# 23. We Need to Talk About Ryan Gosling's Ken.
My Own Private Feminism: Part 2 (of 5)
“Why? Why are you hitting me?” He leaned down and looked me right in the face. “If I didn’t hit you Minny, who knows what you become.”
- Leroy to Minny, The Help, Katherine Stockett.
I survived girlhood relatively unscathed. How had I dodged the bullet? Was it because I had most often followed the rules? “No playing at the back of the building” (where mother couldn’t see), “no playing downstairs in the afternoons” (when mother took a lie down), “no going to the yoga centre” (where the manager raised mother’s hackles). And later, “no drink driving” (we will fetch you whenever, wherever) and “no sneaking around” (whatever you intend to do, do it here, under our roof, where we can protect you).
Like most girls, I had nightmares of being chased and daydreams of my plan of action were I accosted in a dark alley. Eyeball gouge? Kick in the nuts? Chest stab with pen? Pen-knife to the jugular? What if there were more than one? I was told that most likely a weapon would be used against me. That I would freeze in fear. I learned to play it safe. I learned that the best protection was a dependable man close at hand. Dependable men. Bless ’em.
Because I grew up in Bombay with its smaller, relatively less-aggressive males, I realised only much later that the shoving, kicking and cussing I got away with as a teen would have got me raped and killed in Delhi. My social class wouldn’t protect me there, on the contrary, it would perhaps have made it worse. I had heard the stories. From abductions to garden-variety marital hell fires. And at a railway station in my early 20s, I felt its breath on my neck.
Returning from Agra with friends from college, I had whacked a towering mountain of a man with a water bottle and made impolite suggestions about what he could do aside from brushing up against us. I received a paan-stained hole of a mouth shaped into a sneer and a look from blood-shot eyes. Murderous – is the only word to describe it. No fear. No shock. Not a single bystander jumped to our defence. We fled the scene. It was a dawning. The beginning of internalising that cultural commandment I had rejected all my life: Sit properly. Cross your legs. Don’t tempt fate.
By my late 20s, I had lived on my own in Goa for months and had learned to forgo solo walks in moonlight. I was back in my apartment by dusk with a bag of momos from the Tibetan place, ready for a night of writing, reading, and watching DVDs. Having bolted the doors and windows and checked them again. Twice.
The avoidance danger, of stargazing on beaches, of not going where the heart desires, was a small sacrifice, compared to the Pit of Hell. Right? Right. Finally, I had grown up. Accepted. And began to wonder: what was the collective effect of these small sacrifices? Of forever being aware of The Threat? Of always being grateful, indebted – indentured – to dependable men?
To what degree have women been infantilised, disempowered, disallowed to be fully who we are, by accepting – having to accept – that the only place we can be a tigress is not in the sacred wilderness we seek, but in a square of astroturf, guarded by father, brother, husband, son?
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.
The media called it ‘sexual assault’. It was the Deepest Pit of Hell. Deep beyond a womb annihilated by hate. Deep beyond the reach of newspapers braying for blood. Deep beyond my capacity as a young mother raising two small boys to know what the hell to do with the information. Those men once were babies. What had happened to them? When did it begin? In utero? On tricycles? At the first hint of moustache? In the primordial ocean? The plains of Africa? In the fertile crescent? When?
My only sibling being a sister, growing up I’d missed the memo. Or hadn’t paid attention to it: Boys don’t cry. Boys are brave. Boys love sports. Especially football. Also cricket. Boys have short hair. Boys wear boy clothes. And most grotesque of all: Boys will be boys. One afternoon - soon after my babies started primary school - while reading Raising Caine: Protecting the Emotional Lives of Boys, I wept. For fathers, brothers, husbands and sons everywhere.
The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead, patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.
– bell hooks, The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, 2004.
In the Barbie film that spawned a head-spinning number of corporate partnerships and cosmetic procedures, Ken knew there was something (apart from genitals) missing from his life. He longs for Barbie’s love, attention and respect. He has low self-esteem and feelings of worthlessness. Every night was Girls’ Night. Barbie had a Dreamhouse and over 200 careers, including some in STEM fields. He? He was Just Ken, his job: ‘Beach’. Barbie had no idea where Ken lived and didn’t care. Ken owned nothing, was nothing. Ken had no power. Ken had The Problem That Has No Name.
The Kens in Barbie Land - the film seems to suggest - are Women under Patriarchy; the Barbies, Men in the Real World. Well, I propose: The Kens in Barbie Land are Everyone under Corporate Capitalism and Barbie is Elon laughing all the way to Mars. This film - feature-length tribute to Bimbo Feminism and America Ferrara's ‘it’s literally impossible to be a woman’ outburst and all - is not disruptive. It’s a box-office sensation during the historic SAG-AFTRA double union strike. It is The Status Quo. Except. Except for Ryan Gosling, who has delivered a Ken so nuanced and so important, that if they made a sequel centred on him, not only would I go, I’d even buy the sweatshirt.
No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949
Excerpt from My Own Private Feminism Part 3: Around the same time, a mom-friend called, distraught. There was something off. Her twelve-year-old son didn’t play Fortnite online with the other boys and constantly sketched - horror of horrors! - Niki Minaj! Under Patriarchy, everyone is under assault. We’re being beaten pink and blue…
Read My Own Feminism Part 1, here and Part 3 here.
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Can’t wait for part 3!! ❤️
magnificent. it's so many things that i have always wanted to say.