Singer Sona Mohapatra shut down a Twitter user who replied to one of her tweets asking ‘why all feminists have to show cleavage in order to compete with men’. The man claimed she was ‘trying to woo’ the Bollywood gang despite being one of their victims. “Why all feminists have to show cleavage in order to compete with men... and after seeing ur few interviews i think ur a victim of bolly gang but again ur trying to woo them to be i their gang. wat a dichotomy,” the Twitter user wrote. Sona’s sassy response was, “I’d suggest you treat the multiple ‘cleavages’ in your brain before talking with anyone, let alone with a ‘feminist’ trying to ‘woo’ the ‘bolly gang’.. (Cleavage, noun : a sharp division; a split.)”
Last month, as Bollywood celebrities were trending #SmashThePatriarchy hashtag on Twitter, Sona suggested how to go about it ‘the right way’. She shared a number of suggestions, from ensuring pay parity between male and female actors to trusting women filmmakers with bigger production budgets to writing more ‘worthy roles’ for women in films. In 2017, Sona explained her take on feminism in a lengthy Facebook post. “For me, simply put, feminism means women are equal to men. Neither is inferior or superior. The ideal society in the future would be one in which we all operated & thought as ‘humans’ first & gender did not play a role in the treatment meted out to anyone’s opportunities in the world. While that is a utopian dream in the current day, the reason we need to have such discussions, debates & even fights is to work towards such a future. Attitudinal change in a society won’t happen without the same. This is the ‘good fight’, & worth fighting make no mistake,” she wrote.