While the entire world was excited about the big fat Indian wedding of Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas, Mariah Smith, a journalist with the website, The Cut, wrote a very caustic article about the Quantico actress that creeped out many. Calling Priyanka a “modern-day scam artist”, Mariah’s article portrayed Chopra as a money-minded celebrity who calculatingly married the unassuming Jonas as a power move.
What shocked many was that the author of the article is a female and that too, in a magazine that claims to “cater to women”. “The article was disgusting,” exclaims comedienne Mallika Dua. “What made it worse was that the author of the article is an African-American woman. I don’t even understand if she was being racist or sexist. It was wrong on so many levels,” she says.
While Priyanka dismissed the entire matter like a boss, saying these comments do not bother her, the entire episode brings us to think that though we hear so often about the injustices that women face in the hand of men, rarely do we talk about the injustices we are met with, that come from other women.
Although many have been talking about how women should support each other, the sad reality is that there exists a huge deficit in the number of women who make it their personal goal to elevate other women, instead of tear them down.
Just before her wedding, Meghan Markle too was humiliated by her “best friend”, Ninaki Priddy. Markle’s maid of honour. According to Priddy, when Markle came to town, she expected her old friend to drop everything to see her. They eventually stopped speaking. Meghan’s half-sister, Samantha Markle, also insulted her in the media.
Shedding light on the psychology behind such behaviour, personality development trainer, Rita Gangwani, says, “One big reason for this is that the sense of jealousy in women is way more than that in men. They are very compassionate, but at the same time, they want to garner all attention, for which they either start presenting themselves in a better way, or start pulling the other person down. Another thing to consider here is whatever your gender, if you are unsatisfied with your own life, you try to demean others who are happier in their lives.”
Adding to this, actress Lavanya Tripathi says, “At a time and age when we are all talking about women empowerment and feminism, I think such thought process should have no space. We all talk about how men mistreat women and why we all need to stand against the patriarchal thinking, but if women themselves, are not united, how would we succeed in bringing the change that we all talk about?”
Resonating her thought, Mallika adds, “I don’t believe in the cliché ‘aurat hi aurat ki dushman hoti hai’. I feel this sort of mindset, from men or women, should be condemned. However, we do expect more empathy from a woman, when it comes to women-related issues.”
