Shrill, Kill Feel, This Pill

It is especially the way contraception is advertised that makes us think, how little it has to do with women's liberation and is more a way of upholding status-quoist ideas on sex, gender, family, class

Pallavi Paul Delhi

What is my body?
The obvious answer is that it can be many things - chronology, history, conformism, subversion, doubt, pain, joy, comfort, pleasure, poetry, illness, sacred, desirable, ugly - but most of all, I feel, it is threatening.

Threatening for different people, at different points of time. For myself and my own image as "one of the boys", eventually, my worried grandmother, who didn't think I looked as nice as other girls my age; finally, for the rest of the world ... for now I am a sexualized, untamed, reproductive body capable of wrecking havoc on everything that is natural. 

The 'natural' which is so painstakingly constructed for me everyday. My class - which entails the expectations society has of me, and those I ought to have of it in return. A pact, that tells me, I can have a house, a warm bed to sleep in, good meals everyday, access to education and the confidence which comes from societal acceptance - something more than 90 per cent people in this country can only dream of. In return, I have to behave myself, pretend that I know no bodily desire, and vow to uphold and live out a hetro-normative recreational paradise. Till I either drop dead, or my body becomes incapacitated to be of joy to myself or anyone else. 

This wonderful symbiosis is called middle-class morality. Any danger to it is double jeopardy, an affront to the sacred laws, both of class and gender.
Naturally, when things are so sensitive the last thing that a society wants to do is trust a 'hysterical' human being with any kind of power. Hence, painful melodrama unfolds and grandmothers censure, fathers organise surveillance, mothers emotionally blackmail and mostly everyone plays each other's part.

But there are also mechanisms that function more like a slick, understated Hollywood classic. They sit you down, give you a cold glass of water and then begin in soft, steady, subdued and menacing tones about how a decision to pleasure your body outside permissible limits is criminal/hallucinatory, because outside of them the body is not supposed to exist.

Further, a recognition of these limits is critical to determine the manner in which patriarchy can/will exploit women: Canonised Goddess without agency, cheap domestic labour, biological incubator for offspring (preferably male), 'career woman' cum homemaker. A face-less 'type' trapped either in the oppressive iconography of the sister, mother, modern woman with 'Indian values' or the 'obvious' opposite  of being sexually available at all times in the absence of a father, husband or son who can 'rightfully' claim 'territorial ownership'. 

A case in point for such careful, strategised marking of boundaries are the 'friend of the liberated woman', the I-pill advertisements. First things first.

Thank heaven there is an emergency contraceptive and that people are being informed about it, that women have slightly more agency over their bodies and they can be less tense about physical intimacy with men. Also, they can save themselves from the harassment of a hair-raisingly painful medical procedure (both in culmination and termination) and unnecessary societal curiosity.