Organising Women's Protest by Eldrid Mageli

Author:Eldrid Mageli [Mageli, Eldrid]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, General, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781136791697
Google: yg2tAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-01-14T04:57:13+00:00

Summary

The PI’s leadership believed that media’s images of women limited a woman’s freedom. The group thought that films and literature should not be mere entertainment, but should convey realistic presentations of relationships between men and women. They argued that media mainly gave women two standard images. One was that of the devoted wife, always lovingly serving her family with no thought for her own individual development, suffering if need be and silently tolerating her husband’s mistreatment. The other was that of the vamp, the Western-inspired “modern” girl, flirtatious and scantily dressed with loose sexual morals. Popular literature and films frequently juxtaposed both models in order to show a woman’s options. A woman choosing to be modern and “free” (meaning sexually liberated) would be responsible for breaking up harmonious family relations. Fortunately most “liberated” women in films eventually fell in love with men who helped them to give up their bad habits, and decided to follow Indian traditions.

The founder members pointed out that media’s depiction of appropriate behaviour for a woman was outdated. Today’s society required more than references to mythical figures. The group argued that media in general, and advertising in particular, were strongly influenced by Western capitalist values. Profit-makers used women’s bodies to sell products. Advertisements showed half-naked women selling anything from light bulbs to cars. The vulgarisation and degradation of women was especially evident in film posters, whose designers had no inhibitions in showing any part of the female figure.

Several PI articles and pamphlets took up the issue of rape, enlarging on the main arguments of the core group. This writing attempted to counterpose rape scenes in films with ordinary women’s experiences, showing that rape on the screen had nothing to do with actual experiences. By focusing on rape, the PI’s core group may have touched upon an issue which concerned many slum women, but which they dared not discuss openly. The focus on rape may have provided a bridge between the founder members’ (middle-class) intellectual orientation and the actual experiences of what would become the main target of the core group’s concern, slum women.

Dickey found that her informants, poor and lower-middle-class urban dwellers, disliked sexual explicitness and preferred “clean” entertainment with morally upright characters. Viewers liked entertainment for the whole family which reinforced traditional values.27 In a sense, the leadership of the PI followed tradition when they argued that modern cinema did not respect a woman’s honour. Stitching a bra on top of a movie poster degraded women. Such demonstration of poor taste would not have occurred ten or fifteen years earlier. The PI’s core group believed that traditional models for women had served purposes in the past but were useless now. Now, the combination of old ideas with “Western-inspired” notions of woman’s sexuality in a consumer culture, had produced an environment in which women became devalued. Women were supposed to adhere to Indian ideas about marriage and wifely devotion, while, at the same time, public, commercial exploitation of her body reduced her to a saleable commodity.

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