Feminism f-ed up our society, completely,” the actor Nora Fatehi said in an interview on the BeerBiceps YouTube channel earlier this month.
Only minutes earlier, Fatehi had spoken about a fire within her to prove haters wrong and how her undivided attention was on her work, leaving no time for relationships by choice (and partly because of a relationship experience that had frightened her). Suddenly, she put forth a contrary view, praising the need for conservative gender roles and how life would be better for everyone when these are conformed to.
The host, Ranveer Allahbadia, then played a video about the hormonal differences in male and female bodies, and how the latter are not built for the modern office-hours grind. The two insipidly brought up the Industrial Revolution as being the reason for the 8 am-5 pm schedule, without talking about what came before it in the West, different labour and worker right movement stages and impacts around the world — or indeed about the obvious yet visionary concept that current capitalist hustle systems can change, and need to, and are being challenged. What they inferred instead is that women are just not meant to work outside the home.
Honestly, each time this happens (as it did last year with actor Neena Gupta on the same channel), I just don’t get it. It happens quite a lot, actually. Celebrity women all over the world — from singer Shakira who recently said that her pre-teen sons felt “emasculated” by the Barbie movie and that she agreed with them, to a slew of other Bollywood personalities — assert anti-feminist viewpoints with seemingly almost no self-reflection about how their lives and careers benefit from how feminism reshapes the world for the better.
It’s inconsequential whether Fatehi identifies as a feminist herself. If she wants to give up all her personal and professional volition to become a dependent, she should go ahead and do that. (She also wants to “take over the world”, but hasn’t figured out how yet, but somehow the tradwife lifestyle is apparently also a part of it.) The gains of the feminist movement will offer the scaffolding she will require should she need to start over from scratch if she becomes disillusioned about what the homemaker life is. It’s a life she is fortunate not to have, the kind of life that the vast majority of women in India suffer within.
She’ll be just fine — but those who listen to her won’t, and she’s in a position to influence young people of any gender. When she says, for instance, “Now people want to be in their soft girl era, people want to be in their feminine energy, people want to find themselves. There are a lot of epiphanies right now,” she merely rattles off social media hashtags, misrepresenting curation for reality. Is she disingenuous, or ignorant? Either way, she cannot be excused, for either she passes her confusion on to impressionable audiences — young people without the capital and agency she enjoys, who may make choices they can’t trace their way back from — or else she deliberately offers misinformation, regurgitating rhetoric that has always caused, and only causes, so much harm.
Sharanya Manivannan
@she_of_the_sea
The columnist is a writer and illustrator