Between Female & the Feminist — Unfolding the Female Desire in Konkona Sen Sharma’s ‘The Mirror’ in Netflix’s Lust Stories 2
Women’s pleasure is still a theme that has not been navigated into as deeply as the male pleasure. Through centuries, we have linked the female body to its reproductive core, where in the act of sexual intercourse was to bear an offspring, thus, to embody the idea of pregnancy. To my curiosity, I have wondered, what and how desires function for women, and my understanding and observation often leads me to interpret that female desires might not be intensive on the sexual front, or even if they are, it might not be crucial to link it with the process of birthing a child. The discussions around desire are often miscalculated with religious and political arguments which try to reinstate the role of a woman, and most definitively how men stereotypically view a woman.
The process stimulates birth as a female, the burdens of the female body that are encompassed through the gaze of a man, and the expectations of a woman to fit into the identified gender role of a submissive and a pleasing wife and a nurturing mother. Somewhere in the midst of this chaos, from birth to death, we overlook how the female body and mind operate — how she’s coerced to shifts and transitions in roles and responsibilities. The female desire on the other front is unique and subjective. Often unnoticed, the male gaze tends to overthrow the complexities of the female body.
Recently, I watched the segment ‘The Mirror’ directed by Konkona Sen Sharma in Lust Stories 2, airing on Netflix. The intricacies displayed through the lens, is a pure delight to encapsulate the female lust — the struggle of the mind, and the beauty of the body. Somewhere, the character of Ishita tries to find a tune to sync why the mind and the body exhibit the push and pull mechanism, wherein there are often two voices involved — the moral subjugation and the eternal eagerness for a fulfilled desire. Often, how we are brought up, through religion, education, moral policing and more, impact the way we women form an opinion of what is the ‘ideal’. In this segment, we find Ishita returning home to an utter shock of her domestic help having sex on her bed, with her (the maid’s) husband. The same night, as her mind recovers from the initial shock of events, her psyche syncs into reflecting on the act as a sense of voyeuristic pleasure. I believe what makes this an even beautiful piece is how power plays in this experience of desire. On the employer’s end, she is met with an obsession over her promiscuous maid’s sex life, as well as layered embarrassment of recognition of her own voyeuristic pleasure. As domestic workers struggle to ‘work’ in a residential space, an inhibition of aspiration as well as an employer’s intrigue of knowing about the employee take over the scape.
What is intrinsically beautiful is how the idea of space is portrayed in the film — the two characters intangibly link their desires to the inhibition of space. The camera moves in and out, to make the viewer realize that the help despite the desire is trapped among lack of space, which she comfortably finds at the employer’s home. Meanwhile, the employer is not devoid of privacy, she lives alone. She can ‘afford’ privacy. Yet, to some degree, she is unable to be the voyeur. Power takes a backseat, where Ishita continues to pertain the privacy of the two lovers in her bed. It is almost that the employer and employee, both women, don’t look at sex pervertedly. Truly, if gender roles were reversed, the storyline could have unfolded with a lack of warmth.
The househelp owns the space of her employeer— she is the caretaker of the house in the truest sense, and in addition she owns a space in the desires of her employer, quite subtly. The beauty of this piece is that as the characters discover one another, the female gaze unfolds, as the male gaze moral scrutiny takes a backseat. None of the sexual scenes are acted in accordance with the male eye — when you hear a woman moan, she moans out of pleasure, watching which pleases another woman. There’s very little of the man’s act, intrinsically emphasizing how the female desire is not just rooted in physicality, but in the psyche. As the piece ends, it is not a surprising turn of events either. There is mutual respect, of wanting and understanding pleasure — driving a sense of solidarity between the two women, who at this point are devoid of the former employer-employee tagline, and are presented as two women who are different in their own delivery of self expression and how they view pleasure to be a ‘personal’ experience.
I believe when you reflect on this, it truly is the story of many of us. The idea that sex was introduced with a lot of familiar baggage, and no text book ever taught us what sex could truly mean. Modern contentions argue that sex is not always penetrative even in the cis-gendered narrative. Not every woman derives pleasure the same way, and there is not one model to fit women in. Historically, women’s bodies have been intangibly roped into identity markers of objectification — be it embodied in the weight of a diamond ring, or the red on her forehead. A woman’s desire has always been linked to ownership, which have in turn encouraged systems like dowry, and child marriage to pertain to some extent even today. When I watched this piece, I had to congratulate the direction and the acting. The shots, to the slow buildup to climax, and a different resolution, this piece deserves its own walk to fame. It shows that when women are written by women, with the subtlety and the intricacies of the female mind untouched, desire is also written with care, devoid of perversion.
Nandini Chakrabarti is a writer and poet. She believes strongly in the art and power of storytelling. Nandini has co-authored multiple poetry and short-story anthologies and is currently working on her debut novel. Nandini is an empath, bearing a passion for films, communication studies, chess, understanding the complexities of being a human and creating an equal ground for children.
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