Talking about vaginas is not sexy – not in the least bit. I’m not saying it couldn’t be made sexy, but we choose to keep that out and instead simply talk about them – making ourselves vulnerable, being honest, for once emerging from the forts we’ve constructed for ourselves. That fort is sexy – it doesn’t care about anything but its own defence, plays power games and cannot, will not love – loving you see, is vulnerability. That’s how it differs from admiration – to admire and to be admired involves no risk.

The construct of the “manly Englishman” of Colonial times was an idea painstakingly created in the vicinity of Oxbridge and exported worldwide in the rhetoric of imperialism and as justification for colonialism. As I type, I look around the New Bodleian Reading Room at Oxford, where I am. Several men around me are working away [...]

“Oh Fuck!” is something I hear all around me everyday, as pens drop, essay deadlines draw close or the coffee goes cold. I tried the other day, to put that phrase in other words and came up with “Oh, sexual intercourse!” Upon examining dictionaries for etymological significance, there’s “Oh, strike!” and “Oh, Copulate!” Not so [...]

Sexual desire still makes the slut. Its repression makes the good woman – the “slut” image getting more and more popular doesn’t obliterate the fact that the sexual image associated with the “slut” is still violent – a sexuality of power and domination where the woman adds to the excitement by being what she is.

What did Indira Gandhi mean as a woman, for women, and in the realm of feminism? She has been held up as a model for women politicians and too often the “India has had Indira, we have no dearth of women politicians” rhetoric obscures reality. Her iron fist of populism on the one hand, and choking authoritarianism on the other, have been demonized and reified alternatively by different quarters

It’s hard not to love Apu. The reader, as the viewer, grows up with him through Pather Panchali; leaves the nest as he does in Aparajito, braving death and the jungle of an unknown world, falls in love as he does in Apur Sansar, and finally goes on an eternal search for the self, culminating, [...]

They are nothing like the magically beautiful, free, boundless, bountiful nymphs of graceful gait that Kalidasa and the many of his ilk who followed. These women not only do not exist in reality, but seem, even in their inky worlds, not to have feeling, voice or agency but are like deities in temples – perfect stone-women, to be worshipped, adorned and installed in a palace, saved if stolen by a villain. Bankim’s women, on the other hand, cry out their emotions, spark with anger at the fickleness of men, are agents and victims of the politics of the inner quarters, succumb to temptation, seduce the men they love, play tricks and cause intrigue.

Undoubtledly, Rukmini Devi Arundale did Bharatanatyam a lot of good. She in fact rescued it from the thralldom of an uncompromising “upper class”. But how? By modifying the dance to suit the conceptions of femininity that the upper classes held. What Arundale did in her revision of Bharatanatyam style was to remove the Dasi from the Attam and replace her with the more demure, less vigorous and outgoing typical upper caste woman. Is this the “pristine” form of the dance?

Rape, it is important to internalize is a gendered crime where the perpetrator is responsible for great trauma caused to a woman. She is not the carrier of honour and the vessel of purity but a human being – a person whose needs and space must be respected, a woman who has no obligation to fulfill any “conjugal rights” demanded of her.

Feminism and objectivism are both not monolithic. This is true, especially so for feminism. Women, ecologists and pacifists all over the world define it in different ways. However, to accommodate Rand would be an abrogation of the basic premises upon with feminism stands.