Poor Feminism

Today I was scrolling through my Instagram and I came across a video of Priyanka Chopra talking about how women would never need a man if only they were financially independent. To be honest, there is some truth to this. In my life, I have slowly come to accept that money is, in fact, power. Not having money leaves one open to exploitation and abuse, and even in the best-case scenario there is some risk of being disrespected with terms like “gold-digger” and “sugar baby” (especially for a woman and even if an individual is married). I have sat through way too many baithaks of men around me going on rants about how women make plans to divorce them just to take half their wealth to ever believe that I’ll be respected without money, even if I became the brightest, kindest, warmest wife on the planet, or the most capable and diligent mother. As much as we don’t like to admit it, we gauge a person’s worth by the money they make, and in today’s world even women are not exempt from that.

However, it is also true that low- and lower-middle-class women (or even men, sometimes) never become “financially independent” the way women like Priyanka Chopra talk about. They may be able to afford their own food and a humble roof over their heads (and in countries like India, “humble” is quite a stretch sometimes), but they don’t have enough money to use their wealth as a shield or as a weapon. In such a situation, getting married, and pooling the labor and capital of two people, is not something people should a) be judged for or b) be preached out of from a position of privilege.  Also, it must be kept in mind that just because people sometimes marry for financial stability does not mean that they don’t love each other. In fact, the opposite is true—in many studies, it has been shown that “financial infidelity” is one of the leading causes of divorce. Because we’ve developed our ideas of love and marriage from watching movies, we often forget that one of the key components of any happy relationship is a respect and understanding of each other’s labor and capital, and denying that fact is being a hopeless romantic. Some might argue that being a “hopeless romantic” is good, because all our role models are, but I don’t agree if being a hopeless romantic means making your own life (and the lives of people around you) harder just for the sake of making a good story.

I also want to point out that when preaching things like this, people often approach issues with the mentality of “if you want money, just work harder for it.” Hard work does not always lead to wealth. A nurse probably works just as hard as an actress does, but does not even make a fraction of the money. In fact, even a female doctor does not make the kind of money that an actress does. Forget, doctors and nurses. Think about the poor women who leave their rural homes to work as carers for old, rich people in their finals years. Think about women who work for their families by taking care of special needs children, or physically or mentally challenged family members (and yes, this sometimes includes husbands as well, because all statistics show that sick women get abandoned way more often than sick men even if that statistic does not speak for all men). We live in a world where we let nurses and mothers save our lives but take our feminism from actresses. The truth is that if superstar actresses stopped making blockbusters, we’d still be getting our entertainment from more humble sources.  However, if all nurses went on strike, we’d be in big trouble. Fortunately, we’ve insured against that possibility by making paying nurses (and other such service positions) so underpaid that they could never go on strike for too long without going into panic about how to make ends meet. After all, only very rich (both financially and socially) women get to go on “hiatus” and then make a “comeback.”

My attempt here is not to bash any woman, including celebrities. What I am trying to say is that celebrity women are often in a position where the only disadvantage they need to worry about is the one that comes from being a woman. Not only could ordinary women may have other disadvantages compounded to that, but there being ordinary may not be a result of a lack of work ethic, hard work, financial management, or emotional dependence. In fact, this is true for both men and women. We live in a top down system where no matter how much we try not everybody can be “rich,” so lets not conflate being rich with ideologies like feminism and general morality.