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Feminism of the better haves

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Gayatri Jayaraman
Gayatri JayaramanApr 12, 2015 | 18:18

Feminism of the better haves

Much has been said about the #MyChoice video. I went back to watch it again today, after the calm, and came away still unable to. And mere bad verse or moralising wasn’t it.



In 2001, I had just had my baby, was in the middle of a separation, and was a young 25. As I handled food and wine and wrote on society for Femina at the time, I was attending page three soirees wearing clothes I could ill afford and clutching wine flutes in the kind of hotels you felt too poor to be in at that age and that income level. I often escaped into the luxurious bathrooms, to comb my hair, retouch my makeup, take a breather from the toomuchness of the wealth of the goings on. 
It is in these bathrooms where several society women, who continue to be prominent members of various industries today, would strike up conversations, and tell me I was brave – at 25 I probably looked like I badly needed bolstering.

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Many shared details of their lives in passing. Several would draw me into stalls to show me how they touched up bruises with foundation, how the clichéd marks would end just above the hemline, how they were forced to plead for every expense. One told me she went on crazy diets, starving herself to retain her trophy wife status so she would be thought "worth the money" her husband invested in her. She is so botoxed today, I barely recognise her. For many salons and spas and plastic surgery were not the relief and escape they were to me and my middle class friends – a dream of an expensive day of pampering – but essential and stressful tools to keeping the standards their husbands set for them. One woman, a high society hostess, confided how a joint bank account was the only thing that kept her married. I recall one art viewing at a five-star where a particularly gorgeous woman whose husband is a prominent collector whispered to me that her husband would hit on anything that moved and then dragged me conspiratorially to stand by her all evening, to demonstrate and pass me meaningful looks every time her husband obliged to do so. Every single one was well heeled and looked extraordinarily lucky from the outside.

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It was, for a year or so, a terrible consortium high society opened up to me: the empathy of the damned, tailored to bolster my confidence. Many who spoke to me once, never looked me in the eye again. The secret baton had been passed on. The deed was done. There was no friendship here. Just the lingering knowledge that we were each not alone. The message was clear: we may be multi-millionaires, we look glamorous, but we do not live the dream.

It is a lesson that I am grateful for. It kept me going when I lacked courage and built the foundation for my emerging feminism because it taught me one crucial lesson: that feminism is not about class, wealth, society, community, or even education levels. That feminism was this common longing for a set of freedoms for ourselves. The freedom to wear a dress, or not, not be abused verbally or physically, the tedium of being the perfect wife or mother, the freedom to earn and own one’s own money, to be deemed worthy of the expense of living one created for those who supported them financially if they could not (and many especially in big business houses were and are not allowed to earn their livings for the sake of family honour) – these are things we all struggle for. The struggle to feel safe, in our houses, workplaces, that the urge to feel beauty is more the urge to feel acceptance, that women everywhere were being deprived of the chance to establish their worth and set the measures by which they could do so.

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Most of all, that there really was no difference between a high priestess of Malabar hill and my maid. If anything, the maid earned her living and was not too genteel to drag her offensive drunkard husband to the local police station. Many in citadels did not and do not have this option, being bound by family honour far more than the rest of emerging India. In that sense, just based on my personal and 14-year-old survey of the crème de la crème, I would say abuse in elite circles is far higher than in middle class ones for this reason. 

If I had not learned this lesson, I would have imagined that a second marriage to someone with loads of money, and apparent social worth, would have made me happy for life. That I would spend the next decade seeking not social worth but a partner who would value my freedom, is a result of this learning. It set me free in ways I did not anticipate then. 

My bitter disappointment with the #MyChoice video is the lack of this. It is not that it is elite, but that it fails to look at even that elitism with any real empathy or understanding of its own rarified environment. It inserts class, the segregation of haves and have nots, those with choice and those without, into the class-resistant empathy that is the only thing women across society have to hold on to in their abuse. It clothes it beautifully, falsely, with words and images that mean nothing, like all things fashionable and expensive and bespoke-designed.

Like foundation over a bruise under the hem of a very expensive dress.

Last updated: April 12, 2015 | 18:18
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