The Woman TV Raised Me To Be
By: Malvika Tewari
Tags: Feminist, Media, TV, India, Adolescence

Bollywood of the 2000’s, you gave me nothing. Nothing but film after film of the same woman caught in the same patriarchal setup with the same second-hand fashion from the West, the same structured myth about what my aspirations should be.

TV in urban Indian households at the turn of the millennium was flooded with content from the West — MTV, VH1, HBO, Star Movies came at a time when adolescents were frankly tired of the annoying morality that even the most progressive Indian television was handing out to us in stale Bollywood & melodramatic TV soaps.

American television was a whole different deal. It was refreshing to see more women speaking their mind, leading the narrative, making choices, living out the consequence. But they were still the same woman — white (tanned), privileged, powerful but punching down. What seemed at the time as a freedom from morality would eventually be unraveled to me over the years as a very different kind of trap. It was patriarchy, repackaged.

At the time of a developing sexuality, which people are in denial of in 14 year olds, we were bombarded by images of the sexualized female form from every direction. Godawful Indian remix videos with PVC dresses, trashy reality TV on VH1, magazines, anime- every form of media carried a very similar image of the female form. Even the way the form was captured- the angles, the focus, and the disembodied limbs constantly framed the body as something female but not an entire person. Certainly a commodity — the currency attached to which was her sexuality. In the economics of female sexuality, there is also the hetero-male gaze (residing in all genders) that is constantly fed and starved as the demand metric and pop culture is a marketplace. This is not made-up, this is an existing billion dollar business that sells cars, real estate, golf magazines, you name it…except that the female is never the stakeholder in the profit. She is the crafted commodity.

Females learn early to be judicious when using their sexuality as a currency. We are made to feel competitive and TV amps up this sentiment like no other. Everyone loves the drama of an economy in times of scarcity. Whether it is watching best friends fight or soppily sabotage each other for the attention of the male on a TV soap, we love a female rivalry that revolves around a man in which sexuality is used as the ultimate weaponry. I have always likened this to continuing a harem structure. A male having multiple female partners on / off the screen is excused, congratulated, even expected but it’s never a forgivable trait in a female character. She is instantly slut-shamed and vilified.

We carry this sense of scarcity into the real world — a scarcity of male-attention and the security that comes with it, relying emotionally, if no longer financially on him. I have to remind myself that it’s time to shed this paper-thin skin that women have worn for so long and an insult to the labour of the females who have worked hard to bring us to a point where this entire competition can be dismantled. It’s not enough to decapitalize female sexuality- it leads us to an even shakier ground- what is the new visual definition of our gender and sexual identity. Everyday as we dress ourselves, it is as though we are on TV, the gaze never leaves. Am I dressing too modestly or too overtly? Is it ok to make my game avatar someone with an unrealistic body as she performs crazy fighting stunts? If we wear a pink PVC dress, are we reclaiming or conforming? We always have to prove or disprove something, whether we like it or not, we are always reading the image. It’s been a very long battle, it’s all a bit of a blur. But it’s good to remind ourselves that we are fighting it together, as half the population of the Earth and we can support each others choices.

Sisterhoods can be the most empowering thing to watch on the screen and thankfully as I was becoming an adult, they had arrived. It can be cathartic to see women, that used to size each other up, now holding each other up. The Mean Girls reference in the banner image was for this purpose, the difference a female writer & director can make to drive this point home. I can’t help but respect Regina George, after all she does car commercials in Japan. I had seen some vicious teenage drama in real life and was growing increasingly tired of the rumour mill. TV finally had some realistic, happy, healthy female relationships in cartoons, chick flicks, comedies, commercials. Female audiences were finding more representation on screen — we were being seen as intersectional, whole humans. A few shows even uttered the word feminism. Our job here was done, fellow adolescent females.

Hannah Gadsby, Nanette (2018), Netflix

And who watched TV anymore? It was 2009. The Internet and social media had long arrived. Blogs, forums, chat rooms and web pages meant that anyone could be a content creator or rather, the idea of what is female could become a two-way dialogue, not mere consumption and imitation. Media and pop culture have evolved so rapidly and have been problematic in so many new ways since TV. My latest existential struggle has been to find the thin line between privacy and shame. What makes me hide parts of my life and am I responsible for the curiosity of others to decontextualize a part of me and interpret the female image as they wish to? Where does the power lie? Who is the spectator, who is the performer and what is this stifling closeness with no real connection?

I’m glad that as consumers we demanded better content of TV. And as consumers of the Internet, we will continue to. We did not allow ourselves to be raised by the television and rebelled as any angry teenager would. Reading the image remains a regular practice as I search for my definition of being female. I still see generations of women painted behind my face. I remain a copy, one of many, but I’m no longer the self-important face of it. At almost 30, I see so many painted in front of me, younger faces. When they tear open the canvas, I wish for us to greet them warmly into a place where there’s room for all of us and more- the mom, the girl unlike the boys, the babe and I.