Barely a week ago, Malayalam magazine Grihalakshmi’s controversial photo-shoot around a breastfeeding mother ruffled a few feathers. After the breastfeeding image caused a big splash in Kerala, the ripples of the controversy spread to the rest of the country. But going by the social media response, some of the harshest criticisms for the photo-shoot, its subject and the magazine have undoubtedly emerged from Kerala and Malayalis. Although they applauded the intent of the magazine, some detractors were also quick to criticise the magazine’s brazen approach. They opined that the magazine had bitten more than they could chew by throwing open a rather uncomfortable topic to a nation that is clearly not ready for it. We still are not as open minded as we’d like others to believe.

But history suggests that we didn’t always have such a narrow-minded outlook. A Reddit thread brought out the topic of an old Indian stamp from 1981, showing a mother in a traditional attire, breastfeeding her child. Soon, it was picked up by a Twitter user by the name Raminder Jit Singh.

 

It has to be noted that back in the 80s, the government of India had released the stamp as an initiative to promote breastfeeding. And today, when a magazine attempts to do the same, it has a case slapped on it by some self-anointed guardian of the Indian culture. Not only that, people have been foaming at their mouths, alleging a “feminist propaganda” behind the photo-shoot.

(Picture credit: Pinterest)

The way the photo-shoot has been received is quite telling of our times. People are quick to malign the magazine and the model by saying that it was just a ploy to grab attention and the whole thing was just a money-making stunt. But it’s a custom for corporations to feature female body and breasts as money-making tools. Also, Kerala, the land of the so called progressives, also have a rich and thriving soft-porn industry, making this outrage sound very misplaced and selective.

It shows that some things don’t get better with time, especially in a patriarchal society like ours, which has been trying to vehemently shoot down anything progressive move that benefits women. Women still get blamed “inviting” rapes and bullied for alleging sexual abuse. The word “feminism” now has a dog-whistle effect on some sections of the society, causing many women to distance them from the term. Especially in Kerala where men allege “feminist propaganda” behind everything, a well-known actress was sent rape threats on Twitter. And what invited this wrath in the first place? She spoke against a particularly misogynistic scene from a movie that starred a much-loved superstar.

With a smart phone in every hand, we’d expect a better dissemination of ideas and information. Theoretically, we should have fared better than our  countrymen from the 80s who had a more open-minded approach towards breastfeeding. Instead, we have regressed and there’s a study to back it. We’d expect social media to educate people and dispel wrong notions. Instead, it creates “echo chambers” of like-minded people who use social media tools like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to come together and reinforce each other’s biased world views. It simply means that our social media culture has unwittingly set us back by centuries, and we are back to witch hunts, but this time, on the internet.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Mar 07, 2018 02:24 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).