This post is to share the retro Nike print advertisement below. I came across these images on a blog called ShoeGirl Corner while looking for background info on Nike advertising for my last blogpost. Loved the advert.
It does feel retro.
Does anybody do eight page print spreads in glossy magazines anymore? Including an entire page that has just five words?
The feminism doesn't feel retro, though.
Women as still often seen and portrayed (and see and portray themselves) in relational terms, as mother/ daughter/ wife/ sister/ friend, as significant others. There still are feminist breakthroughs to be had in taking out that scaffolding and portraying women as individuals, as protagonists, as heroes of their own stories.
Is it retro for Nike to feature normal people, like the soccer moms and school teachers who actually pay for Nike products, rather than Wimbledon champions and Olympic gold medallists? I hope not.
The great Tamil lyricist Kannadasan might be on the pro-Dimitrov side of the argument. One of the greatest love songs he ever wrote, naan pesa nenaipadellam nee pesa vendum, goes: "naan kaanum ulagangal nee kaana vendum", meaning, "you should see the world's I see". This is a deep insight. Understanding each other's worlds is a critical (and under-celebrated) aspect of love. As an East European tennis pro, Grigor Dimitrov has a better chance of really getting Maria's world, than, say, a Tam Bram management consultant.
On the con side of the argument is yin-yang balance, a theme I've riffed on before. Maria is one tough cookie, she has plenty of yang in her soul. She needs a guy with dollops of yin-energy for them to be in harmony. Ex-boyfriend Andy Roddick clearly didn't fit the bill. Apparently, ex-fiancee Sasha Vujacic did't either.
Maria Sharapova and Roger Federer, in Sao Paulo
The problem is, professional sportsmen with yin-energy are rare. But they do exist. Roger Federer is a great example.
So will Grigor Dimitrov be Maria's Mr. Right? It depends, on whether Grigor can be more like Roger Federer than like Andy Roddick, and I'm not talking about winning grand slam titles.
But is this person with Liz Hurley really Shane Warne?
The ultimate ornery, brawling Aussie has become a metrosexual pretty-boy. Why? I think it is for the same reason that I initially expected Liz Hurley and Arun Nayar to work.
My theory, or more precisely, my understanding of Jungian psychology, is that any couple needs a balance of yin and yang. Liz is one tough honey: determined, hard-working, ambitious, rich, successful and totally in charge. She is a woman with a lot of yang. She needs a man with plenty of yin for the two of them to work as a couple.
Initially I reasoned that the modest and unassuming Mr Nayar would work for Liz because he would provide that yin-yang balance. He would be happy to play the beta-male to Liz’s alpha-female. The way Liz put it in an interview, “Arun is astonishingly good-natured and would be the last man on earth to feel overshadowed by me. He’s thoroughly comfortable in his own skin”. With 20:20 hindsight, perhaps Mr Nayar was not all that comfortable being overshadowed by Liz, dissolving his identity to become Mr Liz Hurley. And actually, I have no reason to believe that Mr Nayar is full of yin-energy. Having a featureless personality and having yin-energy are totally different things.
If one were looking for a man with some yin-energy to balance Liz's yang, the old Shane Warne, the beer-bellied scrapper that cricket fans have known for decades, would have been central casting's last choice. Liz getting back together with her long term boyfriend, the posh, floppy-haired, finely chiselled Hugh Grant, would have felt more natural. Given that landscape, for Liz to step away from an obvious choice, to take on the raw material she found in Shane Warne, and to turn that beast into a pretty-boy with enough yin to keep the couple in balance, that has been an act of astonishing inventiveness and chutzpah that that old leg-spinning wizard Shane Warne himself would have been proud of. And heck, it just might work out for them.
I hope some film makers are following the Liz and Warnie love story. It has terrific potential as a modern, feminist interpretation of William Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew.
“So, Prithvi, we have heard that Indians mostly have arranged marriages. Is this true? How does that work?”
I was out at dinner with a bunch of business colleagues when I was asked this question. Conversation around the table paused. My colleagues were clearly interested in hearing about Indian arranged marriages. These colleagues included smart people from Brazil, Denmark, Poland, Bulgaria, Canada and Britain. I needed to come up with something truthful, credible, and that showed India in good light.
I had a hunch that this perception of Indian arranged marriages was shaped by Western media coverage of normal, happy girls from, say, suburban Birmingham, who are married off, against their will, to tribal chieftains in Kandahar province. These stories are true, and are terrible tragedies. However, my knowledge of this world in negligible, and comes from the same media reports as my Brazilian or Bulgarian colleagues.
My marriage, and marriages in my immediate family, have all been “love marriages”. However, several very good friends of ours have had arranged marriages. These couples generally are educated, professional, affluent, cosmopolitan, urban Indians. As far as I can tell, the texture of these arranged marriages is not all that different from love marriages. If anything, some of the most lovey couples I know - who cuddle together in company, and address each other as “honey” and “sweety” - came together through arranged marriages. I actively dislike the terms arranged and love marriages, partly because of the implication that arranged marriages are loveless.
I told my colleagues that while media reports about girls abducted to be married off against their will are true, they entirely outside my experience. Within the relatively privileged circles I inhabit, arranged marriages are quite common. However, here, they work quite differently from the media stereotype. Here, arranged marriages serve exactly the same purpose as the compatibility matching algorithms in dating websites like eHarmony.com or Match.com.
A couple brought together by an arranged marriage algorithm have a number of things in common. Their parents get along, or at least, are not contemptuous of each other. They are from similar social and economic backgrounds. They have similar levels of education, and are likely to have similar attitudes to a bunch of stuff. All these are good statistically significant predictors of marital success. What the arranged marriage algorithm, or the eHarmony.com algorithm, does not predict is chemistry - the magic electricity that crackles between, say, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Which is OK, because the arranged marriage algorithm works just fine, as long as individuals can keep exploring options until they find someone with the right (or reasonably good) chemistry.
This gambit worked: Everyone at this table was a quant. It led to some companionable geek-talk about how one could improve the quality of these algorithms (should one hold out a control sample, of couples who are intentionally mis-matched, to train the matching algorithm?) until my Bulgarian colleague chipped in. She was one of two women at the table. To her, algorithms to predict compatibility are worse than useless, regardless of whether they’re authored by clans or by eHarmony.com. They totally miss the point. Chemistry is not just one more factor in a marriage. It is the central thing, the only thing that matters.
This served a nice segue to a set of stories about how women are more romantic than men, and my defense of the Indian Arranged Marriage was successfully concluded.
Chennai Super Kings, my home town cricket team, just won IPL 4 in style. They have clearly been the best team on show since the inception of the IPL, with two trophies, one runner up spot, and one semi-final finish.
Many reasons have been ascribed to this performance, from MS Dhoni's captaincy, to the stability of the squad, to Stephen Fleming's coaching. I really like the tactical intelligence of CSK's game plans - Ashwin opening the bowling, Hussey and Vijay playing traditional cricket shots rather than low percentage slogs and Dil-scoops, Badrinath's clear role as the crisis man, Dougie Bollinger's yorkers at the death, shuffling the batting order to maintain left-right pairs - good, smart cricket.
But, as the many erudite Mylapore Mamis in CSK's fan base will be happy to explain, success does not derive only from one's tactics, from the flow of one's deeds on the field of action, from one's karyas on the dharmakshetra. Success also derives from karma, from the stock of goodness accumulated through many small acts of kindness and decency. These acts happened long before the men in yellow stepped onto the dharmakshetra of Chepauk.
One of these karmic factors working for CSK, which mainstream cricket commentators seem to have completely missed, is their co-ed cheering squad. CSK were the only IPL team with both men and women in their cheering squad. They were led by a shaven-headed fifty one year old drummer called Sivamani.
I certainly don't mean to pass judgment on the all-girl cheerleading squads, or on their admirers, as "bad". But CSK's co-ed approach just feels better, more comfortable, more natural. There is no obvious reason why leading a cheer for a sports team should be sexually charged. Cricket has long had a tradition of colourful, noisy and committed fans: Sri Lanka's Percy Abeysekara, India's Sudhir Gautam, West Indies' Trini Posse, England's Barmy Army. This cheering was never sexy (though the Barmy Army's chat with an Aussie fielder at the boundary line could involve pointed references to his sexuality). Sex and cricket always were fulfilling, but distinct, aspects of life.
When cheerleading was invented in America, at Princeton University in 1884, it was an all-male activity. Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Franklin Roosevelt were cheerleaders in their time. Somewhere along the way, cheering a sports team morphed into the stylized sexual displays put on in the USA today in football and basketball (but not in cricket's cousin baseball). The IPL imported this into cricket in the name of "marketing".
Perhaps the greatest failure of NFL style cheerleading at the IPL is not moral but material: it doesn't seem to work in marketing terms. Several teams with great looking all-girl cheering squads are failing to fill their stadiums, or to animate their crowds. Ultimately, people who want to watch dancing girls can watch them elsewhere, without the annoying bat-ball distractions. The men and women who pitch up at cricket matches are there to enjoy the cricket. Sivamani and his co-ed troop successfully orchestrated the cheering of these real fans. CSK's fans were easily the most passionate and vocal in the IPL, effectively adding another player to CSK, making them almost invincible at home. Long may the force remain with CSK, and with Sivamani.
I was at the club, meditating on a cappuccino, while the kids were at tennis class. Muzak played in the background. Billy Joel floated up on the Muzak track, singing:
She can kill with a smile, She can wound with her eyes, She can ruin your faith with her casual lies, And she only reveals what she wants you to see, She hides like a child, But she’s always a woman to me...
I noted that the saddest thing that can happen to art happens when music turns into Muzak. This does not apply to made-for-Muzak specialists like Yanni, Norah Jones or Richard Clayderman. But when the work of real artists, like Jim Morrison, Neil Young or Bob Dylan is stripped of its emotional heft and piped around supermarkets, to people hearing without listening, that is profoundly sad.
Point noted. Billy still banging on:
...She carelessly cuts you and laughs while you’re bleeding, She brings out the best and the worst you can be...
Maybe I just was not in the mood to sympathize with unrequited love. Billy, I asked myself, as he built up to the crescendo...
And the most she will do is throw shadows at you, But she’s always a woman to me.
...what exactly would happen if she did not remain a woman to you? What if she stopped being a gorgeous babe who kills with a smile, who causally throws shadows at poor besotted Billy? Would she turn into a flitty, flighty, fluttering, fairy? Would she turn into a hag, or a fire breathing dragon?
A tautology like “always a woman” is worth stating, even in a pop song, only if it has another layer of meaning, a layer in which it isn’t obviously a tautology. For instance, when Crosby Stills Nash and Young sang, “A man’s a man who looks a man, right between the eyes...” they were pointing to an ideal of manhood, of integrity, that boys should aspire to but seldom achieve. Billy's tautology implies that the only women worth the name are babes, deadly babes, the sort of babes who promise you more than the Garden of Eden.
What about my buck toothed, bespectacled second cousin who chain-reads Agatha Christie? Or my caftan-clad maiden aunt, who is excessively proud of her almond burfi? Neither of them is a crush-worthy babe. Neither of them is the flirty type who might throw shadows at Billy. But surely, they still are women. This is so unfair.
This is what Noami Wolf called the Beauty Myth, feminism's last great battle-front. Women have shaken off many myths of womanhood, expectations which once bound their lives. They are now at liberty, at least in my circles, to walk away from purity, chastity, motherhood, servitude, delicacy, vulnerability. "Frailty, thy name is woman", would not have occured to Hamlet if he had seen watched Serena Williams wallop a forehand crosscourt.
Yet, after all these victories, women are still bound by one final myth, the expectation that a woman must be beautiful, desirable. This final myth leaves women vulnerable to countless soul-destroying insecurities, and open to exploitation by men, and by the market. Besotted Billy's lyrics, unknowingly, are reinforcing this nasty myth. Stupid Billy.
As it turns out, this post is not a political rant. It is about the value of even a little research. I had totally misunderstood the song. Billy gets the shackles imposed by the myths of womanhood, and is on the right side of the argument.
Wikipedia tells me, authoritatively as usual, that this song was written for Billy Joel's first wife Elizabeth. She had become Billy Joel's business manager at a time when his life and his finances were on the rocks. Elizabeth sorted out his finances, became his wife, and managed Billy to platinum albums like Piano Man, The Stranger and 52nd Street. She was considered "unfeminine" in the industry for being a tough-as-nails negotiator. Billy wrote this song as a rejoinder to that "unfeminine" label. "She only reveals what she wants you to see" is not about her decolletage, it is about her negotiating style. Regardless, she's always a woman to Billy.
Another song in The Stranger, I Love You Just the Way You Are, was also written for Elizabeth, and expresses the same sentiment, without the delicious ambiguity.
Unfortunately, Billy and Elizabeth divorced, and Billy doesn't enjoy either Always a Woman or Love You Just the Way You Are anymore. He tries not to perform them. So this John Lewis' Christmas advert, which I think captures the open-hearted spirit in which the song was originally written, has vocals by Fyfe Dangerfield. Enjoy.
The Clintons' marriage is famously “complicated”. The Obamas seem a stable and happy couple. This blog believes that Liz Hurley’s marriage to her unlikely Indian beau Arun Nayar is more likely to go the Obama way than the Clinton way; the Hurley-Nayar yin and yang are in balance, as are the Obamas’, while the Clintons’ is not.
Earlier, I had floated a general theory: the psyche seeks a balance of yin and yang in every couple. Happy couples have this balance. The Clintons don’t. Both Bill and Hillary are tough, smart, super-ambitious scrappers. All yang. Where there are differences in style, Bill the charming compromiser seems more in touch with yin energy than Hillary, the doctrinaire disciplinarian. They could easily be best friends; they seem to understand each other perfectly and enjoy each other’s company. But they are too alike to be a couple, their marriage needs more yin.
Michelle Obama, unlike Hillary Clinton, seems very happy being a wife and mom. She is not using her first ladyship as a platform from which to influence policy. She could if she wanted to. She is smart enough and has the necessary training. The Economist ran a thoughtful and sympathetic column a year ago, lamenting the “momification of Michelle”:
...during the campaign she raised a lot of thought-provoking questions—about “the flimsy difference between success and failure” in America, about the removal of rungs from the ladder of opportunity, and about the plight of families at the bottom of the heap. It would be good to hear a bit more about what Mrs Obama thinks and a lot less about what she wears.
The Economist is missing the bigger picture: the Obamas have an endless supply of smart, articulate, well-trained, motivated people capable of raising thought-provoking questions about the flimsy difference between success and failure. They don’t have anybody else who can be Mommy. In choosing to be Mommy, Michelle is doing what she alone can do, and letting others do what they can do as well as she can. David Ricardo would have congratulated her for focusing on her comparative advantage. CJ Jung would have congratulated her for bringing more yin energy to her marriage when it was needed; now that Barack is the most powerful man in the world, he inevitably gathers more yang around him than he ever did before.
When the Obamas first got together, their balance of yin and yang probably was different. Michelle was Barack’s senior at Harvard Law School and his mentor at the law firm in Chicago when they got to know each other. The change in the way their marriage works is a nice example of how plastic identity can be, and how much that identity is shaped by context.
Readers shocked by this apparent endorsement of a woman’s traditional role... hang in there. Another marriage which seems about right in terms of yin and yang balance, but with a woman being the tougher partner, is that of Liz Hurley and Arun Nayar.
I was a bit preplexed when I first heard about this match. It was reported in the British press as Liz Hurley marrying an Indian textile tycoon. Sure, this was good publicity for India, and a glamourous A list celebrity like Liz Hurley would make a fantastic trophy wife for an Indian tycoon. But who exactly was this Indian textile tycoon? I am pretty close to business circles in India, and nobody I know had ever heard of Arun Nayar, or of his family’s “import export” business. And if Mr Nayar is not exactly an A lister back home in India, why does Liz want him?
Last week’s Sunday Times resolved at least a part of this puzzle. Liz Hurley never was destined to be a trophy for some Indian textile tycoon. She is one tough honey: determined, hard-working, ambitious, rich, successful and totally in charge. She was getting herself a well-built husband who would look appropriate (and not say anything inappropriate) at public events, and would be happy to help mind the animals at the farm back in Gloucestershire. Some extracts:
- Liz says "Chasing goals has less to do with earning more money – although I’m not against it – and more to do with being challenged and trying to win”
- Arun Nayar, her husband [is her] most devoted member of staff. Only the other week, she announces proudly, Arun came home from manning the farm’s stall at Cirencester boasting how many of wifey’s snack bars he’d hawked. “He sold 50!” she beams
- Does she worry that Arun might suffer from a touch of the beta males, given she’s such a big personality and it’s her name on the family business? “Arun is astonishingly good-natured and would be the last man on earth to feel overshadowed by me,” she says, unruffled. “He’s thoroughly comfortable in his own skin and I don’t think he’d swap places with anyone.”
The Times journalist isn’t trying to portray either Liz Hurley or Arun Nayar in flattering light here. But it isn’t hard to imagine that it is easier for the driven Ms Hurley to live with the amiable anonymity of Mr Nayar, than with a man who is as driven as she is. She needs someone to bring some yin to her yang.
Why don’t glamourous hotties ever fall madly in love with nice, well-mannered, hard-working boys? Why are they forever falling in love with over-muscled, mean-spirited, brutes who are so clearly up to no good?
This topic has been debated extensively in my hostel room by my friends, all of whom are nice, well-mannered, hard-working boys. However, the most insightful take on this eternal question came not from my nice-but-angst-ridden hosteller friends, but from one of their moms, a trained psychologist with a Ph.D. in Jungian thought. The way she saw it, the psyche, consciously or otherwise, always seeks a balance between animus with anima, yin with yang. The elements need to be in proportion.
Vicky Cristina Barcelona illustrates this thought. Watch it before you read this post, if you care about suspense. I will give away elements of the plot.
Vicky has her life sorted. She is a serious, hard-working, responsible, well-educated graduate student. She is engaged to a serious, hard-working, responsible, well-employed banker/ lawyer. They will get married when she earns her Masters degree. They are buying a nice house together in a pleasant New York suburb. They are thinking about tennis lessons. Soon they will buy a Volvo and have beautiful children who will get above average grades. Vicky is well on her way to yuppie nirvana, the only nirvana she has ever wanted. That is, until she falls in love.
The man she falls in love with is Juan Antonio, a spontaneous, passionate, intense, expressive, incandescent Catalan painter. She isn’t looking for love, she isn’t even open to being wooed. But her yang senses Juan Antonio’s yin, her earth needs Juan Antonio’s fire. Together, their chi comes into balance, magic happens, and Vicky becomes more vividly alive than she has ever been. Vicky's story is at the emotional core of the movie. She still is the girl who wants to be a suburban mom. But she needs to deal with the depth of her feelings for Juan Antonio. Is this a fleeting infatuation? Or profound love? Or is profound love a fleeting infatuation?
The film’s other emotional core is Juan Antonio’s marriage with Maria Elena, another spontaneous, passionate, intense, expressive, incandescent Catalan painter. Juan Antonia and Maria Elena live, breathe, sleep and dream together. They work together so intensely that their art, their styles, are indistinguishable. They are one mind, one soul, inseparable despite inhabiting distinct bodies. Therefore, their love is dysfunctional. They are too alike. Together they have too much yin, too much fire, their chi is not in balance.
Juan Antonio and Maria Elena need another element, someone who is not like them, to balance the chi in their marriage. That element comes, like a breath of fresh air, in the form of Vicky’s college friend Christina, a film maker bored with her own work and casting around for new experiences. What could be a more exciting new experience than these passionate Spanish artists? It works out, fire needs air. But does air need fire?
Vicky Cristina Barcelona feels like a classic Woody Allen film, which is great for someone like me who has long been a fan of Manhattan and Annie Hall. Woody Allen's characters do sometimes come across as one-dimensional, like vehicles to make his point rather than as messy, real, flesh and blood people. That generally doesn't happen here. British actress Rebecca Hall is appropriately stilted as Vicky, and Scarlett Johansson easily gets into the skin of the beautiful, bored and self-centered Cristina. But the real-life couple who make this movie are Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz. They bring so much guts, gumption and messy passion to their roles as Juan Antonio and Maria Elena that it's impossible not to be carried away.
We watched this DVD shortly after Live Flesh, a Pedro Almodovar film which also had a superb Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz. That cast, the Spanish setting, and the broad open-ended questions about love and the meaning of life give this film a delicious Woody Allen meets Pedro Almodovar feeling. It is great fun. Mind it!
See the player in the blue t-shirt? She is Dr Emily Ryall, Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy of Sport at the University of Gloucestershire. She is a committed, competitive sportsperson and a University lecturer, thus embodying the Corinthian ideal of amateurism. As a girl with a Ph.D. who plays rugby, she is reshaping the myths of womanhood. Discovering Dr Ryall, and that there are entire University departments dedicated to the Philosophy of Sport, are some of the few good things to have come out of the Thierry Henry handball incident.
BBC Radio 4 had a story last week on Henry's handball. It featured Simon Barnes, the chief sports columnist for the Times, and Dr. Ryall. Both of them let Thierry Henry off pretty lightly. Neither of them focused on the thirty seconds immediately after the goal, when the Irish players were animatedly appealing to the referee, when Thierry Henry had ample opportunity to 'fess up.
Simon Barnes thinks "sport is no longer about building character, it reveals character"; so Henry's handball was a part of the great spectacle of sport because it gives us an insight into Henry's flawed genius. Dr. Ryall thinks intent matters: the fact that Henry did not intend to cheat makes a difference to her. Which is a very interesting moral argument. For instance, the business leaders who destroyed Enron (or Lehman Brothers for that matter) surely did not intend to do so. Unlike Henry, it is not at all clear that anyone at Enron cheated. But does positive intent absolve them of blame? Things are certainly not working out that way, certainly not in the court of public opinion.
Personally, I find the lack of censure for Thierry Henry, in the court of public opinion, more shocking than the handball itself. People, in all walks of life, will always have opportunities to cheat. Some people will always take the opportunity and cheat. But overall, people will cheat less if they are constantly reminded that cheating is bad, and that honour matters.
Dan Ariely, the behavioural economist, demonstrated this in a neat experiment. One group of students took a test, and were paid according to the number of correct answers they self-reported. Another bunch of students took the same test after having sworn not to cheat. The bunch who swore not to cheat consistently gave themselves lower and more accurate scores than the "control", despite having exactly the same incentives and exactly the same opportunities to cheat.
Many people describe Henry's handball as "understandable", which is true, it was understandable. But in being understanding of Henry's understandable behaviour, we, collectively, are diluting the social norm that cheating is bad.
Patriarchal cultures generally build their female characters around two polarized archetypes: the Madonna and the Whore. And so real women casting around for raw material with which to build their identities are forced to make a false choice between these archetypes, and therefore between virtue and sexuality. So, since the days of The Female Eunuch and The Feminine Mystique, one of the themes of the feminist movement has been to create icons who break this polarity, icons who are both caring and potent, who are both babes and moms, and who keep their lives on the rails.
From these icons, real women can more easily learn to be… like Angelina Jolie?
Naomi Wolf, the feminist intellectual, thinks Angelina Jolie is the iconic woman who brings it all together. In this article, Ms Wolf writes that
Angelina Jolie... for the first time in modern culture, brings together almost every aspect of female empowerment and liberation... she broke through into mass-market consciousness with her turn as cartoony superheroine Lara Croft... sexy and daring, confrontational and independent...
When Maddox appeared... Jolie revealed a new vision of single motherhood... tender, glamorous, and complete, father figure or no father figure in the picture... she blurs the conventional boundary of what female stars are supposed to do — look pretty, emote, wear designer clothes — by picking up Princess Di's fallen torch and wrapping her elegant bone structure in a shalwar kameez to attend to the suffering of Afghan refugees in Pakistan
So she becomes what psychoanalysts call an "ego ideal" for women — a kind of dream figure that allows women to access, through fantasies of their own, possibilities for their own heightened empowerment and liberation.
The article is a fun read, until you realize that it is not meant to be ironic or tongue in cheek. Is this really Naomi Wolf, the daughter of the legendary Bay Area teacher/poet Leonard Wolf, the Rhodes scholar who advised Al Gore when he was America’s next President, who wrote The Beauty Myth – a book about how modern women have freed themselves from all the traditional feminine myths, except the myth of beauty?
And is she really touting Angelina Jolie as an ideal? The same Angelina who broke off all relations with her abusive dad, french-kissed her brother in public, had a lesbian girl-friend, hit on a married colleague, and wore a vial of her boyfriend’s blood as a pendant. Never mind the bit about being the archetypal ideal woman. Is Angelina even just okay?
Moonballs from Planet Earth would like to propose an alternative feminist icon who brings it all together: Donna Sheridan, the character played by Meryl Streep in Mamma Mia. Donna is a mom, an entrepreneur, has a ton of fun with her girl-friends, doesn’t know which of her old boy-friends is her daughter’s dad, and lives on to enjoy a happy ending.
There’s a fire within my soul Mamma Mia, here I go again, My my, how can I resist you?
The last blog post was about Barbie, much reviled by feminists for warping the way girls think about themselves. My take was that Barbie was mostly harmles, and that self-destroying Ophelia was a more scary archetype. To which Radhi had a very interesting comment: "But in our real worlds - madness, despair and anguish are also true, tantalising and in a weird way... much more interesting".
Very true. Which is why Ophelia and Hamlet are compelling characters, but dysfunctional human beings. All happy families are alike, and therefore a bit boring. Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and therefore interesting. Compelling stories are almost always about the darker side.
This is why the Ramayana generally makes for a less gripping story than the Mahabharata. Because Rama works great as the maryada purushottam, but he isn't designed for drama. In the Mahabharata, even the Pandavas include Dharmaputra the gambler, and Arjuna, the androgynous warrior.
But the thing about great stories is that they don't just entertain. They shape our ideas of who we are, and how the world works. And these ideas, especially when taken aboard in childhood, can be self-fulfilling life scripts. Which, I guess, is why the stories of Rama and Buddha and Jesus are told over and over again. Not because they are entertaining, but because they just might do a bit of good.
Iconic pop culture has as much power as religion in shaping the mythos, and with it individual destiny. Life imitates art. Star Wars, Sholay, Enid Blyton, Hardy Boys, PG Wodehouse, Batman comics, Peanuts... they all exert mythic power. And there are good myths and bad myths. For instance, Princess Diana seemed in thrall to the same tragic myth as Marilyn Monroe.
Almost a century before either of them came Empress Sisi of Habsburg Austria, stuck in a loveless marriage to an imperial heir, who "became known not only for her beauty but also for her fashion sense, diet and exercise regimens, passion for riding sports, and a series of reputed lovers. She paid extreme attention to her appearance and would spend most of her time preserving her beauty". Empress Sisi refered to herself in poetry as Titania, the fairy queen who falls in love with the donkey-headed "mechanical" Nick Bottom. Titania, unlike Ophelia, survived her stupid infatuation.
And, to come a full circle, where does Barbie line up in this pantheon? Mostly harmless feels like a fair summing up.
Barbie is right up there, along with McDonald’s and the Marlboro Man, as a capitalist icon that liberals love to hate. Not without reason. Barbie is anatomically inaccurate. She might psych women into body-image anxiety. She could trap girls into limiting self-concepts. And so, for a while, my wife and I very deliberately did not buy our daughters Barbie dolls.
But our daughters were gifted Barbie lookalikes. They did watch Barbie movies at friends' homes. Barbie stuff gradually found its way into our lives. And, having now experienced* quite a few Barbie movies, I am convinced Barbie is Mostly Harmless.
What I like about Barbie is that she is a survivor. She is kind to animals, helps her friends, goes on adventures, solves riddles, sings songs, rides on dragons, defeats the baddies. She generally gets herself a hunky boyfriend. But she is the protagonist. The movie is about her. The boyfriend is an accessory. This is in sharp contrast to the standard template Bollywood script, where the only point of being the heroine is to be the hero’s conquest. This probably does hurt the way many Indian women construct their identities, playing bit roles in their own lives.
Sure, her emotional range is an ideal set up for a Botox-enhanced adulthood. And Barbie is never revolutionary. She does not rage against the machine. She will never be out there on the perimeter, like Janis Joplin, Medha Patkar or Maya Lin. Barbie goes with the flow. When it was cool for women to be Stepford wives, she was a Stepford wife. When it became cool for women to be doctors and pilots, Barbie became Doctor Barbie and Captain Barbie, all splendidly kitted out. Maybe she is more like a Griha Lakshmi than a Bhadra Kali... which, actually, is okay.
The archetypal young woman I find scary is not Barbie, but Ophelia. Barbie survives. Ophelia didn’t. When an envious sliver broke off a slanted willow, Ophelia and her weedy trophies fell in the weeping brook, she chanted snatches of old tunes as one incapable of her own distress, or like a creature native and indued unto that element. Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia, and therefore I forbid my tears, for Barbie would have swum to shore.
* I don’t think I’ve ever watched a Barbie movie end to end, but I have watched some pivotal scenes multiple times
Juno is an outstanding film. It's funny, quirky and cuts as deep as you want it to. Watch it.
This is an old-fashioned movie, a movie with a plot. A monosyllabic dork who runs around in golden shorts gets a sixteen year old pregnant. She is going to have the baby. Complicated situation needs resolution, and that keeps the story-line rolling.
But is that what the movie is about? Naw. In almost all movies worth watching, plot is nothing more than a device that serves to showcase character. What makes the movie is Juno, the title character, brilliantly and authentically played by the twenty year old Canadian actor Ellen Page.
Without giving too much away...Juno is naive, mature, perceptive, cynical, trusting, would love to be wooed by a jock, loves her own dork, is spunky, vulnerable, really into cutting edge music, thinks chemistry lab is kind of cool, just doesn't get her tone-deaf parents, has wonderful parents...she is real.
When Charlie Brown picks up the Little Red Haired Girl's pencil, notices it has been chewed, and beatifically declares "She's human", maybe he is discovering that she is a bit like Juno.
Ideally, Juno, I ain't looking to analyse you, categorize you, or define you, or confine you, all I really want to do is, baby, be friends with you.
But...but Diablo already defined you. By calling you Juno. Not Jane, or Janet, or Jennifer, but Juno. Juno, wife of Jupiter, mother of Mars, Regina of Rome, guardian of the Empire's finances, Lucina (she who brings children to light), spiritual heir to both Hera and Diana. The goddess is back.
Today's women have many more choices than their mothers or grandmothers. This is good. However, choice in itself does not make people more happy. People with more choices are more responsible for their own destiny. This responsibility can, and does, feel onerous.
"All women in my society are housewives, therefore, I am a housewife" is a very comfortable position. "I am a smart, educated woman who chose to walk away from a lucrative, satisfying career to be a housewife" is a much less comfortable position. It's totally unsurprising that women in this position report being less happy.
What the research misses is that these less happy women are better off than their mothers and grandmothers who never had the option of having a career.
This is a serious argument worth making. Serious and influential people, including Professor Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago, have argued that reducing the choices available to individuals is good because it makes people more happy. This is just wrong-headed. Freedom, liberty, the ability to influence one's destiny...these are greater ends than the sort of experienced happiness that gets reported in surveys.
The happy people living in the Matrix were victimes.
