So it’s the 8th of March again, while the ides of March blow over the country with women being at the centre of this ire it seems more than appropriate to write about us today.

While reading Barack Obama’s now hot selling book “Dreams of my Father”, I began to relate to his dilemmas. Not just because his first creative endeavour was shot down by the critics at the time that he wrote it :-), but also because he had to deal with finding his place in the world.  He examines whether the problems of the black community are his own or whether he is American or African, or if indeed being of mixed blood he can fully belong to either world.  Of course he found his answers and the rest, as they say, is history.

I grew up in an environment that never let on that   there was indeed any discrimination against women. Successful happy women surrounded me. I went to a co-educational school where we ran the same races as the boys and were subliminally told that being a girl meant you were somewhat smatter and stronger.  Later through my years in college I spent less time in the classroom and more in the villages of Orissa and in the offices of various voluntary organisations, I travelled alone and had a deep Marxist phase and none of it pointed towards the fact that I was disadvantaged in any way. If anything I thought I was the luckiest most advantaged human being on the planet. I fell in love and married the man I chose. It made me secure and sceptical and had me standing on the crossroads, never quite sure if discrimination against women was a real fact that applied to me. But as I went further down the rabbit hole of life, the distinct and small signs began to show. Today all those signposts flash past in my mind as I write this.

The birth of my daughter helped me to view a girl in the world. When a well meaning relative held my hand sympathetically and said ”Never mind next time” - I truly thought she was talking about the fact that I had a caesarean. It was my ex husband who translated the true meaning of what was said to me. I was appalled and angry. Then as I looked around the nursing home (a pretty upmarket medical service I may add), I saw that in the ten day period of my stay there were only boys born. My naiveté put this down to “maybe it’s the boy season”. Then along came the catholic nurse who translated this phenomenon to me - the ultrasound was helping choose boys over girls. It made me sad. I came home and like every parent wanted to secure my child’s future financially. The insurance agent suggested I get something that matures before she gets married because many “women are killed for these policies”. It was advice from a man who does insurances for a living. The postpartum blues really got me then :-). And I had to fall in to line and admit that something was going on that wasn’t all kosher.

So now its eleven years later. All the men around me talk about the strong women they know, women themselves are freer. The women in India feel stronger. There is proof of this strengthening in every career sphere. Women lead in so many areas. They are getting better and better at what they do. They wear what they like, they choose their own personal status, they spend their own money and they dictate the terms of their sexuality. And then the parliament refuses the women’s reservation bill, women are asked the leave pubs, and they are beaten if they want to hang out with their lovers, the sex ratio just keeps falling. So what’s going on?  We’re living in the age of the media, so is there help on its way from there?

Everywhere I look there are images of women. Sexy, smart, made-up, conniving, strong. So where do these images come from? Who created these images? 

We are hurtling along in cinema breaking one boundary on the next. But it’s still women who are sex objects, men the receptors of their attentions.   These repeated images of women, has actually convinced women that somewhere they need to look like these women to be desired, or to be like these women to be winners.  And even though somewhere deep down they know it’s a load of bullshit, there is nothing out there to convince them otherwise.

Someone I know, as part of her job, was assigned to study what sort of pornography women like to see. She talked to several women, searched data and found that there was - a) No real pornography for women b) women rarely ever watch pornography on their own. They are looking for sensual/sexual stories not just disconnected images. And more than that they want to improve themselves and want things that they can share and be appreciated for not hide. That probably explains why all overt sexual images on screen, has most men salivating. And when most women look at the image she sees the woman’s hairstyle and make up :-).

We are in dire need of recognition and acceptance of women’s language. Their actual way of seeing things. We need more images created by women, and more sounds, and more films and more words. As the makers of these images, sounds and words increase and their audiences get more empowered, a new visual language will emerge. Whether it will be more sensitive, more alive, and more vivid and perhaps more fun is hard to say but I am inclined to think it will be. This is indeed the next turn that cinema, TV, advertising can take.  Cinema that builds on a woman’s inner core and works outwards from the inside and not in from the outside! Images that build self esteem and make happy women on any day.