Fight Against Biased Laws in India
Monday, 9 June 2014
Sunday, 4 May 2014
I AM ALIVE Campaign - Promo 3
The
campaign is intended to put forward many situations in our daily lives
in India, that will make us re-think: Are we really Alive? We take this
attempt to re-discover the purpose of our existence, and hence, make
ourselves more humane and kind. The overall aim is to wake up to
ourselves: The difference between myths and realities. #IAMALIVECAMPAIGN
Share the word! Join the Campaign! Build yourself for a better tomorrow!
Share the word! Join the Campaign! Build yourself for a better tomorrow!
Coming soon to Google Plus, Facebook, and Twitter. Stay tuned for the Campaign Launch on 31st May 2014
Thursday, 1 May 2014
I AM ALIVE Campaign - Promo 2
The
campaign is intended to put forward many situations in our daily lives
in India, that will make us re-think: Are we really Alive? We take this
attempt to re-discover the purpose of our existence, and hence, make
ourselves more humane and kind. The overall aim is to wake up to
ourselves: The difference between myths and realities. #IAMALIVECAMPAIGN
Share the word! Join the Campaign! Build yourself for a better tomorrow!
Share the word! Join the Campaign! Build yourself for a better tomorrow!
Saturday, 5 April 2014
I AM ALIVE Campaign - Promo 1
The campaign is intended to put forward many situations in our daily lives in India, that will make us re-think: Are we really Alive? We take this attempt to re-discover the purpose of our existence, and hence, make ourselves more humane and kind. The overall aim is to wake up to ourselves: The difference between myths and realities. #IAMALIVECAMPAIGN
Share the word! Join the Campaign! Build yourself for a better tomorrow!
Share the word! Join the Campaign! Build yourself for a better tomorrow!
Friday, 21 February 2014
Understanding Consumerism in today's world
I saw a Facebook status message of one of my friends’ a few
days back, which brought the interest in me to get back to writing.
Starting with a quote from an article on CNN.com titled: “Women:
Saviors of the World Economy?” – “The largest growing economic force in the
world isn't China or India -- it's women. The earning power of women globally
is expected to reach $18 trillion by 2014 -- a $5 trillion rise for current
income, according to World Bank estimates. That is more than twice the
estimated 2014 GDP of China and India combined”. This was the year 2009.
Yes, 5 years back.
This reflects the vision of 2009 which is today, a reality:
The heightened attention to both the earning power, as well as spending power
of women. The FemmeDen, a group of women researchers who focus on the gendered
implications of product design, write in one of their online publications, “Why is gender important? Women’s continuing
evolution combined with their increasing buying power has created an explosive
business opportunity in the consumer products industry.” They then
point to women’s buying habits. Though once these same women were considered to
be “powerless”, are now “powerful”. As per this research, women buy or influence
more than 80% of consumer decisions.
So? What’s the big
deal?
Let’s take a sneak peek into today’s TV shows. Any soap you
turn on during the Prime Time on Indian Television, is loaded with women filled
up from top to bottom with heavy jewelry and dresses that could cost you a
fortune. How far do these huge-TRP shows affect or are affected by reality? Who
in the world wears up 5 kgs of gold on a Tuesday evening at home?
Oh! They are just
shows. We don’t have to follow that!
More than 30 years after feminism’s triumph, prepubescent
girls can be seen regularly in public dressed in mini-skirts.
So? What are you
trying to prove?
Instead of seeking to emulate domestic-oriented women,
presenting themselves as future virtuous wives and mothers, little girls seek
to emulate Paris Hilton. How about that? Children’s dolls, take Barbie as an
example, are made-up to look like prostitutes. “Toy manufacturers produce dolls
wearing black leather miniskirts, feather boas, and thigh-high boots and market
them to 8- to 12-year-old girls,” the American Psychological Association noted.
“Clothing stores sell thongs sized for 7- to 10-year-old girls, some printed
with slogans such as ‘eye candy’ or ‘wink wink’; other thongs sized for women
and late adolescent girls are imprinted with characters from Tom & Jerry and Puss in Boots.
That’s American. We
in India are not bothered about that!
How about the “My Body, My Choice” proverb? I was born in
the 1980s, and I knew girls who would go around with boys, get married, and
have a good long relationship. And what do we see today? MY BODY MY CHOICE.
What does this essentially mean to you? Any woman can go around the roads,
scantily clad, and no man has any right to look at her.
This is essentially what feminists and “modern” women say.
Let’s take the recently concluded “Veet - Walk of Confidence” as an example. You
could see celebrities in micro-mini skirts, showing their midriffs, and going
around in public transport, even walking. Nice. It’s your body your choice.
Aren’t my eyes a part of my body?
What are you trying
to prove here? How am I walking in a mini-skirt linked to consumerism?
Well. I am coming on to that. Hold on! When you want to walk
naked on the road, the basic thing you want is Independence. Isn’t it?
Now, let’s see. In an age in which women’s independence and
achievement are often framed by and articulated through consumer discourses and
practices, what does this mean for the future of feminism and feminist
identities? I wonder about such consequences precisely because the consumer
lifestyle is a fundamentally un-feminist thing. The epistemological
foundation of feminism and feminist identity historically has been the
eradication of inequalities. Thus, feminism is diametrically opposed to
consumer practices which support the dominance of global capitalism: a system
which thrives on the exploitation of labor, theft of resources, and facilitates
vast accumulation of wealth among a tiny percentage of global elite, while
simultaneously impoverishing the majority of the world’s population. Further,
since consuming is a singular act of identity formation and expression, does
women’s empowerment through consumption at the individual level undermine the
possibility of gendered social change at the collective level?
Let’s interrogate
the intersection of discourses of women’s independence with discourses and
practices of consumption, with an eye for contemporary attitudes toward and
definitions of feminism.
The concept of women’s independence has long
been tied to discourses about wealth, and the accumulation of material goods
and wealth, primarily due to the dominance of patriarchal hierarchy in our society. The gendered control of wealth has its roots in the gendered division
of labor that emerged in the context of early hunter-gatherer societies.
During this context, women cared for children due to the biological reality of
breast-feeding. As nomadic hunter-gatherer societies transitioned into settled,
agrarian communities, the established familial division of labor sustained and
became taken for granted as social constructions of gender and the ideology of
patriarchy emerged and intersected. In settled societies the concept of
property was born and as men were expected to handle familial business outside
of the home, they were granted the title of property owners and wealth
managers, and thus were able to accrue status on their own. In these
circumstances women were economically disenfranchised, which set the stage for
the development of the modern world in the capitalist context.
So, the
feminists say that patriarchy oppressed them for ages, and did not allow them
to gather wealth at wish. Right! But do you see that patriarchy did not mean
keeping women away from money. It actually meant that men would do all the hard
labor outside of the home, so that they could gather the money and feed the
women.
So, how did patriarchy oppress women? It oppressed men! It
forced men to be responsible for everything in a family!
So? Come back to the
point please!
You feminists don’t get it. Do you? In the patriarchal model
that has dominated normative conceptualizations of family during the
twentieth-century in women, in the roles of wife and mother, have been charged
as managing daily household functioning, which includes shopping for themselves
as well as for their family. Women historically have been consumer-in-chief in
this dominant model. This trend continues today, as recent research shows that
women either decide or influence eighty percent of purchasing decisions for
goods or services (FemmeDen, 2009).
Advertisers long ago recognized the significance
of the patriarchal model and targeted product advertising to women for a
multitude of products. Historically speaking, advertising targeted to women has
tended to emphasize a woman’s role as caretaker of a husband or family (in the
case of household appliances, food and beverage, and cleaning products, for
instance), or as an unmarried person seeking to land a man (as with beauty
products and clothing). Recognizing the gains of the feminist movement
throughout the middle and latter half of the twentieth-century, advertising
today interpolates women as strong, independent decision makers and money
makers, and as sexually driven beings.
These trends interact with another key trope deployed by
advertising: that consuming allows one to express and articulate one’s
individuality.
Thus, a trend that we see in today’s advertising, and in
popular discourse in society more generally, is that women are independent
social actors who express their identities and independence through consumption.
What I find troubling about this trend is that the notion of women’s
independence, as articulated in this particular way, is premised on
participation in the system of global capitalism, as opposed to aligned with
feminist epistemology of equality.
So? Are you now
favoring feminism?
The situation today is far removed from a woman in a Girl’s
Hostel asking for a room of (her) own, in that it is not about having freedom from
patriarchal control in society, it is about having the freedom and power to
acquire the goods that one wants in service of projecting an independent image
and lifestyle. Problematically, for most women consumers today, as with most
consumers of any gender, consumption is hardly an act of empowerment, but
rather an act that creates debt and further binds one to the exploitative
system of global capitalism and finance.
This is represented and perpetuated in
part due to widespread attention in popular culture today to celebrity
lifestyle. Its luxurious and expensive trappings fuel the consumer desire for
goods, both expensive and cheap. The trend of expressing independence through
consumption, coupled with the popular notion that today’s India is a
gender-neutral space wherein feminism is equated with man-hating renders
feminism irrelevant or unnecessary. However, the increase in representations of
women expressing independence through consumption has generated new discourses
and representations that conflate independence and consumption. Indeed, in the
spirit of ensuring feminism’s relevance to a new generation of women, third
wave feminists have argued that contemporary feminism is about “judgment-free
pleasure.” To these feminists, such pleasures include shopping for designer
clothes, without the guilt that previous generations of feminists often felt if
shopping or otherwise supporting patriarchal businesses or exploitative
consumer goods [As per Richards
& Baumgardner magazine]. So, that brings me right back to my topic:
Consumerism.
So, how does feminism
harm you today?
Coming back to the My Body, My Choice theory, feminists have
taught girls and women that chastity is oppressive, that they should liberate
themselves. They have also taught that there are no natural limits to
sexuality. Witness their enthusiastic embrace of homosexuality. So, based on
feminist principles, why shouldn’t little girls sexualize themselves?
And why shouldn’t adult men and women view them as sexual if
there is no such thing as unnatural sexuality?
If you constantly bombard boys
with sexualized images of girls and the message “girls are the same as boys” in
countless different forms, the primal drive of male sexuality will lead them to
prey on girls. Since they’re told male and female psychology is the same, the
girls must he just as eager to have sex as they are — they just need a little
convincing, or a little alcohol or drugs, to loosen up from social constraints.
It’s really very simple.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not
some self-hating male-basher who views every girl who has sexual relations as
somehow a victim of male aggression, even if she consents to sex. There may be
almost as many morally reprehensible women out there as men. There are many
girls around these days eager to have sex with boys, and more than a handful
even seduce the males rather than wait for the reverse. They have a degraded
mentality. But so do men and boys who view every attractive female as primarily
a sex object. We don’t support RAPE. But we are also against consented-sex-turned-into-rape-stories.
So what? Even if I go
naked, why the hell do you anti-feminists have to drool on me?
When a girl or woman goes around exposing half of her body,
how can men and boys he blamed for viewing her as a sex object? A woman’s naked
legs or midriff triggers a biological sexual response in most men. IT’S CALLED
NATURE!
Thus is the confluence of two powerful social forces, consumerism and
feminism. The first makes us view everything in the world as an object of
gratification and every relationship as transactional, and the second makes
promiscuity easy and seem natural — feminism puts men and women into the
consumerist category when it comes to sex.
Of course, the unconditional commitment that marriage used
to imply is no longer fashionable. Since sexuality is such a powerful primal
force, especially for the young, this consumerist sexuality becomes a huge part
of their lives. It’s obvious that women tend to suffer more psychologically
from this arrangement.
So you now see how consumerism is linked with feminism,
and how feminism is linked with consumerist sexuality, and the result of such
ideals, is our present society!
Sunday, 8 September 2013
100 Habits of Men - What Feminists HATE
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DISCLAIMER:
Please note that these qualities are the most
talked-about in every feminist page on Facebook and overheard from general
people and discussed in media. This is just a consolidation of all the ‘facts
about ALL Men’.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So as per feminists, these are the ‘qualities’ ALL MALES
possess, and that’s the reason for them to Hate guys, and all those who support
guys [e.g. MRAs, MCPs, Chauvinists, Anti-Feminists, Equalists, and everyone in the guys’
families (incl. their moms, sisters, elderly people)]:
- Irresponsible
- Nerds
- Emotional
- Does not watch porn
- Dreamy
- Look ugly
- Pervert
- Too romantic
- Not able to sing
- Not able to dance
- Smiling all the time
- Can’t go against their parents
- Show off
- Liars
- Immature
- Arrogant
- Does not want to go shopping
- Rude
- Boastful
- Don’t look like McSteamy
- Doesn’t let his wife watch saas-bahu serials
- Greedy
- Stupid
- Love to watch sports
- Love to work
- Selfish
- Don’t have money
- Insincere
- Alcohol-addicted
- Boring
- Hairy
- Smelly
- Extremely low on intelligence
- Lazy
- Shapeless
- Don’t like to build muscles
- Dominating
- Angry
- No sense of humor
- Makes others laugh
- Too serious
- Passionless
- Can’t dream
- Can’t stand up for a woman
- Loves his bike
- Snores
- Clips toenails in the living room
- Drools on other women
- Too possessive
- Does not let his woman drool on other men
- Smoke
- Scratches his back
- Pees on the toilet seat
- Earns too much
- Spendthrift
- Does not give his credit card
- Wears jeans shorts
- Does not wear jockey undergarments
- Can’t speak with a woman’s accent
- Discusses proudly about official contacts
- Photographs flowers
- Wants to start a family
- Wants to get married
- Performs pooja every day
- Watches porn
- Vegetarian
- Wants to have kids
- Wears relaxed-fit jeans
- Can’t abuse
- Doesn’t like to gossip about movie stars’ lives
- Picks his nose
- Eats small meals
- Shaves his body hair
- Does not wash a woman’s clothes
- Says “sorry” too often
- Says “Thank you” too often
- Does not like teddy bears
- Does not watch cartoons
- Does not let his girl sleep with his boss
- Kisses his girl every day and night
- Loves to show affection in public
- Calls his girl just 5 times a day when he is at work
- Forgets dates
- Channel surfing
- Loves video games
- Falls asleep after sex
- Multi-tasking
- Claiming he is more stressed than his girl
- Feels tired coming home after work
- Leaves the toilet seat up
- Exaggerates his diseases
- Complains after waiting for just one hour for his girl
- Takes the trash out and gives the impression as if he cleaned the whole house
- Gets dressed too fast
- Does not agree to his wife’s logical reasoning
- Hates to discuss other people’s relationships
- Does not let his girl wear low-cut
- Too much health-conscious
- Eats loads of junk
- Refuses to become a ghar-jamai
It's again time for you to THINK. Would you blindly follow what these feminists have in mind?
Do you really think they can ever be happy? Do you think they really care about Women? Do you think they really want women to be empowered? Do you think they will fight for YOU?
Take a deep breath, and while sipping your cup of coffee, ask yourself, and then work towards what you believe. The MRAs and Equalists are not women-haters. They just want 'equal' treatment.
Monday, 29 July 2013
Misandry in India - A Sample Research
What do you do to a wife who walks out of marriage within 6
months, and constantly threatens you of suicide, within the marriage, and after
leaving the husband? I asked to seek opinions from a few. Here are the responses:
Ms. ABC (Divorced, 55 yrs old, "Pro-Equality woman"): No woman walks out of marriage in India.
It is you men who marry them, abuse them for 20-30 years,
and when they are not able to work and earn a living anymore, you dump them in religious places
like Kashi and Vrindavan.
Ms. DEF (Lawyer, unmarried, 40 yrs old): What walks out? The husbands in India throw out their wives at midnight, leaving them nowhere to stay.
Mr. GHI (Media personality, married twice, 60 yrs old): I would give her all I have.
Ms. DEF (Lawyer, unmarried, 40 yrs old): What walks out? The husbands in India throw out their wives at midnight, leaving them nowhere to stay.
Mr. GHI (Media personality, married twice, 60 yrs old): I would give her all I have.
She had loved me for 6 months. I can give her anything she wants.
Congress MP Renuka Chaudhary - When asked about misuse of Dowry, DV Act, and other laws by gold-digging women, she openly replied, "It is the mens' turn to suffer" |
Mr. JKL (Teacher, MBA, Feminist, 30 yrs old): You MCP! I don't want to comment.
Ms. MNO (Celebrity, "Alimony-wife", 45 yrs old): If the woman herself wants to get out of the marriage, you should respect that. You should give her half of the property whatever you have earned after your marriage.
Mr. PQR ("Forcefully-separated", Engineer, Equalist, 30 yrs old): I think they need to sit down and talk first, in private, about what they want from life. Both the man and the woman must try to save the marriage first.
Ms. STU (Divorced, Single-mother, 40 yrs old): Ask her for a mutual consent divorce first.
If that does not work out, the woman must find her priorities. If she
really wants to get out of the marriage, then it is her decision. Why would she
make the man pay for HER decision?
Mr. VWX (Divorced, Single-father, 40 yrs old): A divorce is bad both for the boy and the girl.
But, a marriage cannot go on if one party gives such
suicide-threats every now and then.
The law must help the man in such cases. It
is not always that the woman is a sati-savitri and the law must understand
that. They should go for a divorce, of course,
but please don't make marriage, just another financial transaction/ commitment.
Mr. AYZ (Single, Equalist, 30 yrs old): Ask the girl to decide whether she wants the husband or not?
If she is giving threats like that, she must be having some
problem. Take her to a doctor.
If she does not agree to it, try to make her
understand. Discuss the issues you guys are having in your relationship. Suicide is not the answer to everything.
I doubt she must be having something more important, which is more important
than her husband. But that's just a guess. Actually, TALK. That's the best you
can do.
But try to sort it out within your
family itself. Don't involve the girl's family, it might get dirty.
This is what a Feminist in India thinks of all men, and so do the laws and the lawmakers in India |
Governmentof India: Nothing is required. There is no fault of anyone. Just ask the girl to file a divorce case. And the husband should pay half of all his and his father's, mother's, forefather's property to the girl, so that she does not feel that her decision of getting the divorce was wrong.
You can see here
the misandry that is heavily practiced in the Indian society. Not only do the
feminists and greedy females want easy money from the husbands and in-laws, but
also a whole lot of men, who support women and their causes mindlessly. Perhaps
it is time that we realize Feminism in India is not about “Equality” anymore.
They have gone far beyond to make Equality ~ Supremacy!
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