One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.
— Simone de Beauvoir
The aegis of femininity has long been driven by the quotidian impulse of a socio-politico-cultural miasma, created and perpetuated by the institution of patriarchy, in an attempt to divert the apparently fatalistic potential of female authority. The construction of the female identity, since antiquity, has largely been predicated upon hackneyed social mandates that disenfranchise the lot of women, by setting codes of conduct heavily contingent upon the vagaries of the male desire for dominance. A woman, thus, no longer remains an autonomous agent. And her acceptance into the social milieu hangs on her readiness to imbibe the crucial atavistic fervour that defines femininity as inferior and servile by construction, as well as by nature. It is in this toxic annihilation of agency, that one becomes a woman.
The ceremonial injunction into the ritual of womanhood begins, inevitably, through the indoctrination of the woman into the elusive and highly restrictive domain of feminine beauty. As Mary Wollstonecraft put it succinctly, women have been “taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre...” At the level of pure physicality and easy noticeability, beauty remains the most utilised construct for subjugating women, turning their selfhood into a battleground, where individuality is pitted against arbitrary markers of normativity.
In the Indian context, the idea of beauty has been a constant and cumbersome walk of balance, a tightrope of sorts, demonstrating the unhealthy fixation of a culture used to associating femininity with compliance and tractability. It is not by chance that ‘shadeism’ (differentiation on the basis of skin colour) is so deeply entrenched in our linguistic usages, and it is certainly not that clothes for the average woman cannot be produced in a size larger than 12. It is the obligation of a culture bent upon ensuring that the so-called weaker sex remains
weaker, disabusing the notion that femininity can yield power, by suppressing the diversity of the entire sex.
A simple walk through the local market, or a scroll down the social media, even a cursory glance at the matrimonial columns of the newspaper, would teach you this: the woman gracing every magazine on every shelf, poster or advertisement, the one gracing the giant billboards at every traffic signal, indeed the one you encounter at the weekly visit to the theatre, is a glorification of the combined values that patriarchy and a deep-rooted sense of colonial hangover endorse. This hyper-real domain of popular sociology, which prescribes a milky complexion, chiselled jawlines, thin bodies and everlasting youth as markers of female beauty, is a trap created to sustain patriarchal dominance. The result of this coercive networking is a mythic creation of the consumerist culture — a demure, perfected, alluring semblance of the female body, seductive and authentic enough to elevate the status of womanhood to a godliness, unbecoming of the veneration heaped upon it by the youth.
Why, one might ask, is our culture so obsessed with indoctrinating these value systems pertaining to women into the general consensus? The answer is this: ladies, it is not our dark skin, or our paunch or the thinning hairline at our temples, which irks menfolk. It is the urge to step beyond the familiar, the sanctioned space which patriarchy allots us, that threatens their existence. The obsession with female thinness is nothing but a clarion call for female obedience, for docility and meekness.
Indeed, there is nothing ‘fair’ or ‘lovely’ about the fairness creams we are so inclined to accumulate; there is no almanac that refuses you the status of womanhood if your hair is cropped like Ronaldo’s. The shape of your eyes, or the girth of your hips wouldn’t appease you, but only the appalling standards of a society trying to reduce its women to types. Your body sags not under the influence of the twilight years, but under the divination of men and women deifying impossible standards. Oppression is a weapon fuelled by blind conformity, and it is the latter which has been the root cause of our undoing.
Beauty, they say, lies in the eyes of the beholder. My suggestion to you, ladies, would be to not rely upon the beholder anymore. You are infinitely beautiful because you know your worth, because your will lies beyond the confines of debauched social expectations and warped definitions of beauty. You are the goddess no one advertises, and you will create the ideal that patriarchy refuses to endorse. You will make men realise that your beauty blooms in abandon, and by restricting that, these men are selling themselves short, depriving not only us, but themselves, of the vibrance that femininity is capable of.
You are phenomenal in your own way. Let no man (or woman, for that matter) tell you otherwise.
deblinarout@gmail.com
