I remember having asked my dad what "sexy" meant when I was 10 years of age. There was a popular Bollywood jingle which had the word in its lyrics.
He gave me that "it's time for you to know about the birds and bees" look. He however started with dogs - male dogs chasing female ones in the monsoon season (stray dogs mating on the streets is a ubiquitous sight in Indian cities). So males and females find each other attractive - and that is exactly what sexy means, "attractive to the opposite gender". This was a very satisfactory explanation and so I went to school the next day and declared to my classmates in a very serious grown up voice that sexy was a perfectly sensible and inoccuous word that meant "attractive to the opposite gender".
The other day while he was seeing me off at the airport, we saw a billboard publicizing the "Slut Walk" campaign. My dad pronounced the word with an "u" as in bull, like the Swedish would do, and asked me what it was all about. So either he did not know the word or somehow had not been able to relate it to the context (or he was just goofing around, which he is not entirely incapable of). I took a deep breath and thought - this is going to take some work to explain, and even more to justify. But we soon reached the security gate, and I missed a chance to discover how radically feminist (or radically opposed to feminism) my dad was.
He gave me that "it's time for you to know about the birds and bees" look. He however started with dogs - male dogs chasing female ones in the monsoon season (stray dogs mating on the streets is a ubiquitous sight in Indian cities). So males and females find each other attractive - and that is exactly what sexy means, "attractive to the opposite gender". This was a very satisfactory explanation and so I went to school the next day and declared to my classmates in a very serious grown up voice that sexy was a perfectly sensible and inoccuous word that meant "attractive to the opposite gender".
The other day while he was seeing me off at the airport, we saw a billboard publicizing the "Slut Walk" campaign. My dad pronounced the word with an "u" as in bull, like the Swedish would do, and asked me what it was all about. So either he did not know the word or somehow had not been able to relate it to the context (or he was just goofing around, which he is not entirely incapable of). I took a deep breath and thought - this is going to take some work to explain, and even more to justify. But we soon reached the security gate, and I missed a chance to discover how radically feminist (or radically opposed to feminism) my dad was.
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2 comments:
I absolutely shudder to think what my conservative Russian parents would think of Slut Walk.
My mom once claimed that "anyone" can tell how many partners a woman's had just by looking at her, and that a woman with "too many" partners will quickly be labeled a slut. Hm.
hmm. I've never had this conversation with my mother, but she ,like most women of her culture and generation, holds marriage very sacrosanct. Pursuing partners outside or breaking up marriages amounts to heresy for her. Interestingly she puts the blame mostly on other women, who "entice" married men and break up marriages. Or maybe she wants me to be "warned" about such women, and would have warned me differently about how not to be seen as such a woman if I were a girl.
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