# 25. Who's Cleaning Toilets at The DreamHouse®?
My Own Private Feminism - Part 4 (of 5)
Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949.
’Women’s Work’ is drudgery. Unpaid. Uncelebrated. Yet without it, society would collapse. As I gaze upon the pink abscess called Barbie’s Malibu DreamHouse on Airbnb, I can’t help but think about the people employed to clean it in the Real World while its residents frolic in Barbie Land. Is my house help, paid for her labour, an extension of the massive inequity that makes this fantasy life possible? Or is she the ultimate subversion of Patriarchy because I pay her to set me free, allowing us both to participate in the formal economy? Is it a win-win? Or am I being naive? Both? Here is a 1973 poem (one I would not dare analyse but felt the need to share) entitled ‘Who Said It Was Simple’ by Audre Lorde, self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”, that provides some answers:
There are so many roots to the tree of anger
that sometimes the branches shatter
before they bear.Sitting in Nedicks
the women rally before they march
discussing the problematic girls
they hire to make them free.
An almost white counterman passes
a waiting brother to serve them first
and the ladies neither notice nor reject
the slighter pleasures of their slavery.But I who am bound by my mirror
as well as my bed
see causes in colour
as well as sex
and sit here wondering
which me will survive
all these liberations.
Gentle reader, I know what you are thinking: Kenough already! I want to move on. I do! For your sake as much as for mine. I even tried re-reading A Room of One’s Own to exorcise She Who Must Not Be Named, but still, I find myself sinking further into The Great Pink Bog. Clearly, Mattel has got under my skin. I know I must Cold Turkey, so this is my promise: Post this post, no more B word.
But before I burn her at the stake, may I leave you with this fagot for the fire: Magic Earring Ken and Sugar Daddy Ken were the most fabulous dolls of all, and they, along with poor pregnant Midge, were cancelled. Aborted. Banished. Un-Represented! But like whack-a-mole, bash her with a gavel as many times as you please, Barbie shall come back to haunt us again and again. Her Skinny Cis Blondeness won’t go away. Grinning like a banshee, cackling like a witch, screaming like a Siren as we crash and burn around her, she’s here for the long haul. So I acquiesce. Barbie is powerful! And dangerous.
Case in point: A few days ago at a screening of Asteroid City in Bombay, I met a smart, spirited young Indian film actress dressed in a block-printed short-pants-suit and tan Oxfords - in a nod to Wes Anderson. Her friend wore pink trousers and a matching shade of lipstick (in a nod to The Grand Budapest Hotel?). I listened as they discussed the Hollywood strikes, Satyajit Ray’s influence on Scorcese, and how AI might affect the Hindi Film industry.
One of them said Ray thought Indian audiences were daft. The other said, he was right, and that Oppenheimer was meh, brushed over women scientists in The Manhattan Project, underutilized Florence Pugh, and that we’d never know what Japan really thought because the Internet won’t tell us. They loved Bollywood song-and-dance, Hollywood rona-dhona, and everything within and beyond that binary.
They were smart and fun and far from formulaic. They were Hope in the Millennial flesh! But as the doors opened to WesWorld where gentle pastels and bright palettes have been delighting us for over a decade, Pink Pants said how grateful she was to the Barbie movie for ‘bringing colour back’. That’s the power of the repetitive image courtesy a gazillion corporate tie-ups. Hail Goebbels?
To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
- George Orwell, Under One’s Nose, 1946
I love pink. Pink is my favourite type of sunset. Orange too. But will one colour now forever be conflated with a blondified voodoo doll (Weird Barbie wtf?), and the other with a bad case of Hindutva? Will we ever again be able to dress without accidentally summoning someone else’s icky agenda? “Womanism is to feminism as purple is to lavender,” said Alice Walker, and to her scholarship, may I humbly add: Pink is to Blue as Barbie is to Ken, and together, they are the Anti-Rainbow.
Mattel, through their hideous progeny, have made flesh the Oppressive Duality. The one that we should all - beyond the binary or not - be trying to escape. The one that limits our imagination early and often. It stalks us at the toy store, at the department store, at school, at work, at all of life really, telling us what and how we should be. Or more accurately, telling us what and how we should pretend to be.
As a trans woman who writes and thinks a lot about film, I found the [Barbie] movie’s approach both deeply frustrating and strangely resonant. Yes, the film does well by trans people in some regards… Yet the film’s story line and its politics set up a kind of pure distillation of womanhood that seems specifically rooted in the cisgender experience and affords little room for anything outside a rigid understanding of gender.
- Emily St. James, for The New York Times
I was introduced to the term TERF - Trans Exclusive Radical Feminist - at a centre for the arts by a 13-year-old girl as we watched a performance by Rainbow Voices, India’s first LGBTQ choir. Her earrings were this shape ♀. She said she was done with Harry Potter because Rowling was a TERF. It was the first time I felt I had to sit at the feet of a child and listen. Which is what I did. And this is what I learned:
I am not a fan of the platform formally known as Twitter where the JK Rowling fracas took place. Nor am I a fan of Harry Potter - aside from the fact that the series fueled an interest in actual physical books for the Digital Generation. I am a fan though, of kids, storytellers, and Feminism, and I realised I hadn’t been paying attention. JK Rowling’s toxic tweet-fest was one thing. But Chimamanda Nigozi Adiche too? I had gifted Dear Ijawele, A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions to so many people! My self-identity was now a-wobble. Dear Audre Lorde, what had I missed? Was I not bad bytch adjacent after all?
♫ Well, I’m not the world’s most masculine man, but I know what I am and I’m glad I’m a man, and so is Lola. Girls will be boys and boys will be girls, it's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world, except for Lola. La-la-la-la Lola. ♫
- Lola, by Ray Davies, The Kinks, 1970.
It was at a ‘Mixed, Gay-friendly’ nightclub in Leeds in the late 1990s that I came face-to-face with the glamorous drag queens that I had until then only read about or seen in films. In my 20s, bolstered by sturdy black Doc Martens, I bowed before their glittering stiletto power, gobsmacked. If their lives had been anything like Tralala’s (that beleaguered transgender prostitute in Hubert Selby Junior’s gut-wrenching 1958 novel Last Exit to Brooklyn) or like that of those depicted in The Crying Game (1992) I would not have known. I had plenty of gay friends but knew no trans people.
Unless you count my mother’s hairdresser - an elderly lady who walked with a limp from being brutally beaten in Calcutta, and who, from what I heard, later died from complications around a botched surgery. My mother would commiserate with her woes while getting her hair done. I’d sometimes overhear them, but I was very young and I didn’t quite get all of it. Later, I occasionally went to a hairstylist who was a trans woman too - but with a very different story. Around my age, she was middle-class, had family support and ran her business out of her parent’s home.
In India, ‘other genders’ have been a part of public life, suffering a setback during British Colonisation when eunuchs, deemed ‘ungovernable’, were criminalised. But I grew up in the 70s and 80s and didn’t know about all that. I saw Hijras beg at traffic lights in deep voices, stuffed blouses, and pretty sarees. We gave them our coins in exchange for their blessings. In a strangely pleasing inversion, boys found them somewhat intimidating. Girls, not really. I gawked at their elaborate jewellery, bright lipstick and evening shadow, but most of all, I admired their audacity. In poverty and in ‘women’s clothes’, they were The Man.
‘Male/Female/Other’ were choices we saw regularly on official government forms and ‘gender-fluidity’ was rife in Hindu ideas and images. But it was not until I read Alice Dredger’s Galileo’s Middle Finger in 2017 that I gave much thought to what “intersex” meant, how intersex differed from trans or asked - where were all these people? They had to be hiding - made to hide? - in plain sight.
By 2020 bathroom bans, puberty blockers, and trans-women in sports began to break the internet and I knew - as a person who identifies as Humanist - I had some catching up to do. I watched Disclosure and the Eliot Page interview. I found Alok Menon, JVN, the glorious Rani Koh-hi-Noor and many others on Instagram. I read about Lili Elbie, the story behind The Danish Girl and most recently, after the uneasy TERF conversation, I dug up Adichie’s offending comment from the 2017 BBC interview.
“Trans women are trans women”, she said when asked if trans women were women. She was mostly paraphrasing the question the interviewer had just asked her. “If you’ve lived in the world as a man with the privileges that the world accords to men and then sort of change gender, it’s difficult for me to accept that then we can equate your experience with the experience of a woman.” Naturally, things blew up, and on her Facebook page, she issued a lengthy clarifying statement. An excerpt:
Perhaps I should have said trans women are trans women and cis women are cis women and all are women. Except that 'cis' is not an organic part of my vocabulary… I have and will continue to stand up for the rights of transgender people. Not merely because of the violence they experience but because they are equal human beings deserving to be what they are.
Okay, I thought. She stumbled on semantics. Perhaps a dearth of empathy? Imagination, even? For such a brilliant writer, it was strange. I wondered if she’s been kicking herself ever since. Maybe not. The rabbit hole goes deep and it made me think about what gets lost in these battles. But also, what is found. It wouldn’t be the first time members of oppressed groups that had more in common with each other than not did not see eye to eye. And it won’t be the last.
When Betty Friedan described the deep dissatisfaction with life amongst well-off, well-educated white housewives in The Feminine Mystique in 1963, she was criticised for her lack of attention to issues affecting non-white, poor, and lesbian women. She intensely disliked Gloria Steinham for ‘diluting’ the women’s movement with broader concerns. But that book, whether she liked it or not, created a ripple effect that benefitted all kinds of women, everywhere. It rang a bell so loud that it set in motion feminism's Second Wave and still reverberates across the world. Imagine if Betty Friedan had shut her mouth for fear of being cancelled.
Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem didn’t like each other. In many ways, they weren’t allowed to: Beginning in the late 1960s, the media pitted “The Mother of Feminism,” as Friedan was often called, against her younger colleague, casting an important social movement as a catfight. It didn’t help that they looked so different: Steinem was and is thin and tall, while many reporters described Friedan with anti-Semitic and sexist slurs. If their fight was shaped by two different visions about what feminism should be, it was also driven by a culture that spent a good deal of time trying to destroy women who fought for equality.
- Rachel Shteir, in a review of the play The Fight, New Republic, 2017.
Friedan was “The Mother of Feminism” but Steinham was “The Face”. Steinem was tall, slim, young: hot. Friedan was not. Yes, the ironies abound. But that’s no surprise because individuals and groups are always flawed. Their social movements though, seem to get better with time. Humanity seems to be perpetually in a Baby Vs. Bathwater predicament, but so far - mostly in a two-steps forward three-steps back kind of way - we have learned how to hang on to the baby. I hope the trend continues.
Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud? But what makes a woman a woman? Menstruation? Gestation? Lactation? The tango between estrogen and testosterone that exploded when I was thirteen is now, at peri-menopause, an experimental dance to which I don’t know the steps. I’m ‘growing wings on the way down’ and can’t help but wonder, after decades of bleeding and past child-bearing years, will I cease to be a woman? Also, why do men have nipples?
Yes, biology is real and it shapes experience. Mine certainly did. Had I - a biological female - not found a biological male for partner-in-life, we would not have managed to either get married or pregnant so easily and with such a huge thump of approval from all of society. Fact: Most biological females can make babies. Also Fact: Adoptive moms sometimes lactate. Another Fact: Amygdalas of gay dads can blow open as wide as that of biological mums. Fun Fact: For interesting and rather queer evolutionary reasons, men have nipples because women do.
This is where I exist in society. I am just this guy. I am transgender, and I exist. But that is just my sexuality. More important than that is that I perform comedy, I perform drama, I run marathons, and I’m an activist in politics. These are the things I do.
―Eddie Izzard, Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens, 2017.
Clearly, there’s a lot more going on than meets between the thighs. Penises, for one, can be turned into vaginas. Who knew the two were made of essentially the same stuff? Under what circumstances penises should be turned into vaginas are matters of deep consideration, way beyond my skill set. I’d imagine though, if a pubescent child said they wanted HRT and a double mastectomy, their parents would be distraught.
Yes, there is much to understand. Starting with why culturally, do we seem to want everyone to fall into one of two baskets when clearly the reality is that many of us - maybe most of us - fall between the two? Some of us are not vaguely in basket vicinity! How did we get here? Were we always this way? Unlikely. Just look at the bonobos, living their best lives, solving their problems with pan-sexual love and cooperation in matriarchal societies. Life on Earth seems too subtle for Homo sapiens’ crude cultural excretions, and now, to top it all, we aren’t even allowed to talk about any of it.
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.
- Noam Chomsky, The Common Good, 1998
Lessons learned: Stop talking. Start listening. Be open. Not so open that brain - or heart, or any other vital organ - falls out. Don’t be a bot. Don’t be a sheep. Definitely don’t shut people up. Especially those we may not (yet) agree with. Let trans women be women. Let cis women be women. There is room on the broom for all of us - wicked witches, bad bytches, and whatever comes next. It’s time to excavate The Mother Goddess. Time to stop squabbling, start gestating and collectively birth a civilisation more nuanced than this one.
The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power.
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949.
I am tired of labels. I am tired of always watching where I tread. One wrong move and I could be canceled. Have my leg blown off. I call a family meeting. I look into their eyes. I am what I am. You are what you are. They are what they are. We are not jars of peanut butter. We need no labels. Could the problem possibly be not that there are too few pronouns but that there are one too many? We are all equally capable of suffering. May our Feminism be Humanism. May our pronouns be Us/We.
Peace out. ☮
Coming Soon to Wit’s End: My Own Private Feminism Part 5 (of 5): I am no scholar, but I do know this: Women’s desire to participate in the world outside the home has been maniacally thwarted and carefully controlled, the world over and throughout history. Still is. Our contributions to all aspects of human culture and civilisation - for some unfathomable reason - have been methodically, painstakingly, erased. We have been involved in every Human Rights struggle and Social Movement at least from the French Revolution onwards and unless we teach Women’s Liberation - that mother of all social movements - with as much gusto as we do World War II, The Rise of Nations, (and so on), history will repeat, rhyme and rap us on the knuckles ad infinitum.
So no. I will not waste my breath or your time on #NotAllMen, Incels, Men’s Rights, and the whole Jordan Peterson saga. There’s enough about any of that easily available on tap. Obviously, not all men are rapists, and yes, many women lie, cheat and steal. Good men have been burned at the stake for #MeToo and legions of brilliant lawyers will continue to produce data to defend their virtue or banish them to the ninth circle of Hell - depending on who is paying their fee…
🌈 Read My Own Feminism Part 1 here, Part 2, here, and Part 3, here.
If you enjoyed this post, do like it by scrolling down and clicking the heart icon, leave a comment by clicking the button above, or share it with a friend by clicking the one below! Thank you for reading Wit’s End.
It’s been a shared journey of mutual inspiration and delight. Thank you too Tara. I resonate deeply with what you have written in this piece. It is a calm, compassionate call for sanity in an otherwise hysterical debate. (The Last Exit to Brooklyn remains a favourite of mine, it’s understanding of the universality of the human condition, of class as the ultimate oppression and of what unites us is formidable and is still relevant to our cultural moment).
Wise, witty and wonderful as usual ! ♥️