Challenge Accepted

Is it just a viral Instagram trend? Or is there something we are missing out?

We live in the age of fads. Isn’t that the irony? Something as temporary as fads have almost become permanent. Recently, the one currently taking internet by storm is “Challenge Accepted” trend. The objective of this could not be more important and critical to our current state and times. Women nominate each other, and put up B/W pictures of themselves while calling out others who have inspired them in their lives. This is done as a symbol of resilience and solidarity against femicide in Turkey.

The idea of this article is not to analyze the Challenge Accepted trend per se. But really take a step back and see what sort of larger themes emerge from it. I do not plan to argue the merits or demerits of those themes. But try to show such themes exist and we need to be cognizant of it.

While I have some objections with what is passed off these days as symbol of support, many among you agree a picture on Instagram or Facebook produces little to no change in on-ground reality.

However, in the last decade, our systems of knowledge consumption has seen some fairly dramatic changes. For starters, we consume most of our knowledge via digital channels. We changed from calling it knowledge to content and till date it still surprises me why this move was made. Instead of long in-depth analysis, our knowledge is now a lot more skimmed but a lot broader. Some of the folks I spoke to, agreed that such Instagram trends might not bring a material change but it brings visibility. It brings the Turkish women’s plight to the forefront and onto everyone’s mind. In larger scheme, this gives every woman the power & access in doing her ‘bit’ to inch this issue forward. Even from a pessimistic viewpoint, what is the downside here? A few BW pictures on Instagram? That’s not so bad.

However, the current trend showcases something very interesting about the overall narrative of feminism - A deep personalization of it. Every one, basis their experiences, economic classes, levels of empowerment have an unique idea of what feminism is. And that essentially means there is not a single common version of it out there. Some talk about security. Some talk about glass ceiling. Some talk about sexual harassment. Casual sexism, plight of working mothers, Sexist labels, Institutional sexism, Gender wage gap. All of them are important problems to solve. And to a large extent it makes sense too. Women have been oppressed at various facets of life and even across economic classes. But there is no one common goal that every one is driving towards.

Historically if you look at all major changes (Democracy, Women suffragettes), all of them had but one common simple goal. It helps unifying everyone for a cause. This is probably why #MeToo won. It was personalized only in the details but the goal never changed. It was a simple, easy-to-understand goal - Sexual harassment. Everyone understood and everyone knew what was to be done.

Second, the third-order effects of such Instagram trends is what I call - Dominating the narrative. Simply put, we all have a limited inventory of mind-space, attention. And when we fill it up with these trends, we are also deciding what we should not be discussing.

Urban women in Metros form less than 10% in India. Yet they seem to be at forefront of speaking up, leading discussions, speaking at seminars etc. Essentially they are deciding what should be considered feminism and what needs to be solved. This is not to say they are solving irrelevant problems. Rather they do not reflect the interests of everyone. And by everyone, I mean the woes and issues for a women in village, urban-poor, unemployed housewives etc. Women from these segments have fundamentally different issues and ergo require different solutions.

Topics like women self-help groups are hardly discussed. Yet there are hundreds of webinars, conferences on Women In Tech here. We don’t discuss about NGOs trying to get a sanitary pad to every adolescent girl in the villages. Instead we are talking about being body-positive. It is amazing to see so many women in India who raised their voices against Turkey. Yet no one has bothered to look at Female Infanticide in India. We are the highest in that category yet we don’t have anyone talking about it, much less creating Instagram trends.

In many ways, such a trend is very similar to Elite Imitation. Elite Imitation is basically Indians solving problems of West with resources in India. You can read about this here. A very clear instance of this is Maternity Leave Policy. India has one of the most liberal maternity leave policies. We are on par with some Nordic countries in this sense and is widely considered one of the success-stories for Indian Feminism. But the problem lies in not in lack of adequate maternal benefits but rather historically low number of women participating in labor-force. Even in this small segment of employed women, most are in the informal sector who do not gain anything from this maternity policy. Essentially this benefits very few women in corporate while neglecting the needs of everyone else.

Some argue that such policies can help increase women employment in formal sector yet no one talks about how this creates a powerful incentive for organizations to discriminate women during their hiring process itself.

Most women in India live in villages and the problems they face are grave and existential. It is not about work-life balance but life and death. We don’t even know the magnitudes unreported cases of crimes against women. When a narrative gets skewed to represent interests of few, we end up ignoring the plight of masses and the whole movement is basically to fulfill the pain-points of few, even if it is at the cost of ignoring the existential plight of countless others. In some sense, soon the movement becomes plutocratic in some sense where the voices of few is assumed to represent the voice of everyone.

Before I end this, a honest note - I was divided between writing this post because I am sure some of you already shared your picture on Instagram and deeply believe in this cause. And there is a very real chance I risk offending some here but I would love to hear your views. It is practically impossible for me to look at a problem from all possible lenses and there is a very high chance I missed some. Yet the idea here is to understand the ripple-effect of some seemingly harmless things we do as a society and raise some difficult questions. And it is okay to have the wrong answer than have a wrong question.

If you liked this article, definitely do share it! :) I really need more readers to validate my self-aggrandizement.

Also I still don’t understand the outrage against Indian Matchmaking. It was a splendid show. More power to you Sima Aunty.

---