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Feministaah

Silence Feeds The Monster – Feministaah

by Deepa Gahlot February 24, 2026

written by Deepa Gahlot

The Epstein Papers are causing explosions of scandal every time the name of a famous person is revealed. The notoriously corrupt and corrupting sex offender hanged himself in prison, and his cohort, Ghislaine Maxwell is serving out a 20-year sentence. One of the courageous women, whose testimony helped convict the two, died by suicide in April last year. In October, Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s memoir, Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice, was published and has been on the bestseller lists since then.

Many survivors of the Epstein-Maxwell sex trafficking operation agreed to appear on camera (including Giuffre) in the two Filthy Rich documentaries on Netflix, but reading about one woman’s honest account of what those two monsters did—and for years, escaped the law on the basis of their wealth and power—can be shocking and enraging.

It must have been a difficult book to write, because she opened herself to judgement—many reading her account of the lavish lifestyle she led as part of Epstein’s entourage, must have felt that she had it easy. But behind the glamour, there was abuse, helplessness, fear, the indignity of being ‘supplied’ to powerful men, and being unable to walk out, because of the reach Epstein had in the upper echelons of power. He bought off cops, judges, politicians, bureaucrats, diplomats, mediapersons, for years and carried on with impunity.

Maxwell, who sourced underage girls to feed the lust of this man and countless others, was attached to him with a twisted rope, so that to keep him, she had to find ways to fulfill his needs. They had the ability to pick girls who were vulnerable, so that it was not just easier to groom and use them, they made sure they never found the courage to escape or expose them. It’s not as if there was no investigation, but most of the time, Epstein managed to get away or had his lawyers broker deals that allowed him to remain free. The media, that wondered occasionally about the source of his immense wealth, also wrote puff pieces about him—his looks, his magnificent homes, his art collection, the beautiful people who swarmed around them.

Giuffre had been abused by her own father when she was six, and he also allowed a friend to rape the child. Her mother stayed silent while the daughter suffered, and kept sending her to a juvenile home. Life in the institution was so terrible that she kept running away, and every time she trusted someone to help her, she was sexually abused. The constant trauma led her to believe that she somehow deserved what happened to her.

When Maxwell encountered the pretty teenager, she was working as a locker room attendant at a luxury club. She was taken to Epstein’s mansion ostensibly to give him a massage, but a few visits to ‘learn’ massage led to rape and gradually, she was entrapped, too confused or frightened to break away. She was taken around the world and trafficked to men—Prince Andrew’s name has already been exposed, but there were many others. One of them Giuffre does not name in the book, but says he was a Prime Minister, brutalized her so badly that she emerged bleeding profusely. Epstein coldly said, “You’ll get that sometimes.”

She writes in the book, “But the worst things Epstein and Maxwell did to me weren’t physical, but psychological. From the start, they manipulated me into participating in behaviors that ate away at me, eroding my ability to comprehend reality and preventing me from defending myself. From the start, I was groomed to be complicit in my own devastation. Of all the terrible wounds they inflicted, that forced complicity was the most destructive.”

Other survivors of sexual violence have written books and there have been studies on how patriarchal power structure facilitate abuse. The title of the book — Nobody’s Girl—is particularly tragic, since Giuffre was isolated by her own family. Her predators created a situation where her only value was defined by her utility to men. The “Nobody” in the title is not just a reflection of her status as an orphan or a runaway; it is a reflection of how the patriarchy views young, vulnerable women, as disposable commodities without agency.

A section of the book deals with the physical toll of this exploitation. Giuffre writes about the ectopic pregnancy she suffered and the chronic physical pain that plagued her for the rest of her life. She found the courage to escape when Epstein sent her to Thailand to do a course in massage therapy; there she met Robert Giuffre, whom she married and moved to Australia. Away from the clutches of the two, she regained a semblance of normalcy in her life. She had three children, and tried to give them the best she could afford.

At some point, she felt that she must seek justice, and with the support of her family, participated in the legal proceedings against Epstein and Maxwell. It meant having her life and her pain turned into tabloid fodder, living in fear for the safety of her family and enduring hate pieces in the media.

She goes against the “Good Victim” trope, that says that a woman must be blameless to be believed and to deserve justice. Giuffre does not conceal her own mistakes and missteps. She discusses being “sexualized against her will” and how she survived by “acquiescing”— something that is used to tarnish a woman’s testimony in court.

Emma Brockes wrote in The Guardian, “It is also a book about how a young woman becomes a hero. And yet here she is, having to charm us out of shrinking from her in horror. Of course, these assumptions of hers aren’t wrong. Giuffre, who was 41 when she died and whose deft, smart book is co-written with the journalist Amy Wallace, knows that to be a victim of sexual violence is to be at best pitied, at worst reviled. (Sample headline from the Daily News: “Jeffrey Epstein Accuser Was Not a Sex Slave, but a Money-Hungry Sex Kitten, Her Former Friends Say.””

The book is a harrowing read, not just because such a thing happened for so long on such a large scale, but also because exploitation of girls and young women continues, in some form or the other, and, in most cases, goes unpunished.

(This piece first appeared in The Free Press Journal)

February 24, 2026 0 comments

Feministaah

Austen Always – Feministaah

by Deepa Gahlot December 30, 2025

written by Deepa Gahlot

The world of book lovers is celebrating the 250^th birth anniversary of Jane Austen, one of the most influential writers of all time—she was born on December 16, 1775, in Steventon, Hampshire, the seventh of eight children.

There are Jane Austen Festivals and other events worldwide, featuring talks, performances, and exhibitions. Fans and scholars gather to celebrate Austen’s life, works, and enduring impact on literature and culture. New publications, adaptations, and scholarly works continue to emerge, ensuring Austen’s legacy remains vibrant (according to information on the net). This kind of love and admiration is rare for any writer to receive, over two centuries later

She expressed the thoughts, emotions and rebellions of women at a time when feminism was a blip on a distant horizon. Her reputation rests on six novels – Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), Northanger Abbey (1816) and Persuasion (1818), though she also wrote some more stories. These six were such astute and empathetic portrayals of British society of her time, that they resonate with readers till today; and audiences too, if the multiple film, TV and stage adaptation of her novels are considered too. Not to mention the works of writers like Helen Fielding and Sophie Kinsella, inspired by her.

Austen’s writing often explored themes of love, family, and social status, with strong, complex female characters. At a time when women’s social status rested on making a good marriage, with no other opportunities available to them, Austen’s novels critiqued the patriarchal society of the time.

When women were expected to be docile, she created heroines, like Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse, who were intelligent, witty, and independent. Her heroines often defied the strict social norms of the time, choosing personal happiness over material security. Her novels also feature strong female relationships, showcasing the power of female bonds and sisterhood.

Sarah Lyall, who travelled to England where the Austen celebrations were in full swing, writes in The New York Times, “The books can be read on multiple levels: for their romantic plots and insights into the lives of the landed gentry in Regency England, for their revolutionary narrative techniques, for their sly humor. They reward rereading — close readers say they discover something new each time — and the universality and pliability of their plots make them ripe for cinematic adaptation.

“Austen’s most ardent fans are known as Janeites, a word coined by the British writer George Saintsbury in 1894 and used by Rudyard Kipling in his 1924 short story The Janeites about British soldiers reading Austen in World War I. The Jane Austen Society UK and Jane Austen Society of North America were founded in 1940 and 1979, respectively, but the modern era of fandom is universally acknowledged to have begun the moment a thrillingly disheveled Colin Firth appeared in his wet shirt in the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice”

The website janeaustens. house analyses the writer’s enduring appeal, “Jane Austen’s novels are not feminist in the way we mean it today. But they do hint at the need for equality between the sexes. Her heroines defy gender norms, and push for more agency in their own lives.The overarching theme that runs throughout all her novels is the inequality faced by women in Regency society. At the time when she was writing, women had very few legal, social or economic rights. Very few upper- and middle-class women could own their own property. Women had little formal education, could not enter university or the professions, and great stigma attached to the idea of a middle-class woman working for an income: think of the way Jane Fairfax is pitied in Emma because she has no choice but to work. Legally, an unmarried woman was the responsibility of her father, but once married she was completely under her husband’s control, as were her children and any property. Yet for most women marriage was the only option for respectable survival.

“So while Jane Austen’s novels do revolve around marriage, we must remember how immensely important the question of marriage was to most women. At one end of the scale, it was a question of wealth and status; but at the other it was simply about securing a home, securing oneself from poverty, and avoiding the destitution of an ‘old maid’. But whilst Jane Austen makes clear the hard economic facts of marriage, she also offers, in the examples of her heroines, another possibility: marriage for mutual love and esteem. If a husband effectively ‘owns’ his wife, then marriage to a man who does not care about you is not a safe or secure place to be. The hope was that you might marry a man who loved and respected you, and would treat you as an equal even if the law did not demand it. While her novels show unhappy marriages (like that of the Bennets in Pride and Prejudice) and marriages of economic necessity (like that of Charlotte Lucas to Mr Collins in the same novel), she is optimistic (or romantic) enough to suggest that it may be possible to find equality inside marriage.”

These are concerns of contemporary women too, which is why her stories fit into any age, as modern adaptations like Clueless (1995), Bride and Prejudice (2004) and the Indian film Aisha (2010) show

The fascination with Jane Austen and her books just refuses to die down. In the works is a screen adaptation of Janice Hadlow’s book, The Other Bennet Sister, in which Mary Bennet emerges from the shadows of her sisters in Pride and Prejudice, and becomes her own person.

Sir Walter Scott, a great novelist of her time, anonymously wrote a review praising Emma in 1815, “the art of copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life, and presenting to the reader, instead of the splendid scenes from an imaginary world, a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him”

An author who wrote, a dialogue spoken by Marianne Dashwood, Sense and Sensibility, ““It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy; it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others,” deserves her posthumous longevity.

(This piece first appeared in The Free Press Journal dated December 20, 2025)

December 30, 2025 0 comments

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Woman Of The Future – Feministaah

by Deepa Gahlot October 1, 2025

written by Deepa Gahlot

The 61^st book in the ‘Death’ series by JD Robb – Framed in Death–has just come out, and shot right into the bestseller charts. The protagonist of these futuristic novels is Eve Dallas, a New York cop, who is among the top female characters in crime fiction, who have lasted the longest– 30 years.

JB Robb is the pseudonym of popular author, Nora Roberts, and she launched Eve Dallas in 1995, with the book Naked In Death. Eve is a tough police officer, with a strong sense of justice and unshakeable self respect. Though she is married to Roarke, one of the richest men in mid 21^st century New York, and lives in his palatial house, she never takes money from him, and if she needs to borrow some, she makes it a point to return it. He does, however, fill her closet with great clothes, and takes pride in making sure she goes out well-dressed. Both Eve and Roarke have survived rough, troubled childhoods, and their relationship is marked with deep love and mutual respect. A tech wizard, he often helps Eve with her cases, as a civilian consultant to the New York police department, while also making sure she eats properly, because in the throes of solving a case, Eve tends to survive on coffee.

Eve’s backstory is traumatic, and the abuse she faced in childhood, made her strong and determined to always seek justice for victims of crime. According to the Dallas fan wiki page, she was born in 2028 and spent the first eight years of her life physically, mentally, and sexually abused by her father. At a hotel in Dallas, Eve stopped the abuse by killing her father. She wandered out of the hotel for three miles before passing out. A police officer found her and took her to a hospital. With no records of her birth and her father’s death unknown, she became a ward of the state. They named her Eve Dallas, because she could not even remember her name—her parents never bothered to give her one and did not even register her birth. She did not exist in any records before she was eight years old. She spent the next ten years in the foster home system, before leaving at 18.

She immediately travelled to New York to become a police officer. She graduated from the police academy at the top of her class. The next few years were spent in uniform, when Lieutenant Ryan Feeney took notice of her and brought her into the Homicide Division. Eventually, Eve was promoted to Detective and then to Lieutenant, in charge of a Homicide squad at NYPSD’s Cop Central.

In the first novel, Eve is assigned to investigate the murder of a high profile senator’s granddaughter. Roarke is a suspect, and the usually self-controlled Eve has to struggle to curb her attraction toward the handsome Irishman. At the end of the investigation, when he is cleared, they form a relationship that only grows stronger over time. The victim’s cat Galahad becomes their pampered pet. By the end of the third book, Immortal in Death, they are married and the fourth, Rapture in Death, begins with their honeymoon. Somerset, the man whom Roarke treats as a surrogate father, since his own was violent and neglectful, looks after their household.

Roarke is a perfect foil for Eve—while Eve is inflexible and almost spartan in her lifestyle, Roarke indulges her. He also respects her boundaries, and gives her the stability she needs, without acknowledging even to herself that she can be vulnerable.

Eve is reserved by nature, but treats her team—particularly her partner Delia Peabody—with affection. Because she works so hard and does not care about her own safety in the pursuit of criminals, her team is fiercely loyal and her bosses are appreciative of her commitment to her work. She is warm and protective towards the few friends she has, and nurtures those bonds, though Roarke is more outgoing and helpful. She hates feminine fripperies and is sure she does not want children. Roarke and she do support a home for troubled kids, called An Didean. (Roarke also supports a shelter for abused women and children called Dochas).

Over 61 books, and the popularity of Eve Dallas had not faded. Robb/Roberts comes up with exciting plots—in the latest Framed In Death, Eve goes after a serial killer, who dresses his murder victims like famous paintings and leaves the corpses at the doors of the homes or workplaces of art gallery owners.

What has undoubtedly contributed to the popularity of the books is the portrayal of Eve Dallas—she is fearless and blunt, but also complex and compassionate towards victims of crime. Often, the perpetrators leave no trace, but Dallas pulls at the tiniest of threads and persists till the case is solved. Like investigating fabric samples and paints and in the new book with its art backdrop.

Readers have followed 61 books, because the harsh police procedural is softened by a wonderful romance and enhanced by sci-fi details like flying cars and auto chefs. If there is cruelty and murder, there is also love, friendship and the certainty of justice always delivered. Because Eve Dallas makes sure that no killer escapes the law.

(This piece first appeared in The Free Press Journal, dated September 27, 2025)

October 1, 2025 0 comments

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Men’s Emotional Baggage – Feministaah

by Deepa Gahlot August 10, 2025

written by Deepa Gahlot

Words like Mansplaining, manspreading, manels (panels with no women), have been coined already, the latest is mankeeping.

The term, according to a piece by Catherine Pearson in The New York Times, “coined by Angelica Puzio Ferrara, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, has taken off online. It describes the work women do to meet the social and emotional needs of the men in their lives, from supporting their partners through daily challenges and inner turmoil, to encouraging them to meet up with their friends.”

Dr Ferrara published a paper in 2014 on the inability of men today to form close bonds with anyone other than their partners, which is placing a heavy emotional burden on women. It is, she says, “a contemporary and under-recognised form of labour resulting from men’s declining social networks”. She’s currently writing a book on the subject, called Men without Men.

The NYT piece says that in a 2021 survey, 15 percent of men said they didn’t have any close friends, up from three percent in 1990. The same report showed that in 1990, nearly half of young men said they would reach out to friends when facing a personal issue; two decades later, just over 20 percent said the same. Dr. Ferrara found that “women tended to have all of these nodes of support they were going to for problems, whereas men were more likely to be going to just them,” she said. She sees “mankeeping” as an important extension of the concept of “kinkeeping” — the work of keeping families together that researchers have found tends to fall disproportionately on women.”

These social trends are often broadly generalized, but as the web show Adolescence pointed out, men are banding together in a kind of resurgent toxic machismo that has created deep web hate groups of incels (involuntary celibates), and conservatives who want a return to the old traditional roles of men as breadwinners and women as homemakers. Under conditions like this, obviously men are afraid to show an emotional side of themselves to other men for fear of ridicule. And if they cannot, after a point, relate to the misogyny sprouting on these groups, they lose a connection with other men. As drinking buddies, maybe, but as emotional sounding boards they turn to women.

As Pearson’s piece says, “Rather than viewing “mankeeping” as an internet-approved bit of therapy-speak used to dump on straight men, experts said they see it as a term that can help sound the alarm about the need for men to invest emotionally in friendships. She quotes Tracy Dalgleish, a psychologist and couples therapist, “The reality is, no one person can meet all of another’s emotional needs. Men need those outlets as well. Men need social connection. Men need to be vulnerable with other men.”

Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, a think tank, and author of Of Boys and Men about what afflicts the modern male, points out, “some of the challenges men face in making strong connections are societal. Many of the institutions and spaces where men used to organically make friends have eroded, he said, like houses of worship, civic groups and even the simple workplace.”

Another piece by Claire Cain Miller also in the NYT, notes, “Boys and young men are struggling. Across their lives — in their educational achievement, mental health and transitions to adulthood — there are warning signs that they are falling behind, even as their female peers surge ahead. In the United States, researchers say several economic and social changes have combined to change boys’ and men’s trajectories. School has changed in ways that favor girls, and work has changed in ways that favor women. Boys are often seen as troublemakers, and men have heard that masculinity is “toxic.” Young people themselves tend to agree that girls are now at least equal to — and often doing better than — boys. Many young men say they feel unmoored and undervalued, and parents and adults who work with children are worried about boys. It’s not just a feeling: There’s a wealth of data that shows that boys and young men are stagnating.”

There is also constant social judgment made worse by social media. Girls and young women are still not mocked for sharing feelings, while men, theoretically encouraged to show vulnerability, are, in practice, shamed for it.

Also, while breaking away from the family unit and the arranged marriage scenario is the accepted lifestyle in many Western and some Asian cultures, it has made the dating scene full of social landmines. Will inviting a person of the opposite sex to dinner constitute harassment? How to decide who will pay for a movie or dinner on a date? Will sharing the bill be perceived as juvenile? Who will initiate the next level after a few good dates?

The mankeeping phenomenon has triggered debates and discussions, which is always a good thing. Even if there is no immediate solution to be found for the problem, retreating into a man cave is certainly not it.

(This piece first appeared in The Free Press Journal)

August 10, 2025 0 comments

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Lady In Pink – Feministaah

by Deepa Gahlot July 15, 2025

written by Deepa Gahlot

The birth anniversary of Barbara Cartland went by in July month, and 2025 marks the 100^th year of the publication of her first book, Jigsaw. Today, hardly anybody remembers her, but at one time, when circulating libraries still existed, the shelves groaned with her romantic novels that mostly women borrowed and read avidly. She also wrote historical novels and non-fiction, but once she earned the label Queen of Romance, it stuck.

She wrote — or rather dictated to an assistant– an astounding 723 novels that collectively sold over a billion copies. Today, when romance novels cannot sell without steamy scenes, her signature plots about naïve heroines, dashing aristocrats, and chaste love stories, all cloaked in her iconic pink aesthetic, captivated her readers, looking for escapism on idle afternoons.

Her books were not all innocent, and her early writing had a touch of the risqué. Born into a wealthy family that fell into financial troubles, she commenced on a writing career when women did not work outside the home. After a year as a gossip columnist for the Daily Express, she published her first novel, Jigsaw, a society thriller that became a bestseller. According to information on the net, she also began writing and producing somewhat racy plays, one of which, Blood Money (1926), was banned by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. In the fifties, she wrote a guide to married life, which was also banned! The year 1950 was also when author Georgette Heyer accused her of plagiarism, for using her plots and character names. The case never reached court, however, and both authors continued to have successful careers.

Today her stories might be seen as outdated, but in her time her books were huge bestsellers. The Guinness Book of Records named her as a top selling author, and in 1976 she created a record for writing the most novels in a single year—an astonishing 23. Even as society and sexual norms changed, she believed that romance was more about beauty than sexuality.

Her rose-tinted world no longer exists and in a post-feminist world her heroines (and heroes) are undoubtedly anachronistic. Seen in a contemporary context, her female characters love within the narrow confines of womanhood, in an unapologetically patriarchal society. Cartland’s focus on the heroine’s vulnerability and helplessness, her constant need of protection from a man, is seen as regressive. Now such a portrayal of a woman, whose primary role is to be rescued and controlled by a chivalrous male protagonist, would be interpreted as infantilizing. . Also the idea that lost virginity diminishes a woman, is problematic, more so because the same moral standards are not applied to male characters.

While her heroines fitted into a mold of swooning innocence, Cartland herself was outspoken and established an empire on the strength of her books of dubious literary merit The author, who wore pink chiffon, thick make-up and long fake eyelashes, led, judging by the ideals set in her novels, a “lurid” life, as a piece in The Guardian, noted, “She gave “daring” parties as a high-society hostess in the 1920s and 30s. She married Alexander McCorquodale in 1927 and divorced him in 1933 amidst claims and counterclaims of adultery. She later claimed their daughter – Raine, who went on to become Princess Diana’s stepmother – was in fact the daughter of Prince George, Duke of Kent, and married McCorquodale’s cousin Hugh, who died in 1963. She then maintained a long friendship with Lord Mountbatten of Burma until he was murdered in 1979.”

Yet another facet of the bestselling author’s life comes from a piece by Doug Bonderud in now.northropgrumman.com/, “She was a daredevil, obsessed with the high-society sport of gliding,” he wrote. “Gliders became popular among the upper class during the 1920s and 1930s, and Cartland was an accomplished pilot. Gliders occupy an odd space in aeronautics: They’re what you get when you take a plane and remove their ability to independently sustain flight. Instead, gliders are towed by powered aircraft and then let go for short-haul flights. But this wasn’t enough for Cartland. She arranged for the first long-distance (200-mile) tow and, along with two Royal Air Force officers, designed the first aircraft-towed airmail delivery glider. During World War II, the Allies expanded on her idea, using powered aircraft to tow troop-carrying gliders near their destination and then cutting them loose….Today, a thriving tow-and-glider plane culture exists, informed in large part by Cartland’s work in the early 1930s. Dame Barbara Cartland doesn’t seem like an innovator at first glance but, just like radio-guidance developer Hedy Lamarr, makes it clear that creativity is an unpredictable force — romance novelists and glider revolutionaries aren’t so very far apart as one might initially think.”

Over 98 active years of her life, Barbara Cartland accomplished a lot, but when asked by a journalist, she said, “‘I am very thrilled by what I have achieved in my life and if nothing else, I would like to say a prayer of gratitude because I have helped a great number of people, both physically and spiritually, to find love.”

She also jokingly said about her books, “Oh you don’t want to read them. They’re all the same.” For decades people did, maybe, they still do. Not many writers have lived through their books for a century.

(This piece first appeared in The Free Press Journal)

July 15, 2025 0 comments

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House Of Sorrow – Book Review

by Deepa Gahlot July 4, 2025

written by Deepa Gahlot

Two Women And A House:

This year’s winner of the 2025 Women’s Prize, recently announced, is The Safekeep, a debut novel by Yael van der Wouden, which competed with a remarkable shortlist of powerful women’s stories — Good Girl by Aria Aber, All Fours by Miranda July, The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji, Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout, and Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis.

While it is not necessary that a novel by a female writer be about women, The Safekeep wraps a complex story about history, memory, loss, loneliness, obsession and twisted revenge, around the intense love-hate story between two women.

The book is set in the Dutch province of Overijssel in the early 1960s, a few years after the end of World War II. Isabel, a woman in her thirties lives in a large country house, with just a maid to help with domestic chores. She vaguely remembers moving to this house as a child, with her mother and two brothers. Now Hendrik lives in the city with his male lover; Louis keeps changing his girlfriends so often that his family cannot keep track of them. Their uncle, Karel, had bought the house and has willed it to Louis, so that he can live there in the future with his family. It is just assumed that Isabel will marry and leave to live with her husband. At the back of Isabel’s mind there is always a lurking fear that she may, one day, lose the house, but she cares for it with a manic possessiveness. She is aware that “she belonged to the house in the sense that she had nothing else, no other life than the house,” even though she is not the owner, just a caretaker.

The background is that the house was taken over when Dutch Jews were evicted from their homes and sent to concentration camps. Isabel has a faint memory of moving into a house which already had furniture, kitchenware and other things, and later a woman desperately knocking at the door, asking to be let in.

“Before being deported and murdered, Dutch Jews were systematically stripped of all of their properties and possessions, including businesses, real estate, financial assets, artworks and household possessions,” according to research on the Holocaust in The Netherlands. Gerard Aalders, a Dutch researcher at the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation, estimated that the Dutch Jewish community was “the most affected by German rapacity”. Like other countries that went through the guilt of complicity with the Nazi regime, there is a collective memory loss about the crimes committed against a community in their names. If they benefited from it, they are even more prone to forget their collusion. Like Karel insisting that the family that lived in the house had to leave because they did not pay their mortgage, and if they wanted it back they would have done something about it.

The house, with its secrets—Isabel finds a shard of pottery in the garden, strange initials engraved under a desk– is a metaphor for the weight of the past and the ways in which it continues to shape the present; particularly the burdens it places on women. Men find ways of escape, leaving women behind to cope as best as they can.

One day, Louis brings Eva to dinner with his siblings, an awkward young woman, with untidily peroxided hair, and ill-fitting clothes. Isabel despises her on sight, and is rude to her. She is furious when Louis leaves Eva at the house, when he has to travel for work for a few weeks.

Isabel makes no attempt to make Eva welcome, and is aggravated even more when her unwanted guest parks herself in the room of her dead mother. She refuses to shift to a guest room, and keeps mocking Isabel for her rigidity and joyless existence. Then, Isabel is disturbed to find that things keep disappearing from the house—little things, like spoons and knickknacks.

Isabel’s isolation seems to be self-inflicted. There is a handsome neighbour, Johan, who persistently woos her, and she keeps rebuffing his advances. Later in the book, when she finally musters up the courage to tell him to leave and never return, he is contemptuous—accusing her of leading him on. “Do you think you have options, Isabel? Do you think they are lining up? At your age?”

What liberates Isabel from traditional expectations, however, is her affair with Eva, that releases all her pent up desire. Eva disrupts Isabel’s carefully constructed world, she becomes the catalyst for Isabel to confront her past, her repressed feelings, and societal judgement. The dynamic between Isabel and Eva oscillates between hostility and a profound intimacy that Isabel never imagined. The sex scenes are written with a kind of passionate urgency and the writer, amusingly said when she won the award, “Thank you all for not talking to me about chapter 10, you’re very respectful people.”

The twist in the story is the real identity of Eva and her drive to get some kind of justice for the crimes against her, her family and her people. Despite the bitterness that it contains, and condemnation of societies that have erased their dark histories, the book conveys hope. Also the idea that, maybe, forgiveness and reconnection of human bonds are left to women to achieve, when men have walked away from their destruction.

(This piece first appeared in The Free Press Journal dated July 2, 2025)

July 4, 2025 0 comments

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Call Of The Courtesan – Feministaah

by Deepa Gahlot June 16, 2025

written by Deepa Gahlot

They were called naachne-gaanewali, with derision—the tawaifs—whose place in Indian society and contribution to the performing arts is gradually being recognized.

The stage show O Gaanewali, by Avanti Patel and Rutuja Lad gives these women their due, through their stories and their music. They are also active on social media, making their research and performances accessible. Popular cinema has done tawaifs no justice, usually turning them into tragic romantic figures, trapped in a disreputable world—either vamps who entrap men, or helpless victims who wait for a male saviour to rescue them.

Traditional and semiclassical forms like thumri, dadra, bandish, hori, chaiti, kajri, jhoola, sawan, tappa, ghazal were kept alive through the performances of these gaanewalis, some of which Patel and Lad performed (along with excellent accompanists), as they narrated anecdotes about famous singers like Rasoolan Bai, Gauhar Jaan, Begum Akhtar, and the oddly named Jankibai Allahabad aka Chhapan Chhuri, who got that moniker, when she was stabbed 56 times. She went on performing with a scarred face and even wrote a book of Urdu poetry. (A fictional version of her was seen in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Heeramandi, where Sanjeeda Shaikh played a scarred courtesan.)

They may not have been integrated into respectable society, but in the golden age of the tawaif culture—from the 18^th to the early 19^th century– these women used to be invited to homes to perform on special occasions. During British rule, the courtesans were marginalized and even criminalized. It could be partly because they were often covertly supporting the freedom movement but mostly because of the influence of Christian morality that labelled the courtesans as prostitutes, and imposed draconian laws like Contagious Diseases Act and the Cantonment Regulations to curtail them.

Today, many books (notably Saba Dewan’s Tawaifnaama) and research papers exist on the courtesans of north India, and documentaries made, which recognize them as artistes. They were, as Patel said in the show, what modern Indian women would like to be – they were educated, well versed in tehzeeb, spoke several languages, were financially independent and could often choose their own partners, so they had a kind of sexual autonomy. They could hold discussions on politics and other subjects with their patrons, which other purdah-bound women were not encouraged to do. Many of them were the highest tax-payers in the mid-19^th century.

There are stories about Gauhar Jaan, spending thousands of rupees on the wedding of her cat, and then the birth of the pampered pet’s kittens. She used to traverse the streets of Calcutta (now Kolkata) in a four-horse drawn carriage. The governor, slighted by this show of luxury, imposed a fine of Rs 1000—which was astronomical for the time– whenever she took out her carriage. A defiant Gauhar Jaan would go pay the fine every day, and travel in the comfort of her buggy.

With the decline of royal and feudal patronage, some of the singers and kathak dancers were forced to perform for the new rich but uncultured class of men, who demanded raunchy numbers or film songs numbers, which may have diluted the tawaif’s art. By 1947, kothas were banned and courtesans were not allowed to perform in their homes. There were attempts, as Lad said, to sanitize the sensual aspects of their songs, for instance, in the song Phool gendwa na maaro, laage jobanwa pe chot, the word jobanwa was replaced by karejwa—the term for body switched to heart.

The closed-minded Victorian morality of the British was inevitably accepted by the Indian elite, and their belief that tawaifs were polluting Indian culture. When some of the courtesans asked to be included in the freedom struggle, Mahatma Gandhi was reported to have said that they must give up performing and become sanyasins. When All India Radio started, the courtesans were needed to sing on the radio. A condition was imposed that the women would be allowed to perform only if they were married. Even the most celebrated female performers were not permitted to enter the premises by the front door, they had to come in from a side entrance. Rasoolan Bai managed to produce a marriage certificate, which is why many of her songs were recorded by AIR. But, when her husband left her and went to Pakistan, leaving her penniless, the woman whose portrait adorned the walls of the AIR building in Allahabad (now Prayagraj), was reduced to selling tea outside the gates of the same premises.

It took artistes like Begum Akhtar to bring their music out of the kotha into respectable society; the early actresses in Hindi cinema were courtesans, and names like Jaddan Bai (Nargis’s mother) and Gauhar (not the same as Gauhar Jaan), were among early movie producers. After them, singers like Nirmala Devi, Shobha Gurtu and Shubha Mudgal popularised semi-classical music and helped wipe off the gaanewali taint on women performers.

In her essay in theswaddle.com, Shreya Ila Anusuya writes, “The complex history of the courtesan has great bearing on any of us today who want to understand how gender currently works in India, and even for those of us who live and love outside of the structures that are prescribed for us – queer people, single people, people fighting for the right to marry outside caste or religion, people fighting for the recognition of live-in relationships as legitimate ways of making a home with someone. This intricate history, still relatively unacknowledged in public conversations, is one deeply powerful place from which to have all of these conversations.”

Initiatives such as O Gaanewali, that entertain and inform serve just this purpose, and more such work must be undertaken and encouraged.

(This piece first appeared in The Free Press Journal, dated June 11, 2025)

June 16, 2025 0 comments

Feministaah

Who Let The Venom Out? -Feministaah

by Deepa Gahlot April 14, 2025

written by Deepa Gahlot

A few years ago, there was some outrage over the discovery of a WhatsApp group by schoolboys in Delhi, on which they were sharing horribly misogynistic content about girls. Like an earlier instance of a schoolboy sharing an inappropriate video of a girl, effectively wrecking her life, while suffering no permanent consequences himself, this one too was quickly forgotten.

Now a show titled Adolescence on Netflix has thrown a grenade into the already escalating concerns about social media toxicity that is harming an entire generation of kids. Even freedom of expression advocates are shouting for controls over unlimited internet access to minors. Because like Jamie (played by Owen Cooper) in the show, directed by Philip Barantini, boys are being instigated to hate women (or gays, blacks, or any ‘other’) and the result is the increase of violent crimes against females, by underage boys. Thirteen-year-old Jamie kills Katie, a female classmate, by repeatedly stabbing her—an act caught on CCTV camera—because she rebuffed his advances. She also called him an incel (involuntary celibate) on Instagram, which is an insult, implying that no woman would want him. That caused such a storm of rage and self-loathing in Jamie that he murdered her.

It is easy to blame absent mothers or lax parenting, but Jamie comes from a stable family, with a stay-at-home mother—both parents are shocked by their son’s arrest. They wonder if they should have been more attentive to what he got up to behind the closed door of his bedroom, but in reality, no parent can totally control what their child is accessing on their phones and computers.

Adolescence has opened up furious debates about the issue; the Director General of UK’s National Crime Agency has warned of a “deeply concerning” trend of online networks of predominantly teenage boys, dedicated to inflicting harm and committing a range of criminality…These online forums or communities – or Com networks – see offenders collaborate or compete to cause harm across a broad spectrum of criminality – both on and offline – including cyber, fraud, extremism, serious violence, and child sexual abuse.”

In Adolescence, a brief scene hints at how vulnerable minds are affected by what they see or read, without having developed the maturity to analyse for themselves. Katie’s best friend hits a boy she believes was responsible for the murder. Far from expressing concern over the killing of their classmate, a boy jeers at the one who was beaten, because it was a girl who did it. Even at that age, the boy already has warped notions of masculinity. In the show, a child psychologist talking to Jamie in the correctional centre, is disturbed by his aggression. He tells her that another schoolmate had circulated topless photos of Katie, and noticing that she was “flat” and now publicly humiliated, he wanted to ask her out on a date, because at that point she would be “weak.” Children are being exposed to sexualized images at such a young age, that a 13-year-boy no longer knows where or how to draw the line. He thinks it is okay to post nasty comments on Insta photos of sexy models, and then seek a transactional relationship with teenage girl, because that is what boys are supposed to do to get female attention.

In a piece for inews.co.uk, Zing Tsjeng quotes from a report titled Lost Boys, in which “the Centre for Social Justice warns that modern boyhood has gone horribly awry. The independent think-tank points to some startling facts: Boys in the UK are struggling in education, more likely to take their own lives, less likely to get into stable work, and far more likely to be caught up in crime. While young women are increasingly progressive, their male counterparts are signing up to right-wing and ultra-conservative, regressive ideologies.”

This show is based in the UK, so a lot of responses are emerging from there, but the situation is not much better in any other country—including India—where online content is unregulated and capable of radicalizing and manipulating young minds. If boys are being exposed to the hate-filled ‘manosphere’, girls are falling prey to harmful beauty standards and confusing behaviour guides, leading to mental health issues. Online bullying can be as destructive as ragging—instances of which are getting to be so brutal that victims are committing suicide.

James Thorne, co-writer of the show (with Stephen Graham, who also plays Jamie’s baffled father), “The ideas behind incel culture are very attractive because they make sense of a lot of things: feelings of isolation, low self worth, feeling unattractive. They tell you that there is a reason why the world is against you: Because the world has been built from a female perspective, and these women have all the power. (These ideas suggest that) you need to better yourself, get in the gym, learn how to manipulate and learn how to harm.”

The success of the series has started a discussion that should have started years ago and might even lead to policy changes. But how much time and infusion of positivity will it take to clean the poisonous sludge that has already infiltrated society?

(This piece first appeared in The Free Press Journal dated March 27, 2025)

April 14, 2025 0 comments

Feministaah

Cerulean Crusaders – Feministaah

by Deepa Gahlot March 20, 2025

written by Deepa Gahlot

Another International Women’s Day went by, with the usual memes, GIFs and greetings forwarded, programmes to celebrate women, laud them for their strength, multi-tasking abilities, etc. Maybe it’s time to acknowledge some of the pioneers of the women’s movement, whose battles made the progress of women possible– the Bluestockings were one such group. Today the term may be used to mock intellectual women, but they played an important role in shaping the idea of feminism as we know it today.

There have been many studies and books on the Bluestockings, a new one by Susannah Gibson, titled The Bluestockings: A History Of The First Women’s Movement, is a reminder of the work of a remarkable bunch of women, who paved the way for women for generations to come.

In 18^th century England (as everywhere else), most women were not allowed an education, and expected to be homemakers. Gibson’s book begins with a description of the grand Mayfair mansion, where Elizabeth Montagu (described as “brilliant in diamonds, solid in judgement, critical in talk”), a literary critic and writer married to a wealthy English landowner, invited like-minded women and men to salons, where they discussed literature, art, politics, science and history.

In that era it was believed that educating women shrunk their wombs and made them unsuitable as wives and mothers. In 1739, a pamphlet, Man Superior to Woman, called educated women dangerous, unfeminine, neglectful of their appearance. In any case, education was accessible only to upper class women, and that too, with the expectation of a good match.

“I never knew in my life,” wrote the statesman Lord Chesterfield to his son in 1748, a woman capable of “solid, reasoning good sense… or who reasoned or acted consequentially for four-and-twenty hours together.” Another commented that comparing a woman’s intellect to a man’s would be like “mould in a garden” being “valued with the fruits it produces”.

Montagu’s salon was made possible thanks to her husband’s wealth and support. As Gibson writes in the book, “One visitor compared the salons to paradise — a place where the lion sits down with the lambs.” Montagu’s greatest pride, she writes, “was having a woman take pride of place,” which included writers like Elizabeth, Hester Mulso Chapone and Hannah More.. The guests also included somewhat enlightened men, like Samuel Johnson and Horace Walpole, who enjoyed the discussions and verbal sparring with bright women. Matching in brilliance was the salon hosted by another woman– Hester Thrale– but on a more modest scale.

Sophie Coulombeau’s review of the book, published in historytoday.com, states,”The problem with 18th-century women, for the feminist public historian, is that they just won’t fit the narrative. We all know about the Suffragettes, so the thinking goes, and we are fairly sure that their forerunner Mary Wollstonecraft can be called a proto-feminist. Surely, a generation or two before Wollstonecraft, there were also brilliant women organising to topple the patriarchy? Such a narrative underpins Susannah Gibson’s Bluestockings. The book argues exactly what its title suggests: that the group of female intellectuals loosely associated with the metropolitan salons of Elizabeth Montagu made up, collectively, ‘the first women’s liberation movement’… Gibson is an engaging writer, with a good eye for entertaining detail. I am grateful, for example, to learn that Hannah More’s cats were named Passive Obedience and Non-Resistance.”

The book can be criticised for giving too much importance to a group of aristocratic women, who did not face the challenges ordinary women had to overcome—though the account of Thrale’s multiple pregnancies (15 in 16 years) and the frequent deaths of her children (only three remained alive in 1776) makes for shocking reading. It also does not give adequate attention to the womens’ writings. But it is meticulously researched and explores the social, cultural, and economic factors that shaped the lives of these women, and through their influence on other women, helped them realise their potential too.

The women were accused of elitism and armchair activism; they were admittedly unlikely revolutionaries, and not radical feminists if seen from today’s perspective, but they worked to promote education for women, supported women writers, and paved the way for future feminist movements The seeds they sowed led to more significant movements like the suffragettes of the 19th century to the feminist movements of the 20th century.

About the impact of the Bluestockings, Hannah Rose Woods writes in newstatesman.com, “At the turn of the 19th century, men began to push back against what they saw as a move towards women’s emancipation that had gone too far. “Bluestocking” passed from being a neutral description to a term of derision. Romantic writers such as Byron and Coleridge mocked these “Ceruleans of the Second Sex”. “I have an utter aversion to blue-stockings,” wrote the essayist William Hazlitt, claiming not to “care a fig for any woman who knows even what an author means”. By the dawn of the Victorian era, their reputation had been largely trashed. From the later 19th century, feminists began to reclaim the bluestockings’ legacy. The campaigns for women’s right to attend university and to be awarded degrees claimed allegiance with their bluestocking forebears.”

(This piece first appeared in The Free Press Journal dated March 13, 2025)

March 20, 2025 0 comments

Feministaah

The Beauty Trap – Feministaah

by Deepa Gahlot March 5, 2025

written by Deepa Gahlot

Demi Moore may have misses out on the Best Actress trophy for her performance in Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, but she won many others– the star not exactly known for her acting prowess.

The film (five Oscar nominations) has earned equal amounts of praise and criticism for its horror treatment of a satire on women’s fear of aging, and the desperate measures women (men too, but not as much) take to hold on to their youth. It’s not all vanity, a large part of the blame goes to society that renders older women invisible.

The casting of Demi Moore was spot on, because her many cosmetic surgery procedures have been written about; her career has been based more on her appearance and personal life than on talent. (Her controversial photograph for a magazine cover in which she posed nude while pregnant is still remembered).

In The Substance, she plays Elizabeth Spark, who has an aerobics show on television and is so popular that she has a star on Hollywood’s walk of fame. Then, she turns 50, and the network boss fires her, because is too old—they need someone young and fresh to get higher ratings. Distraught, she has a minor car accident, and in hospital is furtively handed information about a new beauty serum that promises “a better version of yourself – younger, more beautiful, more perfect.”

On the verge of being made redundant in showbusiness, Elizabeth buys into the hype. The procedure is complicated and painful—there are no easy routes to eternal youth—and the conditions state that she will inhabit her new form for seven days and revert to her normal self for seven days. While she is in her young body, the older one has to be fed intravenously and to prevent the new body from deteriorating, it has to be injected with a stabiliser extracted from the spinal fluid of the original body. There has to be no deviation from this routine, or else…This ‘or else’ is what the film is about, and it is stomach-churning.

The new body emerges from a split down Elizabeth’s spine, as she writhes in pain on her bathroom floor, splattered with blood. And the woman (Margaret Qualley) is dazzlingly beautiful and perfect. Calling herself Sue, she replaces Elizabeth on her show. Inevitably, the admiration for her beauty, leads to Sue being lax about the stringent conditions of the procedure. Much to her dismay, Elizabeth in her own body ages faster and starts looking grotesque.

There have been other films about the evils of aging, from Sunset Boulevard (1950), All About Eve (1950) to Death Becomes Her (1992), and body horror is an established Hollywood genre, but the all out use of, blood, gore and gross visuals, give Fargeat’s film a nightmarish look, without restraint or nuance. Not just her, other women directors like Julia Ducournau (Titane), Rose Glass (Love Lies Bleeding), Laura Moss (Birth/Rebirth) have outdone the body horror conventions set by cult filmmaker David Cronenberg. Critic Katie Rife, quoted in a bbc.co.uk piece by Miriam Balanescu, describes the movement as “a nascent wave of aggressive, stylized women genre directors” who deal in “in-your-face feminist metaphor,” adding, “I personally get a kick out of that kind of aggressive, hyper-stylisation, but I would say that there are people who don’t particularly like being pummelled with excessive style.”

The Substance, liberally uses nudity, pandering to the male gaze, while pretending to subvert endemic showbiz sexism. Can it be labelled a feminist film? It does make a facile comment about the way older women are treated in a youth-obsessed society, but it also uses a stereotypical portrayal of an aging woman, who is to be feared and hated for her unattractiveness. Hollywood has actually found labels for such films that portray older women as psychotic –psycho-biddy or hagsploitation cinema. This builds on the way older women are seen as evil witches in children’s fairy tales. The women – both Elizabeth and Sue—are reduced to caricatures, lacking agency or depth—both passively accept the role men have assigned to them.

Hannah Strong’s review in lwlies.com states, “In regurgitating old talking points about Hollywood’s obsession with beauty and its fear of ageing, The Substance becomes a sterile facsimile of Hollywood itself, refusing to add anything new to the conversation before going for broke in a third act it hasn’t come close to earning. Yet more than anything it feels deeply depressing – a reminder of how society denigrates anyone who challenges the standards pushed by pop culture. But replicating images doesn’t make them implicitly subversive, and The Substance’s presentation is as shallow as the very thing it’s critiquing. There’s no compassion, and certainly no catharsis – just more hagsploitation and a sense of déjà vu.”

The film owes a debt to the Oscar Wilde classic, The Picture Of Dorian Gray, in which the protagonist sells his soul, so that he remains young and handsome, while his portrait, hidden away, ages and gets hideous, recording Dorian’s sins. There is always a price to pay for messing with nature.

(This piece first appeared in The Free Press Journal dated February 27, 2025)

March 5, 2025 0 comments

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