In The Buzz Cut, we bring you a round-up of all the weird, controversial, and wonderful stories we’ve been reading all week.
Finding Freedom, a new book on the scandal around Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s departure from the monarchy, written by two long-time royal reporters, exposes how the monarchy was not designed to accept somebody different than the royals. The book shows how, in failing to support Markle, the monarchy essentially relinquished all of its cultural relevance.
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A Netflix release, Cuties, slated for September, is already garnering widespread criticism for sexualizing an 11-year-old Senegalese Muslim girl in its artwork. While critics (who haven’t seen the film yet) call for its removal from Netflix, here’s what the movie is actually about, and why it struck a nerve with thousands of people around the world.
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Trigger warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of the kind of harassment women journalists go through at the hands of right-wing bhakts in India, and the lengths to which they’ll go to permanently silence those who dare to speak out. This is the story of a journalist who lost her job and got terrorized by Hindu nationalists, all because of a misunderstanding involving the word “krishna.”
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Asian women are fetishized all around the world as ‘exotic,’ as lending some sort of progressive credibility to anyone who deigns to be in a relationship with them. This unaddressed trope finally caught people’s eye, first as a tweet and then as a t-shirt, calling out men who wear their Asian wives as a feather in their cap, as some sort of personality trait. People are finally saying: it’s messed up.
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The whales are a perfect example of what humans have done to the environment, both in their careless exploitation of the planet, and their hurried, apologetic and temporary corrections of their actions. We’ve finally made strides to counter the immensely profitable whaling industry, but in turn, have made the whales’ home uninhabitable for them. So what have we actually done to, and for, the whale?
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The coronavirus pandemic has made us focus on the most random of things, some worth our money, and some not. Enter the most recent object of longing and consumerist lust — a strawberry pink, tulle-heavy, Marie Antoinette-as-an-influencer-like gossamer frock that took TikTok by storm. Just why did everyone, from celebrities to the college-going part-time influencer, get so obsessed with it?
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Facebook is in hot water this week, once again. This time, it’s a scandal that’s native to India, and concerning the reigning right-wing, nationalist BJP administration. Turns out, Facebook actively identified and ignored Islamophobic rhetoric peddled by a BJP politician, at the behest of a lobbying executive, Ankhi Das. In a threatening Hindutva environment, is this just good business?
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Muslim women have always been infantilized in India, be it when the government decided to criminalize triple talaq, or when it stripped Kashmir of its administrative independence. Now, the state-sanctioned media is trying to take away one of the most potent, powerful demonstrations of power by Muslim women this country has ever seen — the pre-pandemic CAA-NRC protests — by portraying Muslim women as puppets to men. Does the state actually believe the ‘idiot Muslim woman‘ trope, or is it simply trying to deter another Shaheen Bagh?
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What does it mean to be a stan in today’s hyper-public, celebrity-focused environment? Be it Rihanna or Beyoncé, this open letter dissects how the most progressive of artists are — at the end of the day — celebrities, and how their material realities are worlds apart from that of their stans’. Do they, with their legal and PR machines, really need the common folk to go to war for them on social media? Or do these stans need to step out of their parasocial relationships and reckon with the reality of their fandom?
