Women who didn't get the memo

In the ITV television drama Mr Selfridge, on the history of the London megastore, a pivotal moment is the business decision to shift make-up to on top of the counter and front of shop. To make what women wanted available to them openly, as opposed to surreptitiously, and to throw open to candour, and commercialisation, the woman's need and desire to attract the male species. Those who most opposed the move were women in the store, horrified of being equated with "women of colour", a term for prostitution derived from the use of attraction oriented make-up in sombre Victorian England.

It revolutionalised not only the beauty industry, but also the way women saw their wants. To call attention to oneself has always been a weapon of shaming women and little has changed. When the 50 Shades of Grey phenomenon swept the country, those most horrified by it were women, several of whom have lasciviously and secretly, read the trilogy end to end. The idea of virginity is horrific because it is a fantasy of men.

But what about the first sexual experience as a fantasy of women? What if women could choose to sell, pick a partner, and contract out their sensuality, as something they unquestioningly own? What if women decided how they objectified themselves? How their attractiveness would be rated or sold? But that's just not something women do. Enslavement is a male fantasy, not a woman's. Because women's fantasies must go where good women's fantasies go. Freedom is also conditional to purity. To want freedom as a woman is great if it ensures an abstract virtue as an end. Self gratification, something as cheap as being coveted, is a disturbing thing. Is to choose to be owned less than to choose to own? Who holds the balance of power if the choice to be owned remains your own?

We can get into the psychology of subjugation as a sexual fantasy at length but the point is not the fantasy but the freedom to choose it for oneself. The people most against the objectification of Deepika Padukone, are those who would objectify her. Sadly, this includes herself.

At the Seneca Falls Convention in 1858, 300 women in the world's first ever women's rights convention adopted a self evident resolution that men and women were created equal in the Declaration of Sentiments. The primary function of feminism was to secure franchise. A vote meant a voice; a voice meant a true democracy. A true democracy meant the right to choose. The right to choose primarily meant an economic and a sexual freedom. Both brought the right to objectify one's own body instead of waiting for someone else to objectify it. It opened the way for women into pleasure, and choice, as opposed to a life of duty and obedience. This includes the right to be as cleavage baring as one wants to be in public, or as pancaked as it takes to be beautiful and to use that to one's chosen end. In 1995, Martha Nussbaum pinned Objectification of Women to a seven point definition:

1. instrumentality: (the treatment of a person as a tool for the objectifier's purposes);

2. denial of autonomy;

3. inertness;

4. fungibility (the treatment of a person as interchangeable with other objects);

5. violability: (the treatment of a person as lacking in boundary-integrity);

6. ownership; and

7. the denial of subjectivity: (the treatment of a person as something whose experiences and feelings (if any) need not be taken into account).

None of these have anything to do with the morality of viewing or presenting a person. These are extensions of choice: The woman's integrity, will, and decision.

Today, feminism is reversing those choices somewhat. Women in the workplace must defeminise to be taken seriously. Nothing distracting - not clothes, not make-up, not sensuality or romance-good women are focused, good women work hard, good women take strong decisions and don't cry, find the perfect work-life balance and are good with math and money.

I am still waiting for someone to tell me how this is different from women who did the housework, handled the accounts, and delivered the baby and went into the fields and satisfied the male species at night, hiding her middle class depression with Valium, sparking the first wave in the first place.

To me, the great disappointment in the discourse around Deepika Padukone's outrage is the rejection of her own ability to choose how she presents herself. The images are taken from her films, her events, and are of her own body. Those are indubitably, her breasts, and she chose to heave them, flash them, show them, use them to tease, titillate and excite. And to me, her ability to do so, in a new India, is the celebration of her choice.

The disappointment I find is in the "good girls don't titillate in this way. I am a good girl. Ergo I don't titillate in this fashion" protests of a woman who has used her modest hips and breasts to exceptional acclaim and commercial interest.

It also comes from a woman who very clearly has a choice in her partnerships on and off screen, playing the dominant role in both, making the charade of submissiveness her choice to perpetrate.

My objection to the new rise of Deepikadom, is against good girl-dom and its equation with feminism. Women around the world have claimed nudity as empowerment, and very few artists in India even today, have had the courage to revel in the beauty of the nude female form; simply because shame and modesty remain greater virtues than a cravenness to sensuality. But the female body remains one of the most beautiful, breathtaking pieces of nature. As Padukone evolves into a mature actress, a diva-like quality emerges.

But a diva can never be one who fears her objectification. It is mandatory that she take ownership of her objectification, flaws and all, and sign her contract with her audience.

I recently sat horrified in the company of a Mumbai society wife who recounted how she celebrated her 25 years of marriage with obedience. The secret to her marriage, she whispered conspiratorially, was the space she created for herself within her marriage, she revealed. The creation of her own life and business, she said, was to make clear to her husband she was "her own person"; he whose will and pleasure ruled her choices in diets and clothes and career. This was the function of the choice of individuality. I sighed into my fruit juice.

Individuality has moved from being an instrument of freedom to one of enslavement; the end being the pleasure, and longevity, of the approving gaze of the man. I'm sorry you disapprove, but being a sex symbol is embracing the gaze.

Women celebrate your décolletage too Deepika, not just men. Maybe you should too.