the fact that Ryan Gosling’s Ken is the most interesting thing about it.

Hit me, baby, one more time.

Between commercial influences, social pressures, and the constant threat of violence, women have not arrived. We’ve been led up the garden path. The rot is planted early: Cross your legs. Sit properly. Don’t tempt fate. You pretty, sexy, little girl!

Excerpt from My Own Private Feminism Part 2 By 2012 my kicking, punching days were behind me. Knee-deep was I now in shiny new babies and mammalian joys: I bore live young! I produced milk! My body was not too fat, too short, too this or too that. My body was a wonderland! Meanwhile, in South West Delhi, a 23-year-old paramedic named Jyoti Singh was having a different experience with her body parts. Six men on a bus had shoved an iron rod up her vagina in a manner that caused her intestines to spill out. It is said she was with a dependable man at the time. One who could not save her… Read the rest here.