E-Paper
Home rule
Though I?d put the telephone receiver down, the words still grated in my ears. The lady at the other end, an employee of a popular woman?s magazine, had just told me that my article was too political to be published. Puzzled, I?d paused to think about the connection.
Though I’d put the telephone receiver down, the words still grated in my ears. The lady at the other end, an employee of a popular woman’s magazine, had just told me that my article was too political to be published. Puzzled, I’d paused to think about the connection. She explained, “Our readers are women, and mostly housewives, who don’t get such issues. They are not interested. How about something more useful for them… say, how to keep the kitchen insect-free or on how to be a friendly mother? Some self-grooming or novel recipes are always welcome.”
This lady had just made a big statement: what women, especially home-makers, don’t ‘get’, what interests them and what they should be reading. Come to think of it, she had just voiced a cliché that women stand for domesticity whereas men run the world outside and, most importantly, the two don’t mix.
Her remark annoyed me even though I am not a stay-at-home wife. But then, neither was she — she had a full-time job at the magazine. Later, thumbing through the contents of some women’s magazines, I realised she was right; my piece wouldn’t have fit in there.
‘Make-up your spouse will love’, ‘lunch-time cosmetic surgeries’, ‘lose weight in ten days’ — these were attractively splashed across the glossies. They are all geared towards training us to please our men, which would lead to our happiness. An article titled ‘How to not feel guilty after a party’ was a little unbearable — the pleasures of good food are denied to women so that they retain their curves. And the soft pornography that these pages offer for men is just indulgence.
That this is a patriarchal billion dollar industry created and run by men to suit their private, social, political and economic agendas is as well-known as Britney Spears and Barbie are among 8-year-old girls. What makes it interesting is how women are part of this machinery with big blinkers and blind spots — we don’t even know how deeply we’ve been conditioned to obsess over our weight, vital statistics, skin, food, hair, feet, clothes, nails, speech, mannerisms and homes.
Caught in this vicious eddy, we waste precious energies chasing the images the magazines create, forgetting that there is a life to live! The 21st century domesticities are more sophisticated, but still as stifling as before.
