Imagine a story in which a woman's appearance is irrelevant to her intelligence. Perhaps, she would still be desired and considered beautiful—albeit unconventionally—like Benedict Cumberbatch.
India’s culture of sexual repression creates discomfort around sex, so how does someone determine whether one is really asexual or if the aversion to sex is nothing but sexual repression?
There’s something inherently perverse about how the patriarchy thinks about breasts. While it freely sexualizes and glorifies women’s breasts in a toxic bacchanalia of misogyny, women themselves aren’t free to do the same. Female desire, after all, is at the margins of India’s popular culture.
It's independence day today. How free are we really? To just loiter? Just saunter about in the streets freely? A very unhelpful, if not damaging, guide for women wanting to be flâneuses.
The conventional female lead we get to see—no matter how quirky the character, no matter how different, intelligent, brave, strong, or “badass”—is almost always skinny.
Cervical cancer is the fourth most commonly occurring cancer. In India, it is one of the leading cancers affecting women. The irony is that it is also one of the two types of serious cancers that can be prevented with a vaccine—so why don't people know about this?
When deployed in a cynical, self-serving or naïvely well-intentioned way, identity politics devolves into tokenism where the individual takes precedence over the multitude and mass movements are eschewed for the soaring but empty rhetoric of hope and change.
