About a decade and few more years ago, in grade VI, one of my classmates suddenly got her period and stained her school uniform in the middle of our classes. Astounded and upset as she was, her plight wasn’t enough for the rest of us to withhold our rather acidulous chiacking. My friends and I shamelessly joined in with the boys in our class in fits of laughter, making her feel conscious, even ashamed about a very natural yet unfortunate thing that had happened to her. I cringe at my 12-year-old self as I remember rolling my eyes at her with a lot of conviction – as if it was a legit thing to do. 14 years down the line, I would do anything to go back and do it differently – perhaps, stand up and tell myself or my school friends that this is absolutely not how it’s meant to be done.
Perhaps I can excuse myself and say that I was a kid and my friends were kids, and we simply didn’t know any better, but also, if we were old enough to understand shame and hate, weren’t we old enough to understand love and support?
If you’re a 90s kid like me, you’d probably remember a few stray instances when you were not too kind to other women. There probably had been numerous reasons for which you judged them – things which you are scared to admit now, and things you were being judged for as well.
Speaking about myself, in my life or well, in at least for a good part of my life, I have been both at the receiving end of judgement by other women as well as been the perpetrator myself.
Simultaneously, I was judging others for and was being judged for everything that 90s Bollywood heroines were also being judged for – for not being thin enough, for being too thin, for dressing conservatively, for dressing not-so-conservatively, and so on and so forth. Somehow, unknowingly, I inadvertently derived pleasure from judging other women for the same things that I was judged for. This was especially true when I had just hit puberty and was always unintentionally, so to say, trying to attract the attention of the opposite sex in whichever way I could. And guess what, I found no other way to do it, except by being a ‘mean girl’ and gossiping and bitching about other girls. Gasp!
Of course, my friends joined me too in it and vice versa.
To say that ‘we were merely children and didn’t know any better’ would be a tacit acceptance of the idea that being somewhat unaware as a child about worldly issues is okay. How else would your innocence remain intact? How else would you continue to be ‘a good girl’ sitting uncomfortably in your skirt, legs glued together, so as to not attract unwanted attention? How else will you not question the ‘values’ in your ‘value education’ class? Those were questions that hadn’t arisen in my mind until way into my Second Year as a student of English Literature at St. Xavier’s College, Calcutta.
However, I am mildly thankful that a little before taking the numerous classes on Feminist Theory and Sociology in college, I had already started becoming aware of my rights as well as my privileges through social media, especially, Facebook, and eventually through Instagram. In fact, I continue to do so.
In a year that has got us excessively worried about the negative impact of social media on our mental health, I want to remind people that there have been and continue to be some incredible good sides to it as well. The fact that today, I wouldn’t judge a woman for coming home late at night, wearing what she pleases or whom she dates, or where she goes out to, is mostly, if not wholly, because of social media and the recourse to a gamut of arguments and counter-arguments on feminist issues that it provided me. And believe it or not, sometimes it has a far more profound effect on us than a book read once on a particular day ever would.
Most of us might remember a particular meme (or something like that) doing rounds on Facebook for quite some time now. This particular meme showed an elegant, black-and-white picture of Princess Diana along with the quote, “In a world full of Kim Kardashians, be a Princess Diana.”, reinforcing gender-based prejudices and satisfying women with just the validation they needed. But just a few days later, somebody thought it was foolish and they re-created the meme with the quote, “In a world full of Kardashians, be whoever the hell you want to be,” super-imposed on the same elegant picture of Princess Diana used previously for completely opposite purposes. Now, that got people like us thinking! It was as simple as that. I feel social media has created a generation not necessarily of good human beings, but of thinkers, who would at least question their beliefs every now and then. Nothing is written in stone any more. Human beings becoming more confused and questioning their surroundings incessantly is definitely a better status quo than them coming to false conclusions based on their biases and prejudices.
What has specifically happened to the feminist movement in the age of social media is that women have gotten a lot of exposure to how and through what social tools they had been oppressed through ages, and how best to avoid falling prey to them in the near future. We’ve learnt to appease patriarchy less and our inner drives and desires more.
Yes, sometimes I do still fall prey to societal conditioning and the do’s and don’ts of patriarchal society, but you know what, I take a moment to ponder on them. I try to be better next time. Such constant efforts to be better and more aware has built a mutually reinforcing sisterhood globally, where solidarity against patriarchy is just the norm of the day. It is not something ‘extra’ or something we ‘fuss over’ just to forget about it the next day. It’s an ongoing effort within an entire online community of womxn who feel the need to call out society on all its acts of unkindness, cruelty and suppression that the world has tolerated through generations. It is also an ode to technology and the social solidarity it can generate merely through an exchange of ideas and opinions, so that every day, we can rise up and stand for another sister than pull her apart in the way we did not too long ago.
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