Several of you beginning with “Msichana” emailed us to let us know that the Indian version of Maxim has just issued its first edition with Priyanka Chopra on the cover. The BBC reports:
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Don’t ever change girl…oh…you already did? Nevermind then. |
Is primetime Priyanka too hot to handle? Forgive me for pondering the merits of Priyanka Chopra, the Bollywood starlet and former winner of the Miss World beauty pageant.But this is the burning question asked of us by the inaugural Indian edition of Maxim – the British “lad mag” which has just made its sub-continental debut with a pouting Priyanka plastered across its glossy front cover.
Readers are also promised information on “100 things you never knew about women”, a “how to” guide on professional begging, and a must-see article on the police inspector in Uttar Pradesh Panda, who fervently believes that he is the incarnation of the Hindu Goddess Radha.
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p>Folks I have learned my lesson. I’m not about to make a comment about any of Ms. Chopra’s attributes, just in case I ever meet her. In fact, I had never even heard of her before I read this article. Bollywood film-watcher I am not. Also, it just so happens that guest-blogger Karthik answered a topical question at the very end of his first post. Getting back to the magazine’s contents:
Two bikini-clad models helpfully demonstrate how to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre (handy if you have a piece of food stuck in your throat).Other parts of the magazine are a masala-like blend of men, motors and models.
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p>Well sure. EVERYONE in India should know how to properly execute a Heimlich maneuver. I’m all for health education in developing countries. I hope however that they don’t let an article like this slip into the Indian edition. It might not go over so well.
See Related Posts: Indians love their newspapers, There is no place to hide it in India, Mortified
Hmm… I don’t know if we are quite saying the same thing RKS. By your logic, I should want to be dating what the media props up as the sexual “object” par excellence i.e. white women. And to a certain extent – fine. Girl on girl action keeps getting fetishized in the media and there’s an increasing number of videos of “ordinary” girls on spring break making out, girls on the desi bus back from some “culture show” in my undergrad making out with each other etc. etc. Coincidence or correlated? Sexual freedom or base debauchery?
Who is this beneficial to exactly? The problem isn’t trying to get people to HAVE sex with each other (and Maxim India is not playing to those of us with white “back up plans” – its target audience is desi who hook up with other desis) the problem is trying to get people to admit the fact that they themselves (not other people) are sexual and therefore open up about it. People will have sex, not to worry – with or without the insights from this magazine.
Maybe it seems like I’m harping on about it. But as a feminist – I can’t see why we have to first turn women into objects before we’re okay to have sex with them. What’s wrong with the complexities of real women? And where is the male counterpart to your argument? Are we coming up with a quick and easy formula to make male sexuality more palatable too? Or is it okay as long as the women are being turned into sexualised domesticated playthings? And just to get personal for a second, I didn’t “jump into” relationship with white men because they had less baggage – they each had all KINDS of baggage. Sex isn’t easy. Relationships aren’t easy. No matter how many sexy girls you put on a hood of a car or have bent over a couch or pouting up at you from on the floor – that’s not what’s going to ease our tensions with our partners.
I’d like to end this by tempering what I’ve been arguing: all this is on a idealistic level. These issues exist and are just as much a thorn in my side here in the west. Of course Maxim is going to be in India and of course people in India should have access to all kinds of media. But as people who read and post and analyse South Asia, it’s important to also be critical of the media available in South Asia to and to be as hard on issues of female representation/identity, homophobia, patriarchy, race relations etc. as we would be if it were part of the mainstream media here.
Anyone has a scan – ed version of her pictures man…???
You’re right, we’re not connecting!
not sure where i said THAT…
I think the point is – is it for YOU to decide? Surely you dont think india has been free of sexual debauchery until the West showed up! THis is a perpetual problem with trying to inject ethics into the complexities of sexuality and its representation. There is nothing wrong with objectification AS SUCH. The only thing wrong is when it – like anything else- becomes a monopoly – and as you say, thats a problem both here as well as there. It is the monopoly that causes the “complexities of real women” to be buried – not the simple fact of objectification. The difference is important. The difference is what will allow feminism – which I’m all for – to not simply become part of the politics of reactionism. The difference would allow feminists (and i consider myself one) to not simplistically see all objectification as part of the ‘assault’ on womanhood (or manhood). Young women having fun in the back of the bus does not AUTOMATICALLY constitute an ethical assault on the nation. We have to be able to let local situations remain local, or to be able to tell the difference between what is local fun and what is national assault. The only way to do that is to modify what we’re looking for: I say look for evidence of monopolies and criticize those; dont just simply demonize the ACT of objectification. Doing the latter is a very de-contextualizing act. Thats bad.
Rks – I enjoy your responses. And I do appreciate both your engagement of this issues and your aligning yourself with the term “feminist” – something that’s getting scarier and scarier (??) for a lot of people. And there’s a lot that you say that I agree with. This for example:
“Young women having fun in the back of the bus does not AUTOMATICALLY constitute an ethical assault on the nation.”
An ethical assault on ‘the nation’? No way. A theatrical enactment of frat-boy fantasies perpetuated and reinforced by the media perhaps? Uh huh. I only mentioned they were desi girls to draw the parallel between what happens in “western-style” media and within “brown” circles – and sure, if the girls want to suck face – whatevs.
My issue isn’t that it’s brown women being objectified. I don’t like seeing women objectified in general. And because this new medium is being introduced to India, it’s worthy of comment. It’s just as outrage-inducing when it happens.
As for the monopoly issue… yes… fine. If the brown public (and here I’m talking about general masses not the intellectual elite) are somehow more critical and astute and picky than the general audience in the west and reject this one mode of heterosexual, misogynist sexuality promoted by magazines like these that would be really great. If we see a response in India where these magazines co-exist with a conscious effort on the part of the public not to privilage the kind of sex it sells, I’ll both be amazed and extremely happy.
I should probably let you know RKS that I’m currently TAing a course called “Sexual Ethics” and my focus is South Asian Studies so if I seem obsessed… there’s a clue why 🙂
Surprise! i’m a TA too… 😉 South asian studies/cultural theory.
I understand where you’re coming from, totally. But I still find this approach problematic. I cant get myself to condemn the ACT, the way you do. In certain contexts this act – objectification – by men OR women at and by either gender – seems to me could be perfectly valid and even natural. Remember what Freud said; the difference between a neurotic and a ‘normally’ functioning person isnt the acts they do but that one obsesses and one doesnt. Thats what I mean too: its not the act; its the monopoly.
Again, I resist the ‘automatic’ assumption that objectification is misogynistic. Context must matter.
You and me both. Incidentally i dont expect it to actually happen, any more than you do. But I’m saying we should perhaps deal with that problem not by banning objectification, but by arguing for/calling attention to the monopoly’s effects.
Seems to me here you’re trying to have it both ways? On the one hand you say ‘if they want to suck face, whatever’. Thereby granting individuals freedom to objectify and act out whatever they like. On the other hand you say “frat boy fantasies” perpetuated and reinforced by the media, ie, objectifying, misogynistic, etc, etc. Clearly you dont mean to say ‘whatever’ here.
believe me, i’m on your side. I’m just asking: how will you tell the difference between indoctrinated women and women having personal fun? And: on what grounds will YOU intervene? And I’m suggesting: you wont be able to answer these questions if you approach the problem thru the lens of trying to identify ‘objectification’ as the culprit. I agree that capitalist media promotes certain styles of reading that become monopolies at the expense of other points of view (read: sex sells), and like any monopoly, that eventually has measurably detrimental effects on society. But this seems to me a capitalism problem rather than directly being a sexual ethics problem. You might say sexual ethics is affected by the process, but then it is the consequence, not the cause, of the problem.
I still think we’re not too far apart on this, prolly just emphasizing diff sides of the same coin. As a lefty, I’m just tired of us pursuing a politics of reactionism, thats all. Whether in gender studies or race or class or post-colonialism. I think leftists havent benefited much in the last 20 years by doing that, and I actually sometimes think we left behind much more productive analyses by embracing that approach. Seems more productive to me to contextualize and see the bigger picture rather than go after particular and individual behaviours (and just be resented as being the PC police). I guess thats a criticism that I increasingly have come to agree with. 😉
(p.s., I also think the subalternists and spivak have really mucked things up for progressives. 😉 thats prolly the MOST un-pc thing a south asian studies grad student could say! 😉 Mucked things up by being unrelentingly reactionary, that is.
Brownfrown, you might like this new yorker article from yesterday. It is related in an analogical way to the conversation we are having (ie, “how do you tell…” when X is personal and local or national and dangerous). THis one is about racial profiling – and pit bulls. Its a neat piece. http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060206fa_fact
Ah RKS,
No wonder we spend so much time writing pages ranting about a notoriously vapid men’s magazine – are you procrastinating on handing something in/grading too?
Yes… I see your point. And oooh believe you me – I squarely point my finger at capitalism. And when I say “sexual ethics” you should know that I don’t really buy into that term – especially the “ethics” part of it… wha?? huh?
Just to clarify – it wasn’t a (sex) ethical problem I was having with Maxim (are you as tired of typing that word as I am? I never want to have to see it again) it was in fact perhaps, to steal the term you’ve been employing, the monopoloy, the dominance of that comodified form of sex. I’m not going to get into the feminist issues tied up with that… you know what I’m talkin’ about. As for the girls making out… here’s a short opinion on it. Women: Do it if it gets you hot. But if you’re doing it for the benefit of your boyfriend (check out a site like Hot Or Not for an example of what I’m talking about – almost every girl who identifies as “bi” wants to pick up another woman to bring home to her and her man) then acknowlege that. Girl-on-girl action has a certain kind of currency in this type of media. And it’s not some kind of sexual rev. because you don’t have the same thing happening with the boys. When was the last time you saw two men making out in the MAINSTREAM media in a hot boy-on-boy scene while his appreciative GF watches, digicam in hand? That’s where I was going with that.
OH! and gasp you don’t like Spivak and the Sub-Altern Studies gang? Oh hellfire awaits, you my friend 🙂 I don’t buy into everything they go off about either. However, I’m at a very conservative faculty studying “Hinduism”, and sometimes, you have to bring up thier spectre just to scare the Kashmir shawls off the creaky tenured profs who still like to secretly refer to themselves as “Indologists”. And then they whisper things about you behind your back… like “Watch out… she’s going to become one of those post-colonial feminist types”. Uhh…
Thanks for the link – I’ll check it out. Get back to that grading!
hee hee, procrastinating, of course. I’m in the writing phase actually, I dont actually TA anymore, tho I did for many years. Thinking of starting a south asia history blog, so I was perusing some of these online sites for ideas I can steal… There arent that many such sites out there, actually. The crowd here seems pretty normal (tho its not a humanities/soc sci blog either, which might explain why its normal ;). I must say I disliked the Chapati Mystery crowd (subalterists to the core! UChicago, of course). As far as they were concerned, the revolution was imminent, gandhi sucked, and chattarjee (or SOME bengali, anyway) is going to save us all — and anyone who says otherwise is either a hindu fascist or is naively playing into their hands. Sheesh. Not much room for discussion there.
I understand. There are lots of ways to approach the problem, tho I think we both agree it is or will eventually be a problem.
agreed, its lopsided. (priyanka’s pics werent that tho, of course. Dont know why I felt obligated to defend priyanka. Oh wait… I remember now. ;D
hee hee, I know. 😉
I have the opposite problem, I’m sorrounded by quite militant pomo/poco folks. Over the top and in your face. They’ve long since scared off the ‘indologists’ and ‘orientalists’, but now they have set themselves up on a similar throne and they rule with about as much tact and tolerance as their predecessors (which is to say, not much). 😉
My question is: Why does our field – south asian studies – need to be squeezed between these two intolerant binaries – hindutvavadis and subalternists? I’d like to reject both – and on similar grounds most of the time. I realize that means catching hellfire from both sides; but if that happens, actually I’ll start to think that i’m on to something! 😉
Hey, email me if you like (link above). What year are you? In writing phase? whats your thesis? what are you reading? how did you fall into grad school? etc, etc.