Lean right in

After long something has moved me enough to post.

I watched the movie 'The Devil wears Prada'. Actually I've seen it before, but that was a while ago, and I didn't really understand much then I suppose.

Yeah, age. Brings wisdom and shit.

And while I know this movie was made almost 10 years ago, I feel not much has changed. That the long-due message put out most famously in recent times by Sheryl Sandberg will need to be repeated and retold in various ways for a long time to come, using different visual aids & story-telling tricks, by localizing it, by dramatizing it, by the unabashed use of celebrities. Anything and everything.

So this movie has an Andrea as the non-fashionista-serious-journalism-aspirant protagonist who ends up taking a job at the biggest baddest fashion rag, called what else but: Runway. And there wearing angelic smiles but damned ugly sweaters she meets the Devil Incarnate, Anna Wintour. Umm, sorry,  Miranda Priestly. Miranda is a bitch-on-wheels as far as unreasonable demands and treating everyone like canine faeces is concerned. Andrea is no quitter though and she quickly, with some help, gets into the groove of things and sets the house on fire, meaning she manages to convince Miss Priestly of her capabilities enough for her to stop treating her worse than a peon.

So new job, a'hole boss, needless to say takes a toll on Andrea's work life balance. Poor girl is spinning around the city carrying messages, packages, laundry, what-ever-the-hell Miranda wants. And she has to do it wearing some tottering Blahniks and Choos. For you see, she has awakened to fashion, partly because she wanted to and partly because she needed to. But it is not the worst thing anyone has ever done to retain a job and her clothes post resurrection are a definite improvement over the grand-mommy sweaters.

Not to her buds though. Her boyfriend, who self-admittedly runs wine reductions the whole day long as a lowly sub-sub-chef in some restaurant, starts out resenting her job which becomes a flagrant exhibition of silent disapproval at everything Andrea does very soon. 

So on the one hand Andrea is working her ass off, and instead of supporting her for trying, for having to take shit from a super-demanding boss and still managing to deliver, this jerk goes and sulks.

Yes she has to work late on his birthday, yes she goes ballistic at one dinner with her dad, yes she ends up (accidentally) taking the big carrot of a work-trip to Paris from her colleague, Emily, who had been coveting it for the whole year, but through all of this, Andrea never loses her good-girl-graces. She refuses to stick around at the work party on boyfriend's birthday for even one extra drink, even when she knows she would have used that time to meet people who could have given her a leg-up on her actual journalistic ambitions. About the Paris trip, whose significance was blown out of proportion anyway, it is to be noted that when Miranda first offers her the chance to go instead of Emily, she actually refuses on Emily's account! Now who does that, I ask you? If you are good and more importantly, better than folks around, you ought to get the big opportunities. Companies don't run on socialistic principles.

But bf and bff both turn away, citing drastic changes i.e. her having deformed into a new strange person etc etc. Andrea has the good sense to go to Paris, that turns out to be quite a roller-coaster and brings her to the realization that she doesn't really want to turn into the next Miranda Priestly (which I think there was no danger of in any case, refer paragraph above). So back she comes to good old fashioned America, and apologizes to boyfriend, accepts she had changed and eases back into her pre-fashion days, into a job much truer to her calling and with a much improved sartorial sense.

And that brings me to my point. This movie has some balls trying to insidiously tell us all that a woman trying to make it at a job, working hard, working smart and in spite of the environment, retaining her value-system, still needs to be chided and derided just because she is now spending a few hours less with the man in her life? Sure she needs to be told to chill out a little bit, which she might have figured out by herself in a few months into the new job, but does she need to be painted a lost soul?

Relationships should make us stronger, double our resources, where we fill in the gaps for our partners, becoming their voice when they can't reach. Our mothers and their mothers and their mothers have done that their whole lives, in fact for millenia altogether as the men went out on trips long and short to hunt, farm, toil and more recently, attend meetings. Why can't women expect the same respect & support? 

Why such serious charges against Andrea, of putting career ahead of everything else, of in fact having become a different person altogether, when all she was trying to do was her job? 

Women have an in-built guilt mechanism, where they look too hard at them own faults, their own misses and are forever struggling-striving-exerting to do better at whatever they deem important; but in this new world where there are new heights to conquer, this self-flagellation is getting a little extreme. 

So there is a double standard and to add to it, there are women who are suckers for self-hate. At risk of being labeled a fanatic or a brasserie-burning feminist, I want to continue to raise hell & high water at the first whiff of this double-standard. And while I fling mud at society, I also want to take a shot at some advice for half its population i.e. the women. Advice for other women, but more importantly for myself. 

Well, first you need to let yourself breathe, then with a swift kick in the pants weed out the negativity, and finally continue to walk, run, leap along your journey with floater, sandal, Louboutin shod feet but most importantly with sunshine in your heart & head held very very high.