Alankrita Srivastava, director of Lipstick Under My Burkha, wanted to explore the internal restrictions women placed on themselves through her film.
“I’ve been brought up in a liberal set-up and there were no external restrictions to the freedom but there was this internal restriction, which was always there. Sometimes you have feelings of shame, guilt, not feeling good enough, sometimes you enter a room and you feel you don’t own it and you feel when men enter a space, they are so entitled, they feel the world owes them something. Sometimes, we are very apologetic about ourselves and our existence. These were the kind of things I wanted to explore.”
Srivastava said that women need to own feminism.
Recommended
“Women need to own feminism because anyone who says they are not feminists feel that men should be superior. We have a problem, we need to own and love our feminism. You and I are sitting here, we are working women, have education and have the right to vote, are citizens of the country because of feminists. Otherwise we would have been sitting in the kitchen and waiting for the men to come! So, we also need a reality check.”
The director also said that patriarchy is ingrained in women as well as men.
“Don’t they want equal pay? Do they want to be sexually harassed? Feminism means no to all that. It means gender equality. They don’t understand. Women slut shame other women. They pass comments like, ‘Look she is so slutty!’ What to do about that? Patriarchy is ingrained not only in men, also in women.”