I Am Alive Campaign - Am I Really Alive?

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!

 

Coming soon to Google Plus, Facebook, and Twitter. Stay tuned for the Campaign Launch on 31st 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!

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!

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!