gender

After much excitement and anticipation, I got my first bra in the seventh standard. I had awaited this moment ever since the girls in my class first started wearing their bras. It was a big deal! Almost as big as getting your first period–a rite of passage into adulthood. In hindsight, the bra made me feel very desirable. I wanted to be seen as a woman. It is strange. Even as a child, bras were so sexualised and gender coded that it was only at a later stage (after a particularly painful exercising session) that I realised they were first and foremost meant to support breasts....

2022 was full of surprises and revelations. However, the lesson I hold closest to my heart was unlearning my internalised misogyny. I realised I looked down upon women I perceived as pick-me girls or not like other girls. While many people who engage in this behaviour enable sexism, it is more helpful to view internalised misogyny as a response or a reaction to patriarchy. As several cultural critics have started pointing out, even the hurling of labels such as pick-me or trad-wife tends to blur the lines between calling out misogyny and reinforcing it....

Does art not also contain the opposite of this ‘Dionysian’ losing of oneself? Does it not also contain the ‘Apollonian element of entertainment and satisfaction which consists precisely in the fact that the onlooker does not identify [themselves] with what is represented but gains distance from it, overcomes the direct power of reality through its deliberate representation, and finds, in art, that happy freedom of which the burdens of everyday life deprive [them]?...