I was scoffed at when I decided to include ‘media glutton’ in the bio for this column. It’s quite possible that no one but me knows how much time I spend (okay bordering on waste) hearing, watching or reading things; not to leave out scrolling of course. There wasn’t so much eyebrow rising for ‘in-your-face feminist’ maybe because that’s pretty obvious. The truth is that I’m an equal measure of both with an irremovable lens of gender hanging ahead of everything I consume.
While a feminist cheat code is something (it’s a thing!) that I’m putting to good use over the past few years, just to keep myself sane, the biggest flipside is that I’m mostly stuck with taking too much in and having to talk about one of them. Much like the mouth and its other end, I could say, just to wind back to gluttony of the popular kind.
I have done a great many things in the four hours of deciding what to write about – walked around in circles and waiting for an idea thereby achieving my 10,000-step target for the day (very rare), alarmed at least three people in the house with shrill shrieks of frustration (medium rare) and eaten everything I could find in a kitchen stocked for the holiday season (well done, glutton me!).
Now that I have met a third of my word limit and still don’t have a focus for a column that is to be a meditation (oh, the irony) on gender in the media, I’m rounding up in shorts most of what I’ve taken in this week, and no, it does not include the menus at Sabha canteens or the different varieties of The Grand Sweets mixtures.
In reading there has been Cat Person, a short story by Kristen Roupenian that was published in The New Yorker this month and has gone viral online since. It is the story of 20-year-old college student Margot and what goes on in her as she texts, meets and sleeps with an older man. As a piece that is reflective of the world we live in – of time spent on building a colorful bubble through mobile communication only to have it burst when you meet the real person – it raises questions of modern dating, of consent, of expectations, insecurities and the right time to say ‘no’. The reactions to the piece, I must say, are the truest reflection of the world there is.
On proud Chennaiite reading, there is fellow columnist Sharanya Manivanan’s collection of poetry titled The Altar of the Only World. Her explanation of the title, a phrase from one of the poems, is telling of how we choose love from the possibilities of other worlds and other people and the persons we put at the altar of the chosen world. I’m going to use it for a long time to come. Girls are Coming Out of the Woods, a poem from Tishani Doshi’s latest collection of the same name is an ode to women who have been abused and those speaking out about it.
I watched the overrated Christmas Prince on Netflix. I have said enough already, but thank heavens for a heroine who wonders about her career when a prince proposes to her. Hoping there’s better out there I got through two episodes of Brooklyn 99 and found the hypocrite in me that found the man-boy protagonist endearing after having dissed every role that Genelia D’Souza was offered in Tamil Cinema.
I watched national award winner Amma, directed by Neelan at a screening and was surprised that a man could tell the story a woman without mansplaining (it was his own mother). The discussion after the screening raised the very pertinent question of how the son is the filmmaker, chronicling the life his mother, whereas the daughter-in-law in the caregiver.
But then again, it is important to give credit to the film, very well made, that also opens the floodgates to talk of the forgotten women that always reside in the shadows of popular, successful men. I walked out of Aruvi thankful that it did see the light of release, excited that it would be a word-of-mouth hit, on a high that it was a great film, but also wondering if it glossed over sexual harassment in an attempt to touch upon a myriad of issues. Or maybe it’s just me, but I hope not.
I noticed that there was only one female artist – Berthe Morisot — among fifty or so impressionist painters that were featured at the Century of Light exhibition I was at. But the exhibition organised by the Chennai Weekend Artists featured so many women it’s exhilarating! Then there’s everything I’m watching at the Chennai International Film Festival, what I did at the Travel Film Festival, and the Buzzfeed community take on #doublestandards, but I’m above word limit and here I’ll stop.
Archanaa Seker
seker.archanaa@gmail.com
The writer is a city-based activist, in-your-face feminist and a media glutton