The Woman TV Raised Me To Be
It’s the early 2000’s in India and my generation is hit with puberty, the Internet & cable television. What really became of us?
I like to think my generation was truly special, which is not to say yours isn’t, but imagine waking up at the turn of the millennium to the heightened self-consciousness of puberty, only to welcome the Internet to your home. You have to admit, this is the stuff of history.
But in this story the Internet comes a little later, it’s simply a segue to help you imagine the world before its existence. And just so we’re clear, this story is about a teenage girl…
…and her TV. It’s also a very candid, reflective & personal account of who I was becoming through these years, consuming what I did from mass media. So feel free to walk in and out of this extended bracket of ‘my generation’, but if you can relate, I’d like to invite you to go down this rabbit-hole of existentialism with me as I grasp in the white noise for some answers on who the woman was that TV was raising me to be, all her forms and manifestations, her confusing signals, sewn like a patchwork costume for my developing gender identity. Or you could just scroll for the pictures.
Mom. The only time I’ve been most convinced to be one is when I was a little girl. Roland Barthes likens toys to a microcosm of the adult world for the child-the homonculus, and I would extend the same analogy to TV ads for adults. Advertising is a dangerous mix of idealism and idolism. What was the female that was presented to us? In 90’s television, the most iconic was the housewife & the mother. Frugal and penny-wise. Couponing queen and domestic goddess. Observe the perfectly starched blue and white saree that stays in place even in the most humid of Indian metros. Reminiscent of a nurse or the Missionaries of Charity. The very image of servitude, starchy morals and renunciation. Nationalist? I think so. Mostly labelled with a back-handed compliment like ‘multi-tasker’ or ‘rises with the lark’. This is not to discredit the role of housewives but to address their silent, underestimated, unpaid, systemic labour and how comfortable we are in our gender-roles to reinforce them with condescension and pats on the back, as we did on television. Housewives and moms on TV were setting standards sky-high with mothers around the country never breaking a sweat and keeping up with everything but their own needs and aspirations. And little girls were role-playing to their dolls to the same clockwork tune.
But this isn’t just why this section is labelled Mom. Since we were too little to be in control of what we wanted to watch in the early 90’s, it was second-hand viewing of what moms were consuming. I’m trying to reach far back into my memory and what stands out are glimpses of India’s Parallel Cinema and TV series that were revolutionary in their politics. There were stories of feminist power across the urban-rural landscape: Manthan, Mirch Masala, Rudali, Saans for instance. Strong female leads acing the Bechdel Test: Smita Patil, Shabana Azmi, Deepti Naval, Neena Gupta & Surekha Sikri (among others) playing relatable characters & forming sisterhoods. Narratives and identities that existed alongside the bright-eyed, ultra-violet, hypnotic housewife. Even though we caught this movement by its tail end, it had a lasting impact where to this day we go back to them for well-written Indian, feminist content that is remedial to our existential aches. Thank you, moms.
Reading the image in cartoons and breaking it down is like serving a slice of decadent cake with the calories printed on it. Why ruin it with the subtext? The warped representation of females in cartoons has long been drowned in laughter and with it a history of being other-ed. Which automatically defines the primary consumer as a school going hetero-male.
Let’s begin with the pain of fitting in. Whether she was the pesky sister as Dee-Dee, a hovering outsider, a hindrance to Science itself…Or foul-tempered Helga Pataki- first ridiculing and then pining at her closet-shrine of the titular male…Or Angelica Pickles- bossy, commanding, but always outwitted, we find the female on the fringe, struggling to occupy space. Growing up as a sister to a brother or that female who wanted in on the video games or jokes or excited conversations of discovering something in Science/ Tech / Sports/ Music/ Comics among a group of boys, you would find yourself unworthy of fitting in. At best you would be ‘like one of the guys’. It was either an erasure of your girlhood or a glaring consciousness of it. An encroachment. What further insults the idea of being female is that in these binary, gendered spaces, for a woman to be ‘like one of the guys’ is considered a laurel, when compared to a boy, emasculated and crushed when likened to being ‘like one of the girls’.
A literal, Greek, crown of laurel. Something from renaissance paintings always sticks out to me, like a reminder of how every time I consider myself a woman who belongs to the world of knowledge, I’m living there on borrowed time.
The painting on the left is iconic- The School Of Athens is a fresco by Raphael that paints the greats — Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Pythagoras, Da Vinci, Raphael himself — in a temple of knowledge. All male, as you can tell, with the exception of one Hypatia. A single woman among male scholars, an accurate demographic representation of our labs, hackathons, stock markets, war rooms, CXO roles. The painting on the right is forgettable. It doesn’t matter who this woman is, she is one of countless nude women painted in the renaissance, ambling in her bed clothes, unproductive in her posture, her disposition hysterical /coquettish / expressionless. She is as stripped of her identity as any photograph of a woman that does the rounds of the internet today. Raphael may well paint himself in his fresco and be a star of the millennium while being authentically himself, an artist. A woman taking a selfie is a completely different story, it is political.
Sometimes I
Tear open the canvas
Upon which my face
Is painted,
To find it hollow.
And in it I find living
All the women
Ever painted as
Staring into the abyss -
Stripped of purpose
Or contemplating it.
(I wrote this a few years back, feeling rather numb.)
Hypatia, is one of the very few women figures in the world of ancient knowledge in the West, not unlike Gargi, Avviyar, Andal of India. Staggeringly outnumbered by her male counterparts. And the nerve of Raphael to paint Athena, a goddess of wisdom watching over his scholarly men. Like Saraswati reigns in the worship of knowledge in Hinduism, while India suffers a stark gender inequity in academia.
Can you imagine the cost of making a mistake in your field of work as a woman? I have felt this, the burning shame of making mistakes in a room full of men at your own subject, knowing that your errors are accredited not to the fact that you are new, nervous or human but that you are female.
It’s a wonder they did not let their voices be drowned, these token females in the pantheon, returning each day to a space where their gender was the elephant in the room, carrying the weight of the collective male-gaze. Or seeking privacy and self-worth by publishing under a male pseudonym. What were the stakes for these women to be keepers of knowledge? Hypatia for one, was burnt at her stake, like a witch. I am not exaggerating, I urge you to visit this link. A man’s findings become theory and praxis. A woman’s become incantations that threaten social order.
Let’s also make her blonde. Does this observation feel forced? Maybe it wasn’t a deliberate choice on the part of the cartoonist or the writer but I still feel the need to bring attention to this stereotype that furthers the distance between a woman and the own-ness of her wit, confidence & knowledge based on a physical attribute. In India, if not blonde hair, it is the cringe-worthy stereotype of a woman behind thick glasses only finding societal praise upon conforming to beauty standards, her ground-breaking thesis notwithstanding. Or it’s another backhanded compliment of being a rare beauty-with-brains, as though in front of each female the two exist in contrast and at many times in her life she must find herself at this crossroad to be respected.
As we farther the idea of a woman from her ability to make meaning of her world, what becomes of a woman on the verge of finding evidence, of truth? She is made to rethink, revisit facts until she feels foolish or forgetful. She is met with disbelief as a first response, always and then has the truth handed to her, bent out of shape and is expected to settle for that. A blatant gaslighting that makes her question her position, her point and her place. This happens to women in science, tech or office spaces as much as in any courtroom. I don’t find it an exaggeration to make an example of a cartoon or an unintelligent female character to question the basis of our personhood. I find it dangerous to grow up on representations of women written by men and fear this for every passing generation. I find myself borrowing their ideas of my own limitations. I grow up believing them over my lived experience.
It is important to educate women, so they can write themselves.
Bollywood of the 2000’s, you gave me nothing. Nothing but film after film of the same woman caught in the same patriarchal setup with the same second-hand fashion from the West, the same structured myth about what my aspirations should be.
TV in urban Indian households at the turn of the millennium was flooded with content from the West — MTV, VH1, HBO, Star Movies came at a time when adolescents were frankly tired of the annoying morality that even the most progressive Indian television was handing out to us in stale Bollywood & melodramatic TV soaps.
American television was a whole different deal. It was refreshing to see more women speaking their mind, leading the narrative, making choices, living out the consequence. But they were still the same woman — white (tanned), privileged, powerful but punching down. What seemed at the time as a freedom from morality would eventually be unraveled to me over the years as a very different kind of trap. It was patriarchy, repackaged.
At the time of a developing sexuality, which people are in denial of in 14 year olds, we were bombarded by images of the sexualized female form from every direction. Godawful Indian remix videos with PVC dresses, trashy reality TV on VH1, magazines, anime- every form of media carried a very similar image of the female form. Even the way the form was captured- the angles, the focus, and the disembodied limbs constantly framed the body as something female but not an entire person. Certainly a commodity — the currency attached to which was her sexuality. In the economics of female sexuality, there is also the hetero-male gaze (residing in all genders) that is constantly fed and starved as the demand metric and pop culture is a marketplace. This is not made-up, this is an existing billion dollar business that sells cars, real estate, golf magazines, you name it…except that the female is never the stakeholder in the profit. She is the crafted commodity.
Females learn early to be judicious when using their sexuality as a currency. We are made to feel competitive and TV amps up this sentiment like no other. Everyone loves the drama of an economy in times of scarcity. Whether it is watching best friends fight or soppily sabotage each other for the attention of the male on a TV soap, we love a female rivalry that revolves around a man in which sexuality is used as the ultimate weaponry. I have always likened this to continuing a harem structure. A male having multiple female partners on / off the screen is excused, congratulated, even expected but it’s never a forgivable trait in a female character. She is instantly slut-shamed and vilified.
We carry this sense of scarcity into the real world — a scarcity of male-attention and the security that comes with it, relying emotionally, if no longer financially on him. I have to remind myself that it’s time to shed this paper-thin skin that women have worn for so long and an insult to the labour of the females who have worked hard to bring us to a point where this entire competition can be dismantled. It’s not enough to decapitalize female sexuality- it leads us to an even shakier ground- what is the new visual definition of our gender and sexual identity. Everyday as we dress ourselves, it is as though we are on TV, the gaze never leaves. Am I dressing too modestly or too overtly? Is it ok to make my game avatar someone with an unrealistic body as she performs crazy fighting stunts? If we wear a pink PVC dress, are we reclaiming or conforming? We always have to prove or disprove something, whether we like it or not, we are always reading the image. It’s been a very long battle, it’s all a bit of a blur. But it’s good to remind ourselves that we are fighting it together, as half the population of the Earth and we can support each others choices.
Sisterhoods can be the most empowering thing to watch on the screen and thankfully as I was becoming an adult, they had arrived. It can be cathartic to see women, that used to size each other up, now holding each other up. The Mean Girls reference in the banner image was for this purpose, the difference a female writer & director can make to drive this point home. I can’t help but respect Regina George, after all she does car commercials in Japan. I had seen some vicious teenage drama in real life and was growing increasingly tired of the rumour mill. TV finally had some realistic, happy, healthy female relationships in cartoons, chick flicks, comedies, commercials. Female audiences were finding more representation on screen — we were being seen as intersectional, whole humans. A few shows even uttered the word feminism. Our job here was done, fellow adolescent females.
And who watched TV anymore? It was 2009. The Internet and social media had long arrived. Blogs, forums, chat rooms and web pages meant that anyone could be a content creator or rather, the idea of what is female could become a two-way dialogue, not mere consumption and imitation. Media and pop culture have evolved so rapidly and have been problematic in so many new ways since TV. My latest existential struggle has been to find the thin line between privacy and shame. What makes me hide parts of my life and am I responsible for the curiosity of others to decontextualize a part of me and interpret the female image as they wish to? Where does the power lie? Who is the spectator, who is the performer and what is this stifling closeness with no real connection?
I’m glad that as consumers we demanded better content of TV. And as consumers of the Internet, we will continue to. We did not allow ourselves to be raised by the television and rebelled as any angry teenager would. Reading the image remains a regular practice as I search for my definition of being female. I still see generations of women painted behind my face. I remain a copy, one of many, but I’m no longer the self-important face of it. At almost 30, I see so many painted in front of me, younger faces. When they tear open the canvas, I wish for us to greet them warmly into a place where there’s room for all of us and more- the mom, the girl unlike the boys, the babe and I.
