Candid, not eye candy

Nonika Singh

She has been panned time and again — not for her acting potential of which there is little doubt but her sartorial choice for which she has faced flak time and again from the fashion police. So who would know better than gifted actor Vidya Balan about how a woman is judged constantly and consistently on the only parameter she is considered ‘worthy’ of being assessed on. As Vidya puts it, “I feel women are judged all the time. They are judged by the length of their hair, the clothes they wear, the way they talk and the way they walk. Women just need encouragement to be themselves, just a little nudge. So, please don’t judge.”

And it’s this schizoid mindset that she challenges in her music video along with four television Bengali actresses. It hopes to make people understand how judging women is pointless, fruitless and demeaning.

“Its terrifying

To be this soft.

To be an object.

To have had to learn first not who I was,

But how I was seen.

Mindy Nettife’s lyrics summarise the pressure of a prying gaze fixated on her physical being. In fact, all over the world every single woman’s story runs the same distance. In India, let us go into specifics that occupied our prime-time conscience in recent times. A senior IAS officer, Smita Sabharwal, in the Telangana Chief Minister’s office, was referred to as an eye candy by a leading magazine thus undermining her capability with a flourish of pen dripping with sexism. Not too long ago a leading media house made the world ogle at Deepika Padukone’s cleavage in a manner that was as unethical as it was offensive.

Actors, mighty, powerful… a woman’s position in society is inconsequential. Looks, looks and looks alone determine her worth. Viewed as a sum total of her body parts she is damned if she is good looking and more damned if not.

Even worse, women themselves remain obsessed with how they look. While men are usually known for what they do, in the case of women it all boils down to the physical appearance. According to Sandra Bartky: “Whatever else she may become, she is importantly a body designed to please or to excite.”

Though we live in a male-driven world, the male gaze, alone, does not determine the lopsided view of women. Women view other women and themselves, too, exactly through the same prism. So strong is the socialisation that she must find approbation as a desirable being. Naomi Woolfe writes in The Beauty Myth, “The more power women have, the more pressure there is on them to be beautiful.” It’s this pressure bordering on neurosis that performance artist Sonia Khurana captures in her work Closet. If actresses and their bodies remain a fair game for all and sundry to point fingers at, even arrows, they, too, unwittingly become cogs in the system and are happy with their objectification. The popular culture — right from item numbers to Honey Singh’s lyrics —accentuate her physicality, never the person or her intellect.

No doubt, beauty is an asset if not a virtue but the obsessive preoccupation with how a woman looks invariably undermines what she does. Actually, the line between appreciating beauty and objectifying women exists. Only most, including the woman journalist, who wrote the disparaging piece on the IAS officer, don’t know where and how to draw it.

By the way eye candy is no compliment. The intelligent IAS officer read the underlying insinuation and took legitimate offence and legal recourse. Last heard had filed a Rs 10-crore suit against the magazine. For those who don’t know what the seemingly innocuous and harmless word means, well here is the dictionary meaning, “Eye candy is a person or people considered highly attractive to look at, often implying that they are but lacking in intelligence or depth.” In short, it could well be a veiled substitute for dumb blonde. No wonder, the IAS officer was peeved. The silver lining is that so were a whole lot of right-thinking individuals following and trolling the news report. That many of them responded with reverse sexism targeting the journalist who had written the rather nasty piece with equally sexist remarks is, of course, not a different story but part of the same continuum.

What’s new, however, is more and more women are not willing to take it lying down. The IAS officer responded with gumption, took on the magazine and forced them to apologise. So did Deepika who wrote an open letter questioning the newspaper’s propriety. “It is a matter of context and how out-of-context the reportage is just to sell a headline.”

And now comes the meaningful video from Nihar Naturals featuring Vidya Balan who just won the Iconic Woman of the decade award for excellence in empowering women-oriented cinema.

All of this put together can’t block the collective gaze that strips women of merit and follows the reductionist calculus of reducing her to a body. But in a country where even ‘honourable’ parliamentarians refer to women with short hair as parkati auratein, even questioning the prevalent attitudes is a victory of sorts.