Mannequins are too sexciting?
The moral police now have their guns aimed at mannequins. Their stand: even the lifeless plastic dummies standing outside a shop can be lethal enough to set the ‘evil hormone’ gushing. The Bombay Municipal Corporation has come up with the proposal of banning the mannequins used to display women’s underwear as they lead to ‘pollution of minds’. The proposal has irked many.
Amongst the outraged lot is the fashion fraternity, who rubbishes the idea calling it unintelligent and ridiculous.
“This is an unbelievably stupid idea. We use mannequins to display our ware and I fail to understand how a prop made of plastic or fibre glass can promote rape,” questions fashion designer Ranna Gill.
Ace designer Rina Dhaka adds, “Don’t we know that an empty mind is a devil’s workshop? This is a bizarre suggestion by some such minds,” she says and adds that such controversies are not new for fashion designers, who have always had courage to showcase what we thought is tasteful. “We are used to such trivial controversies and we simply ask the hardliners, who ever they are, to chill and let us do our work,” she says.
“So, we aren’t here to take dictates from those who don’t have any rhyme or logic for what they are proposing,” she adds.
The justification of Ritu Tawade, a BJP corporator from Ghatkopar, who is the brain behind the idea is that, “according to Provisions of the Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act, 1986, indecent representation of women means the depiction in any manner of the figure of a woman: her form or body or any part thereof in such way as to have the effect of being indecent, or derogatory to, or denigrating women, or is likely to deprave, corrupt or injure the public morality or morals.”
For model Nayanika Chatterjee, only a person with a warped mind can get excited with a plastic dummy. “We should ideally have slots for ads of lingerie on national television. Also, hoardings with such ads are understandable in malls etc and not in areas like small towns where there is no market for such ads. But such a reaction coming from a cosmopolitan city is ridiculous,” she says.
Fashion designer Nitin Bal Chauhan thinks that there is no single solution that can stop men from harassing women and with the recent surge in the number of rape cases, everyone is coming up with solutions. “The seeds for this change need to be sown at every level of our society. And only open-minded, well-read and widely travelled people —anthropologists, psychologists and historians — can offer the right solutions to this problem. It cannot be solved by fundamentalists and politicians hoping to make a quick image makeover,” he says.
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