Bollywood Vixen Priyanka says "hi" to sgforums
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she's cuteOriginally posted by Chewbacca:
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She's the Miss world 2000, India's fifth winner of major beauty pageantsOriginally posted by borgkilla:she's cute
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Ugly Beauty
by Shekhar Deshpande
Everyone caught the knife by the blade at the Miss World beauty pageant.
There are two ways of catching a knife," goes a saying, "either by the handle or by the blade." It seems that everyone involved in the Miss World "beauty queen" contest seems to have caught a flying knife by the blade. The bleeding is likely to continue for a while.
First, the Amitabh Bachchan Corp. and its central semi-god wanted to cash in on a lucrative financial deal, with little more social conscience than a pimp, oblivious to the true nature of beauty contests.
In the Western world, beauty contests have come under fire from feminists. The organizers have shrewdly shifted the venues to exotic locations to display female flesh along with whatever other natural bounty that could be commodified under the guise of tourism. Unlike the Olympics or the Asian Games, beauty contests do not own up any glorious past in the name of anything except a quick buck and insatiable desires to make women compete while we enjoy their degradation.
Bachchan has become a talented businessman. While he expressed a desire to "negotiate" with the protesters at the last minute, no doubt from fear and surprise at the unexpected wrath of his own audiences, he must have calculated, as they all do, that some protest would be good publicity for his clever enterprise. The show itself, typical in livening up the dead past with images of India that even picture postcards no longer carry, was a tawdry representation of the limits of his talents and the reach of his cheap ambitions.
All the excuses that he offered - promoting tourism, claiming competence in organizing a large scale of event, etc. - could be offered by anyone, except perhaps the Taliban executioners in Afghanistan.
With a couple of exceptions, the contestants, including Miss India Rani Jayraj, demonstrated their utter incompetence, almost in a culturally genetic way, in comprehending the situation. The well-known wisdom is that the talent contest for these women is not in hard questions on geography, but in non-questions that school children worth their parents' money would find humiliating.
This is not to say that these women are stupid or that they represent incompetence. Their worth is measured only in anatomical dimensions and perhaps in stylized, ideological social mannerisms. As human beings, their talents don't count. None of them can tell a story, except in a few mushy sentences. None of them is asked to show their human qualities, except their value in optical caressing and sexual fantasies for the pleasures of male viewers. To say that there is any dignity left in these beauty pageants is to insult the concepts of dignity and beauty, let alone the conceptual and relational violence they inflict on women in general. -
protest against beauty pagents -
Rajeev Srinivasan
In praise of Indian women
I found it hilarious that many took umbrage at the fact that an Indian woman won the recent Miss Universe pageant. The opinions I read ran the gamut: from those who believe these contests cheapen women, to those who gleefully point out that in the West nobody pays any attention to these things, to those who worry that assembly-line production of beauty is somehow, um..., bad.
In India, and indeed all over the world, there are plenty of things that insult the dignity of women more than these beauty pageants do. The big Conference on Women was held in Beijing exactly five years ago; things haven't improved that much. Just look around the Indian subcontinent: dowry deaths in India, honor killings in Pakistan. White slavery through kidnapping in Nepal. AIDS deaths through prostitution catering to long-distance truckers.
In the affluent world too, violence against women is endemic. There is the astonishing fact that in the US more women -- or a percentage basis -- are murdered by boyfriends and husbands than in dowry deaths in India. Rape, child-molestation and other sexual crimes are widespread. Economically, women are under-served: they make 70c to every dollar a man makes for doing the same job.
So there are many causes that can be taken up by a champion for womens' causes. The beauty contest is not in the same league. It is pure entertainment -- it is so transparent, so vulgar, so rehearsed, so choreographed, that it's almost as predictable as WWF wrestling or other such sportainment. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to consider what other sportainment is widespread in the subcontinent.
What is indisputable, of course, is that woman-watching is an age-old pastime for men, doubtless one of the oldest. Cave-men must have ogled cave-women as they passed by. Of course, women do the same thing, except they do it discreetly, making full use of any available reflecting surfaces. Besides, they prefer to check guys out from behind, anyway.
The success of cheesecake-and-beefcake-infested shows like Baywatch -- allegedly the most popular TV program in the history of the universe -- is proof that skin sells. Of course, I personally watch Baywatch for the plot-line, just as I read Playboy for the articles.
Sex-appeal clearly sells. Ask any advertiser. And academics have shown that in the workplace, too, good-looking people are far more likely to get promoted, get good reviews, and generally be thought of better by their peers.
There is no denying that many of those would-be beauty queens, pneumatic numbers with legs that go on forever, are distinctly easy on the eye. Therefore it is my humble opinion that there is no harm in a little fantasising by the couch-potato brigade. Better this than going out there and, what is that quaint term for loutish behaviour, 'eve-teasing'?
As for aping things that are Western, that is, sadly, one of the trademarks of Indian society today. Take James Bond movies. These are considered embarrassingly lowbrow in the West, but in India they are hot stuff. So much so that some industrial house went to great expense for a ridiculous ad campaign with that prissy Pierce Brosnan. -
Take the Guinness Book of World Records. Nobody outside India has heard of it, or pays the slightest attention to it -- a publicity stunt dreamt up by a brewery. Whereas Indians compete to come up with the most inane things to get themselves into it -- like walking backwards or growing their nails.
Similarly, cricket. Nobody in the US has any idea about this; in the UK or Australia, it is a poor second or even third -- after soccer and rugby -- in the mind of the sports-fan. Only in the subcontinent is this considered next to, and often superior to, God.
For that matter, I could argue that beauty-contests are an age-old Indian habit. What exactly do you think a swayamvaram was? A princess would check out a bunch of aspiring husbands and choose one -- and I'll bet she would usually choose the best-looking one. So there it is, Indian-culture-enthusiasts, no reason to feel this is yet another imported idea.
Is the manufacturing of beauty queens such a bad thing? Hard to say. Venezuela has been doing a roaring business in beauty queens for some time, and I'm hard pressed to tell whether this has affected the female population in that country adversely. Even though it's true that all those impossibly perfect bodies and faces and teeth will give a lot of teenage girls an inferiority complex, driving them into anorexia and bulimia.
But I personally think there's benefit to Indian women winning these pageants. For one thing, it is part of the image-building process that India has willy-nilly embarked upon. The newly-discovered beauty of Indian women may result in concrete things for Indian industry -- notably for the fashion industry and for the advertising industry, as Indian models and couturiers get more visibility.
There is a school of thought, I admit, that this works both ways -- cosmetics majors are salivating at the prospect of the huge Indian market and may be manipulating the contests for Indian women to win. Perhaps. Women friends of mine are awaiting the 2001 lifting of import restrictions to indulge in Jean-Paul Gautier, Maybeline, Victoria's Secret, etc. Men are terrified at this prospect: a sweet nothing from Victoria's will cost Rs. 1500.
I am biased, of course, but I think Indian women are absolutely gorgeous without all this chemical makeup. It's their skin, their eyes, and their hair. What lovely skin -- colour ranging from sandalwood to mahogany to burnt sienna to ebony, Indian women have beautiful, smooth and silky skin. Lustrous eyes that issue discreet invitations, causing the poor male heart to skip a beat; and cascades of raven hair the average male would love to bury his face in. I agree with Kalidasa's breathless and erotic word-pictures in Rtusamharam.
In pure good looks, I think Aishwarya Rai and Juhi Chawla can lay fair claim to being among the most beautiful women in the world. Aishwarya Rai is a veritable goddess; although a recent film does achieve the practically impossible by actually making her look dowdy. Juhi Chawla is also stunning, of course.
I also believe Indian women are exceedingly sexy. All that demureness and shyness is just a façade. No wonder the Kamasutra as well as enormous amounts of erotic poetry were written in Sanskrit, and all those erotic temple-carvings, a la Khajuraho, were done in India. The Indian male has no option but to worship his woman.
In the spirit of equal opportunity, I must confess that I am partial to blondes, too: Kim Basinger, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sharon Stone, Darryl Hannah et al ring my bell. Although not that new crop of Hollywood blondes such as Gwynneth Paltrow and Cameron Diaz -- they seem somehow... unfinished. -
The thing about white women, and particularly blondes, though, is that their skin can be porous and unappealing at close quarters. (This is not true of some of those alabaster-skinned brunettes.) Terrific from ten feet off, but a little wanting at one foot. They ill-treat their skin through over-exposure to the sun, too. I generalise generously, of course.
The other thing about white women is their homogeneity -- they all look the same, same haircut, a bland sameness because they cover up all their individuality and blemishes through makeup or cosmetic surgery. They all want to look like whoever is 'in' at the moment. Admittedly, the average white woman ends up looking rather good after she puts her face on. There is much greater variation among Indian women -- some really beautiful ones, some really ugly ones, and the average isn't quite so good.
Whenever I watch Indian TV I am struck by a singular fact -- the girls are outstandingly pulchritudinous, but the guys are, by and large, um... dogs. This is true among Indian models too, with exceptions like Milind Soman. Some male Indian models and TV personalities -- no, I don't dare name names -- are so ugly that I am sure small children run from them, screaming in terror.
A woman I met claimed this is because the average Indian man is not as attractive as the average Indian woman. I disagree, from what I have observed on city streets in India. There are equal numbers of good-looking men and women. I guess pretty girls decide to take up modelling in larger numbers. Maybe there are other explanations.
And it is not just the modern urban woman in India who is beautiful. I remember watching a village woman in Bangalore in astonishment -- she was so poised, so confident, in her blouse with puffed sleeves and jasmine in her hair.
Similarly, gypsy women, universally viewed with suspicion for their tendency to pilfer small objects: I noticed a group of them near Hyderabad once, clothed in rags, but laughing in gay abandonment.
Or a young tribal mother outside the great temple at Chidambaram, infant splayed on her hip, begging for small change: I'm afraid I gave her far too much money because she was gorgeous.
I have enjoyed people-watching in Bangalore, Bombay and Delhi. Alas, woman-watching in Kerala has taken a beating in recent years because of the arrival of the tent-like salwar-kameez. No woman under 35 in Kerala wears anything other than this ghastly contraption that leaves everything to the imagination -- no flash of smooth midriff, no belly-button, no skin-tight blouse, no cleavage, nothing. Sigh. Shalwar-schmalmar, indeed. It's a blooming conspiracy, I'm convinced. There ought to be a law.
Contrast this tent with the traditional Kerala woman's-wear of just a mundu (dhoti) and a blouse (known as a jumper). Or, for more formal occasions, a two-piece mundum-neriyathum, adding a discreet gold-bordered shawl. Shapely women look stunning in this outfit. Truly a treat for idle spectators, of which there exist many in Kerala.
Going back to the whole issue of beauty pageants, I am of the opinion that whatever brings India some positive press is goodness. The visibility of Indian women in these contests is an indicator of interest in India as a whole in the world media and entertainment empires. The issue of race is also intriguing. I think the concept of beauty as more than just blonde-and-blue-eyed is gaining currency in the US, which drives global culture.
East Asian women have begun to appear in larger numbers in larger roles in Hollywood and on TV, doubtless due to the increased presence of Hong Kong Chinese shoot-'em-up directors in the US. Similarly dark-haired Latin Americans as well as black/mixed-race women are now seen as icons in the US -- such as Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Halle Berry. -
It appears Indian women are now getting to be popular with white men, presumably those tired of what they consider shrewish, bra-burning white feminists, and looking for caring, homey, old-fashioned brides. Said men may be getting more than they bargained for, but that need not detain us here.
I know several women from India meeting white men on the Internet: two girls met an American and a Scandinavian, respectively, and are talking marriage. A friend in Bangalore had an arranged marriage -- yes! -- with a white Australian; a distant cousin is about to marry another white Australian.
I have also noticed there is a certain class of Indian woman abroad who are 'fishing-fleet' types, intent on hooking some white guy as some kind of trophy husband. And then they are full of themselves and their Irish-Inuit-Polish-Italian or whatever husbands. I feel like saying to them, "Get a grip, woman! This isn't such a big deal!" One such specimen sent me email ranting and raving at me -- apparently I offended her by saying the 'melting pot' business is bunkum.
Occasional exceptions aside, the Indian woman is also noticeably intelligent. Yes, last but not least, on average, Indian women are very smart. An Indian woman grows up figuring out how to let her man think he's in charge, whereas in fact he is as putty in her hands most of the time. Excellent training, incidentally, for a manager. No wonder the Indian women executives I know in the US are outstanding.
In fact, all other things being equal, I think Indian women are winning these silly beauty contests because they are not bimbos. They are poised and clever, and they know how to use their beauty as a weapon to get what they want. More power to them, I say. Three cheers for Indian women! -
When India "Missed" the Universe
Madhu Kishwar
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The winning of the Miss Universe crown by Sushmita Sen in 1994 and the Miss World crown by Aishwarya Rai later that year were celebrated by the Indian mass media and the urban elites as though they were momentous events in Indian history. Manpreet Brars qualifying as first runner-up this year in the Miss Universe contest has convinced many Indians that the winning of the earlier two crowns was not a fluke that India has indeed arrived on the international scene. We thought we had conquered the world whereas in Europe and America little attention was paid to our grand accomplishments.
Up until the 1970s, beauty contests used to be peripheral affairs, only covered by specialised womens magazines such as Femina and Eves Weekly. They were hardly ever a topic of animated discussion in middle-class homes. But now they have acquired a prominence in our social life totally out of proportion to their significance. Millions sat glued to their TV sets in India to watch the crowning of Sushmita and Aishwarya. The prime minister and the president received them as though they were high dignitaries. Big national and international companies spent millions of dollars promoting their products and image through association with the contest and the winner.
Beauty contests now get prominent front page coverage in leading national newspapers. It is inconceivable that a high status paper like the New York Times would organise a beauty contest to boost its circulation. But in India, where earlier the Miss India contest used to be a mere Femina event, it has now been converted into a grand The Times of India gala. For instance, on May 14, 1995, The Times of India gave the lead story to Manpreet Brar, the first runner-up in the Miss Universe 1995 contest, an eight column space across the entire front page. The burning of Charar-e-Sharif in Kashmir was relegated to a much less prominent place.
The victories of Sushmita and Aishwarya had been even more lavishly praised their achievement was celebrated in India the way America celebrated its first astronauts walk on the moon. Even Doordarshan telecast it live this year on the national hook up at prime-time. -
To the inferiority complex ridden Indian elites, the Indian beauties who won international crowns gave them a hope, that if they continue to ape the West in its mannerisms, lifestyle, consumption patterns, fashion designs and what have you, they will one day make it to world class, just as Sushmita and Aishwarya did by learning to walk, talk, dress, smile and wear makeup like Hollywood stars. On the surface, participation in these beauty contests may even give the impression of having a liberating effect on the supposedly tradition-bound Indian women by encouraging them to enhance their physical and sexual appeal. To see Indian women parading confidently in front of men and being sexually provocative could be seen as a sign of self-assertion of their womanhood and sexuality. But in actual fact these contests are hardly a celebration of womens beauty. They end up reducing their bodies and their whole existence to well-packaged products to get them to act as vehicles for consumer goods. Most of these are useless products and, therefore, must rely on media hype to generate an artificial demand. It is no coincidence, for instance, that Pepsi hired Sushmita and Aishwarya to boost their sales in India soon after they won the crown. It is only by using such glamorised models that they hope to persuade people to buy flavoured sugar water costing them no more than a few paise at Rs 6 a bottle and in the process harming their own health.
Protests against beauty contests, the use of women as sex objects and the commodification of womens bodies have been key components of womens movements in the West. Western feminists realised that beauty contests, by their demonstration effect through various media, had the serious potential to harm women physically, mentally and emotionally. Unfortunately, we in India are catching this western fever years after thinking women in the West challenged and discarded those concepts of beauty. The Miss India Contest has become an important national event. Beauty contests have proliferated in thousands of womens colleges and in hundreds of local clubs and hotels. -
Self-turned Racism
One strand of our opposition to the Miranda House beauty contest echoed some of the issues raised by western feminists in their protests against beauty contests. For instance, among other things, our campaign leaflets talked about how the beauty contest trained women to view themselves as sex objects and to remain engrossed in attempts to become sexually attractive to the male eye at the cost of developing other talents and human qualities. But that was only a small part of our objection. For me, the more important motivation behind the campaign was to fight against the vicious forms of elitism perpetuated by the super-westernised elite of our college. Their contempt for those who did not dress according to the correct fashions of the day, did not speak English with the appropriate public school accent, or did not boast of a suitable address in one of the elite colonies of Delhi was so corrosive that it destroyed the self-confidence of many who felt rejected by this group. The beauty contest was a mere symbol of this nasty elitism which enveloped all aspects of student life. In order to be part of that charmed circle you had to have a taste for western music, see western films, read only western literature. If you were seen viewing Hindi films or listening to folk songs, that stamped you as an unfashionable bhenji forever. Likewise, you were allowed to speak in Hindi, Marathi, or whatever your mother tongue may have been, only to servants and drivers. If you read Agatha Christie or even the silly Mills and Boon you were in. If you were seen reading a Hindi novel by Premchand or a Tamil book, you would immediately be considered out. Not that everyone who tried to be part of this in group all came from thoroughly westernised homes.
I recall the pathetic case of one of my classmates from English Honours who came from a wealthy, but not so westernised Bania family. Her family still lived in the unfashionable old city. However, she never gave her correct address to anyone, including her close friends, and made out that she lived in a fashionable suburb of south Delhi. For this she had to incur a great deal of inconvenience every day. Since your social status in the college also depended on whether you took one of the college special buses to an appropriate south Delhi colony, everyday she would take a bus headed towards south Delhi along with those whose social approval she desperately desired, and then come all the way back to the Red Fort to reach her house in the Chandni Chowk area. If any one of her classmates chanced to see her near where she lived, she would refuse to recognise the person and pretend it was someone else they saw. I myself felt a semi-outcast because though I studied in English Honours and could speak English with the appropriate Indo-British accent, I enjoyed the friendship of the pass-course bhenjis more than that of my own fancy classmates. I also enjoyed singing Hindi songs. As Union president, I insisted on holding all general body meetings in Hindi because the majority of students were not comfortable or fluent in English, even though they had a basic knowledge of the language. This choice provoked extreme hostility from my English language oriented contemporaries. -
The Barbie-doll Aesthetic
The moment one expresses distaste for beauty contests, it is assumed that one wants every woman to look like an inmate of a Gandhi ashram, and to lead a self-repressed life. To be opposed to beauty contests is not to be opposed to women beautifying themselves. Throughout history, women have been known to express their love of beauty by embellishing themselves and everything around them, including objects of everyday use. Indian women in particular have been exceptionally creative in this regard. They decorate ordinary mud floors with beautiful designs, have a rich tradition of colourful clothing with intricate embroideries, create lavish mirror work and a host of rich designs. It is but natural that they would express their joy in beauty by beautifying their bodies as well. Shringar is an age old tradition in India where women put on special jewelry, special makeup and decorate every part of the body.
However, the concept of beauty that comes to us from the West along with these beauty contests has very little to do with beauty and more to do with marketing a self-view to women whereby they all try to look and behave like standardised products rather than normal human beings. This makes women self-hating by wanting to conform to a pre-set glamour doll image.
For years, western feminists have grappled with how men have come to define beauty in such a way as to manipulate women into considering themselves attractive only when men find them sexually provocative. Much of this is tied in with a sick obsession with youth in western culture, which effects all strata of the society. Women have access to an extremely tenuous bit of power as long as they are young and attractive to men. Western men, however, have a different standard for themselves. They believe they continue to be attractive even in middle age. In fact, if they are rich and powerful, their age only adds to their charm. Streaks of silver in a mans hair are supposed to enhance his sex appeal, but not so for a woman. There is pressure for her to carefully hide them with a dye, along with other tell-tale signs of aging. As she starts greying, her breasts start sagging, wrinkles appear, or her waist starts bulging, she is made to feel increasingly dispensable. The obsession with having big and firm breasts, narrow waists and shapely legs drives vast numbers of women in the West to go on starvation diets. One and a half million women in the West are known to have their breasts artificially inflated through surgery. American friends tell me that losing weight is such a national obsession that you cannot talk to a woman for any length of time without the conversation veering round to calories and diets. Many women become anorexic in their anxiety to stay trim and get sick because they cannot eat. Others who cant resist eating their fill, learn the art of vomiting soon after each meal so that they are able to eat with abandon without putting on any weight.
For years, magazines like Femina and Eves Weekly (now defunct) have been trying to propagate these and other western obsessions among Indian women but so far their influence has stayed confined to a very tiny section among the urban elite. Eating disorders and plastic surgery are relatively unheard of in our country. But if the euphoria over beauty contests keeps spreading at this pace, fuelled by interested sections of the mass media, women in India are in for a lot of trouble.
So far, the main unhealthy aspect of our notion of beauty in women is our tendency to consider dark skin a sign of ugliness. A heavy premium is put on women being fair skinned. (In this respect Indians are no less racist than some white skinned Westerners). My friend, Surabhi Sheth, a Sanskrit scholar, confirms that the bias in favour of fair skin abounds in Indian literature. A gaurvarna is associated with prakash (light) and saundarya (beauty). There are also caste dimensions to the preference. Brahmins are associated with white skin, the Kshatriyas with red (valour), Vaishyas with yellow skin and Shudras with black. While fair skin was traditionally prized for its association with saundarya, during colonial rule it acquired a new connotation - that of power. That perhaps explains the fascination Indians have had with the Nehru family. Since they were almost as fair as Europeans, they were treated like they were natural born rulers. I am convinced that Indira Gandhi would not have been so valourised and allowed to get away with so many evil deeds had she been dark skinned. A dark skinned girl is often treated as the ugly duckling of the family and finds it tough going in the marriage market. Skin whitening creams that promise a fair and lovely complexion are as sought after as anti-wrinkle creams in the West. The premium most Indians put on fair complexion in women is indeed weird considering that majority of us are rather brown skinned, if not dark. However, in most other respects, I find traditional ways of looking at beauty far more balanced and healthy.
For instance, in India, we are not tyrannised by the pressure to stay trim. If I put on some weight, most of my friends and family are likely to tell me that Im looking healthy. Likewise, whenever I have lost a few kilos, I am constantly besieged with queries like: Have you been ill? Why are you looking so pulled down? As long as a woman is not outright obese, a plump look is associated with being healthy. Most parents would actively discourage their daughters from going on diets to lose weight. In fact, if a woman does not put on weight after marriage, it would be seen as a sign of a stressful marriage. It is widely believed that if a woman is happy in marriage, her body should fill out (sharir bhar jana chahiye.) Even film heroines in India are almost never skinny unlike most Hollywood stars who have to have a lean and starved look in order to be considered right for glamorous roles. Our film stars would be considered plump and many even outright fat by western standards. But in India, heroines like Meena Kumari, Nargis, Asha Parekh, Hema Malini, and Mala Sinha among the older generation were never rejected simply because they grew fat with age. Even among the younger generation, Sridevi, Juhi Chawla and many others have fairly plump bodies. But that does not prevent them from being considered attractive. Most Indians like them for their "healthy" look -
Through Male Eyes
In western culture, by contrast, as women grow older, they become more pitiable. Their husbands often start sniffing around for younger women. The concept of equality and womens rights has brought with it easy access to divorce. But in the ultimate analysis, high divorce rates and breakdowns of marriage do not go in favour of women, one reason being that as they advance in years, they find it harder and harder to find marriage partners, since men seem to prefer, and many are able to get, younger women. The notion that women must remain attractive sex partners forever puts an enormously unrealistic burden on western women, many of whom go to ridiculous lengths to stay young and trim because in roles other than sex partners they get much less attention from men.
In the West, even after feminists made beauty contests less respectable among the elite, women continue to be under tremendous pressure to be sexually interesting to men and try to mould their bodies to be copies of models in fashion magazines. Most western fashions, designed mostly by men, emphasise sexual provocativeness in womens clothing. By contrast, in cultures like Indias, a woman might even jeopardise her chances of marriage by dressing up provocatively. While the system of family arranged marriages in India has many drawbacks, there are several advantages to it including the fact that a womans chances for marriage are not largely dependent on whether or not men find her sexually attractive, as happens in the West where self-arranged marriages are the norm. Since the entire family takes an active part in selecting a bride, in India a woman is expected to be pleasing to a vast range of people and not just one man. This plays an important role in ensuring that popular norms of beauty are not entirely male defined, as in the West.
The relative stability of marriage and family life in India frees women from the pressure to stay forever young and wrinkle free. Especially in a joint family setup, the stability of the marriage is to a large extent decided by how well a woman manages to get along with the various members of her husbands family his mother, brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles. For these people, her youthful good looks are of subsidiary importance and other human qualities far more valued. A woman who gets along with the rest of the family has some support against being deserted by her husband because the rest of the family would join in to keep the man on a leash. The stigma attached to divorced men may not be as strong as it is for women, but it is sufficiently strong to make a majority of the men learn to make the effort required to keep their marriages intact, even when they do not get along with their wives or feel attracted to other women. It is this relative confidence that her marriage will last, whether or not a woman stays youthful and attractive enough to satisfy her husbands sexual fantasies, that allows women in cultures like ours to age more gracefully rather than live in mortal dread of wrinkles, grey hair, sagging breasts and bulging waistlines. Women in India do not need to waste quite as much time in being seductive to men and can invest far more energy into building other relationships, especially with other women.
If the culture of beauty contests takes root in India, it will erode some of the areas of strength traditionally available to women in India. It brings in vicious forms of competitiveness among women and makes them self-hating as they get excessively self-involved and begin to look upon other women as rivals and competitors, desperate for a certain kind of male attention. It makes them more and more unidimensional creatures who are more easily manipulated by men because they see themselves mostly through the eyes of men. While millions of men indulge in sexual fantasies about Sushmita and Aishwarya, I cannot imagine young men wishing they had them as a sister or too many fathers/mothers being anxious to have them as daughters. They tend to provoke only two kinds of responses: sexual excitement in men and envy, or even hostility, among women. In my experience, a woman who only invites envy or hostility among other women becomes a very insecure person despite all the adulation she may get from men. -
Just skipped all that long crap..Didnt even read a single word
make crazy monkey post for nothing.....make him feel worthless....Eat that!! -
the truth hurts. Ouch !Originally posted by Chewbacca:Just skipped all that long crap..Didnt even read a single word
make crazy monkey post for nothing.....make him feel worthless....Eat that!!
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Wahahahahaaa!!!!!!!!Originally posted by crazy monkey:the truth hurts. Ouch !
That's how dumb u are -
thread got lock again wahahahaha .....
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Wahahahaa....Not my problem...WahahahhaaaOriginally posted by crazy monkey:thread got lock again wahahahaha .....
Do i care?......wahahahhaa...... -
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Do i care?Originally posted by crazy monkey:
Isit my problem?