# 26. Embracing The Hag.

My Own Private Feminism - Part 5 (of 5)

The outstanding Margaret Atwood photographed by Tim Walker

I began this essay about two months ago with a desire to record what it was like growing up female and ‘privileged’ in urban India in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. I wanted to describe the freedom I experienced, the equality I knew I deserved (thanks to my mum and dad, such a luck of the draw), but also the oppression I felt from prevailing beauty ideals, unspoken societal expectations, and the perennial awareness of the possibility of sexual violence.

These things shape women and girls. It impacts how we how we dress, where we go, what we say, what we don’t say, the choices we make, the lives we live, and who we become - just as it did the ‘unliberated’ women that came before us. Like many writers, I wanted to put all of this down for Someone Somewhere who may, upon reading it, feel unalone, entertained, and hell, maybe even ignited. But that’s not the whole story.

I wrote this for the same reason I write anything - because if I did not, things would simmer and ooze in the cauldron of my soul until I exploded toxic shit upon everything around me. I write because I have to. I write because I need to. I write, also, because unlike that never-ending line of women staring at me from the beginning of Time with their tongues cut out, I can.

For most of history, anonymous was a woman.

- Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own.

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.

Here on my little Substack, I would like to close the door on all of that. Here we shall be free of any bitch-slapping. Here we shall burn incense, invoke Mother Goddess, love her drooping belly, her breasts full of milk, and feel her power and her glory, forever and ever, amen. At her altar, we shall offer “Women’s Work”, the hours and hours of free labour without which ‘The Economy’ would collapse.

Here we will honour homemakers and caregivers, the ‘just a moms’, the ‘stay-at-home dads’ and the grandparents who hold our babies when we just cannot. We will correct the gross miscalculation of their contributions to the “architecture of life” and eventually, we will dismantle the “worth” delusion that has been ground into our beings over hundreds of Godawful years to serve old and old-school men, and protect their wealth. “Dreaming, after all,” said the glorious Gloria Steinem, “is a form of planning.”

I think the traditional 'feminine' arts of homemaking or dressmaking or whatever are shamefully undervalued. They’re doing what I’m doing: making a space for another person to be in. Creating an architecture for life. There’s no greater task but also no more mundane one.

- Zadie Smith, Nitch

We will clear the fog with care, one shard at a time, like shrapnel. The job can be done by women and girls, by boys and men and by anyone else however they identify, who finds themselves stuck in The Matrix. The fig leaf is off. The old guard, nuts still clanging across the universe, bruised and bloody-minded as ever, can’t stop us anymore. We can study our own absence, we can fill in the gaps, and we can continue our ascent - as we always have - to the higher ground. Let’s go!

---

Two curveballs came at me as I wrote this essay. The first was the Transgender Rights Movement. The hullabaloo over pronouns reminded me of the one over the prefix ‘Ms’. ‘Miss’ belongs to Daddy and ‘Mrs’ to Hubby. What do we call a woman who does not belong to a man? asked Ms Magazine (founded by Gloria Steinham and Dorothy Pittman Hughes in 1972). Today, Ms. is normal, then it was “extra”. Autonomy (birth control, abortion), Image (The Male Gaze), Identity Politics (suffrage, reservation), Violence (beatings, rape). We’ve heard it all before, we are still hearing it still.

And while the jury is out on the demands and dreams of other oppressed groups on so many overlapping issues (Now That’s What I Call Intersectional), perhaps we must do what any self-respecting Mother Goddess / Mother of All Social Movements would do: Hold our offspring tight, tell them we love them just as they are, and whisper in their trembling little ears: take no shit baby, but do no harm. We got you.

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

- Bertrand Russel

The other, even more befuddling curveball that came at me while I wrote this essay, was my son’s puzzlement - and mine - at the inability to find a satisfactory answer to his simple question: why do men think they are better than women? To find out I decided I would begin at the beginning: when and where. I had a feeling it had something to do with monotheism and its One True God in Heaven (with penis and balls, apparently), but it seems I was off by at least a few centuries, if not more:

“Yes, women are the greatest evil Zeus has made, and men are bound to them hand and foot with impossible knots by God.” - Semonides of Amorgos, a Greek poet who is believed to have lived during the seventh century BC.

Oh, dear lord. How deep does this rabbit hole go?

“The most common theory points to the fact… that they have used their greater physical power to force women into submission… their strength allows men to monopolize tasks that demand hard manual labour, such as ploughing and harvesting. This gives them control of food production, which in turn translates into political clout.” - Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Oh, brother:

“There are two problems with this emphasis on muscle power… First, the statement that men are stronger is true only on average and only with regard to certain types of strength. Women are generally more resistant to hunger, disease, and fatigue than men… If social power were divided in direct relation to physical strength or stamina, women should have got far more of it. People in their sixties usually exercise power over people in their twenties, even though twenty-somethings are much stronger than their elders. ...Boxing matches were not used to select Egyptian pharaohs or Catholic popes. In forager societies, political dominance generally resides with the person possessing the best social skills rather than the most developed musculature.”

Christ Almighty! Foragers too? What next? Turns out, this:

“These deep and abiding male anxieties stem from unresolved conflicts between men’s intense need for and dependence upon women and their equally intense fear.” - David D Gilmore, Misogyny: The Male Malady.

Err, no thanks. Back to Yuval:

“Recent studies of the hormonal and cognitive systems of men and women strengthen the assumption that men indeed have more aggressive and violent tendencies and are… on average, better suited to serve as common soldiers. Yet, granted that the common soldiers are all men, does it follow that the ones managing the war and enjoying its fruits must also be men? That makes no sense. It’s like assuming that because all the slaves cultivating cotton fields are all Black, plantation owners will be Black as well. Just as an all-Black workforce might be controlled by an all-White management, why couldn’t an all-male soldiery be controlled by an all-female government?”

That was it. I could take no more! I had re-read some Simone DeBouvoir and her critics (“she is steeped in The Patriarchy!”). I got distracted by accounts of her suffering at the hands of Jean-Paul Satre. I heard that after all that David D. Gilmore blames women for the perpetuation of misogyny. I found reams of scholarship on the history of Indian Feminism that I knew absolutely nothing about! I froze, I panicked, I pondered the extent to which Colonialism, Imperialism, Corporate Capitalism and my social class have affected my ideas of ‘self’, ‘freedom, ‘free will’. And I was reminded why I left academia. I put this essay on ice.

The fantastic Sarah Maple in her Anti-Rape cloak, part of 'The Sisters of Perpetual Resistance' residency, for which she was asked to create an 'object of nuisance'. She then took the cloak on her travels and photographed herself wearing it in various locations and situations.

During this break I had a couple of useful flashbacks: In my early twenties, at a nightclub in Bombay in the 90s, I was physically accosted by a man who was hitting on a friend. I told him she wasn’t interested, so he (drunk, presumably) yanked my long hair hard, bent my neck backwards and held it there for what felt like forever, until another man (someone I went to school with) came over, talked him out of it, and rescued me. I was grateful. My friends and I carried on with the rest of the evening as if nothing happened: there was so much life we wanted to live, fun we wanted to have, happy we wanted to be.

A few years later, while I was a student in the UK, at another dark noisy club and another girl’s night I was slapped so hard on my rear that tears sprung to my eyes. I was alone, looking out from a gallery at my friends dancing below. By the time I turned around, my assailant was gone. I saw the back of his dirty blonde head and I wanted to chase him down and smash my glass into his fugly face. But I did not. I was scared. So I pretended it hadn't happened. Besides, there was so much life I wanted to live, fun I wanted to have, happy I wanted to be.

The interesting thing about both these incidents was that when they happened I felt humiliated. I didn’t want to talk about it. All things considered, I told myself, it was No Big Deal, not worth the trouble. That I should just bury it. Which is what - in my shit-kicker boots, black nail polish and multiple piercings - I did. Experiencing ‘the threat of violence’, is nothing compared to actually being raped or having to die in war or of hunger, right? Right.

As a modern “liberated” woman I understood that if a slap on the ass or tug on a ponytail is all the punishment I receive for being born biologically female, I was amongst the luckiest women on earth. We are taught well as girls to diminish our rage and so, as women, we become brilliant at diminishing our entire selves. To not make a fuss, to move along, chop-chop!

No wonder studies show that women's intellectual self-esteem tends to go down as years of education go up. We have been studying our own absence.

- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

In this interval, I thought a lot about the lives of women. The women I met for lunch, the women who get shot in the face for knowing things. The women paraded naked in Manipur in July, the video floating around of that 12-year-old girl who was raped a few days ago in Ujjain, and the Women’s Reservation Bill passed not long ago in Indian Parliament. I thought about why I write about the things I do in light of all of these horrors and “more important” issues. Isn’t a woman’s place on the picket line? And here I was banging on a keyboard, talking about lipstick. What was the point, really?

And then came my answer: The Personal is Political. I wore it on a T-shirt many moons ago. My little life, lucky as it has been, reverberates with the lived realities of women and girls, everywhere. I write what I write Because. Because The Women’s Liberation Movement is never done and saying something, however small, is better than saying nothing at all.

In 1996, My sister (L) at 24 and I (R) at 21 at her ‘bachelorette party’ in the Joyce Steven’s Because We Are Women T-shirts screen-printed by my mother at her press and worn by all the 20 or so women present on that most brilliant night.

When I was fifteen my elder sister went to Bryn Mawr College and as a result I received, second hand, an education in “The Stranglehold of The Patriarchy / How to Resist The Dominant Paradigm”. The directions we received were: run naked under the stars, look between your legs, use a hand mirror, dive into Big Vagina Energy and once you are there, sit in a circle with your sisters and howl at the moon! I thought they were a bit mad, but I loved them. And I was listening. Now, decades later, well-lodged in middle age, I think I finally properly understand what they meant.

We may never know why men think they are better than women, but we don’t have to care. We can use a hand mirror. We can study our own absence. We can fill in the gaps. We can look to Mother Goddess and Wicked Witch. We can go grey. We can wear sensible shoes. We can dance around the fire and feel our magical powers, warts and all. We can Embrace the Hag. And we can wear lipstick while we do it.

So though in general I dislike labels, there is one I wear with pride. I do it for the women who were silenced, and for the ones who screamed bloody murder for me to have a say. For them, I will walk softly, I will carry a big broom, and I will go to the Moondance. Everyone is invited.

This is what a Feminist looks like. ♀

“She’s all I know about Bryn Mawr and she’s all I have to know”, James Thurber, in The New Yorker.

Read My Own Feminism Part 1 here, Part 2, here, and Part 3, here, Part 4, here.

Dear Readers,

About your comments and messages by email and text: they are fuel for my fire. I cherish them! Please do consider engaging with my work here on Substack as well - it will really help me grow this project!

To those who upgraded to a paid subscription recently: THANK YOU SO MUCH. I know it is a hard thing to do for online content when most of the internet is free. (Though it isn’t, really - we pay for it with our time and our attention, aka our lives.)

Having upgraded to paid on a few publications on Substack myself, I would like to add that “for the price of a coffee” I have often received the red pill, a stay in Wonderland and been shown how deep the rabbit hole goes. Sharing below some portals with excellent bang-for-buck ratio:

• Robert Wright’s Non-Zero Newsletter (Waheguru!)

• Eric Rittenberry’s Poetic Outlaws (my shot in the arm)

• Jessica DeFino’s The Unpublishable (the eye of the beholder)

• The Patti Smith Substack (smiley face factory)

• Nishant Jain’s Sneaky Art (god is in the details)

Of course, none of these may be your cup of tea. But somewhere on Substack, I assure you, awaits Your Own Private Espresso. It will be fresh and organic, and if you think it is delicious, let the barista know! You would have supported an independent creator and helped reshape Social Media.

Cheers, ☕
~ TS

PS: Happily, some of you asked for a collated version of My Own Private Feminism to read as a whole. If you would like to receive the essay as a PDF (or perhaps a booklet in the post) please fill in this interest form!

Big Vagina Energy: A 12th-century Sheela Na Gig on the outside of the chancel apse of Kilpeck church, Herefordshire. Photograph: Mick Sharp/Alamy

Why do people say, ‘Grow some balls’? Balls are weak and sensitive. If you really wanna get tough, grow a vagina. Those things really take a pounding!

- Betty White

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