THE UNBECOMING: A REFLECTION ON FAUX EMPOWERMENT

The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego, and Señor Xólotl, a painting by Frida Kahlo in 1949

We are offered a narrative of arrival, a sleek, well-packaged myth that suggests womanhood in the modern epoch is an unassailable stronghold, fully realised through choice and autonomy. This story is peddled relentlessly, yet beneath its veneer of glistening progress, one finds not liberation, but a sophisticated, multi-layered mechanism of control, a system that demands performance while silently stripping away the very sovereignty it purports to celebrate. To be Unapologetic is to refuse this comfort narrative entirely; it is to peer into the shadow cast by the smile and to name the forces still at work.

The most fundamental acts of subversion are often those that claim physical space, which is precisely why the forces of regression now work to claim dominion over the female body itself. The abrupt overturning of Roe v. Wade in the United States stands as a historical rupture, a brutal reminder that enshrined rights can be dismantled overnight, transforming personal medical decisions into matters of state legislation and criminal liability. This legal violence finds its horrifying commercial mirror in the alleged "Human Egg Farm" in Georgia, where vulnerable lives are reduced to the most basic of commodities, reproductive cells, harvested repeatedly under duress. Globally, the UN Population Fund reported that nearly half of all women in 57 developing countries are denied the right to make decisions about their own bodies, including whether to have sex, use contraception, or seek health care. To see a person’s biological essence treated as an extractive resource for a black market is to witness a dystopian commerce that renders the individual utterly powerless. The promise of empowerment withers into a cruel irony when the law and the market converge to deny ownership of one’s own flesh.

This systematic disregard for a woman's body flows seamlessly into a quiet, yet persistent, cultural campaign to dictate the dimensions of a woman’s identity. The pushback is framed not as hostility, but as a nostalgic return to order. One watches as the "Trad Wife" trend romanticises the surrender of economic and social independence, encouraging a retreat into a pre-feminist domesticity where a woman’s worth is measured not by her ambition, but by her pliability and devotion to tradition. Simultaneously, the public discourse, particularly online, is poisoned by divisive rhetoric, the TERF war cries of figures like J.K. Rowling and the widely critiqued, exclusionary agenda of the film ‘What is a Woman?’ by Matt Walsh, propagating blatant transphobia. Rowling’s public statements, such as her assertion that “Erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives” and that “Sex is real and has lived consequences,” seek to rigidly define womanhood in a way that excludes and polices. This is echoed in the film What is a Woman?, where the conservative host Matt Walsh makes the uncompromising claim that “Women are adult human females. They have XX chromosomes. They can bear children and give birth.” These campaigns are instruments of distraction, turning necessary conversations about gender, identity, and trans rights into political wedges that splinter the very communities required for genuine collective progress. True autonomy cannot exist within borders policed by rigid, exclusionary definitions of gender.

The resulting cultural atmosphere fosters a profound state of manufactured self-consciousness, one that preys on our physical form. The cyclical resurgence of dangerous aesthetics, such as the "heroin chic" trend, alongside the insidious spread of mantras like "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels," are not merely superficial phenomena; they are systemic tools of social conditioning. They cultivate a desire for physical smallness and perpetual fragility, keeping millions preoccupied with the Sisyphean task of self-starvation rather than the far more potent work of dismantling systemic injustice. The cultural ideal is not strength, but perpetual, aestheticised vulnerability.

This erosion of personal dignity culminates devastatingly in the failures of the legal frameworks intended to guarantee our safety. Nowhere is this tragic vulnerability more apparent than in the Indian legal system, where the rising tide of violence continues to be compounded by legal apathy. The National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5, 2019-21) found that the weighted prevalence of domestic violence against women in India was 31.2%, with approximately 5.7% reporting experiences of sexual violence. The existence of the marital rape exception in the penal code, a structural anomaly that deems a husband’s forceful, non-consensual sexual act against his wife not a crime of rape, is a profound codification of diminished consent, placing the sanctity of a flawed institution above the sovereignty of an individual. Furthermore, one cannot forget the brief, but alarming, period following the 2021 judgment by the Bombay High Court’s Nagpur bench, which suggested the absence of "skin-to-skin contact" could render an act of groping under the POCSO Act less severe. While the Supreme Court swiftly corrected this dangerous precedent, the fact that a major court could conceive of such a narrow, perverse interpretation, one that made an individual’s clothing a legal defence for their assailant, speaks to a foundational judicial willingness to trivialise sexual violence. The escalating rape statistics are merely the mathematical reflection of a judicial and social failure that consistently grants abusers the benefit of the doubt, while subjecting victims to a scrutiny that is often both derogatory and defamatory.

In this hedonistic era of legislative regression, commercial exploitation, and cultural policing, the claim of "empowerment" is not just naive; it is actively deceptive. It asks us to bear the weight of systemic failures with a personal smile. Until our collective right to bodily, legal, and ontological integrity is genuinely unassailable, until we are seen and protected as fully autonomous beings, the only real power I believe we possess is the courage to speak this uncomfortable truth, unedited and without hesitation.

Written By Purani R