Really, nothing. It’s been more than a week since the Vogue Empower video directed by Homi Adajania and featuring Deepika Padukone amongst others, has appeared, been watched, digested, commented upon, counter-videoed, spoofed and counter-spoofed. And a week on the internet constitutes nothing less than a geological age of course, so there’s been a veritable melting Ice Age of responses. To list just some of the reactions to the video – the female fan responses, that say kudos to Deepika for “saying it like it is”. Uncritically starry-eyed as they are, they point to the real chord struck by the video with thousands of young women fighting, thinking, arguing and surviving their way through a breathtakingly conflicted urban India. This is an India that by all appearances works hard and parties hard, in the process occupying a fraught and frequently violent terrain of interaction between the sexes.

Two, the critical response from many men and women and/or a section of feminists (because we all hopefully know by now that the referents “women” and “feminists” are not co-terminus). One group of responses repeats the old leftist anxiety (saturated with the history of masculinist communism in the twentieth century) that videos like these, with their glossy styling and patently upper-class agendas of sartorial and sexual choice are widely out of step with the “real” issues that affect non-upper-class and rural women – thereby vaguely equating upper-class feminists to Demi Moore from Disclosure or Priyanka Chopra in the desi version, Aitraaz. At best, the upper class feminist is mostly harmless but frivolous – like in Mr and Mrs 55. It’s also as if working class women or rural women do not struggle with issues of greater sexual and personal autonomy. I think all the educated, upper-class people on the internet saying this message of greater choice has utterly no relevance to all those rural and uneducated women have a perversely abject imagination of them – as if “their” lives are entirely devoid of choice, and “our” lives are lusciously full of them – khaps in Haryana banning jeans for girls; “love jihad” allegations against eloping couples from small towns and villages or the government cracking down on bar dancers demanding dignity and safer conditions of work point to a real anxiety about this demand for greater autonomy by women across class and caste barriers.

There is a much more interesting critique from the left – that points out the hypocrisy of magazines like Vogue making videos on female empowerment when all their money is made promoting unrealistic and singular standards of female beauty, into inducing near-panic amongst millions of young women regarding their supposedly imperfect and non-normative bodies and lifestyles. This to me is a valid critique, pointing to the real problem with a corporate-money-powered intervention in any social movement. It reeks of dishonesty when you juxtapose an editorial defence of choice with the injunction to be pretty/liberated/stylish in a particular way, Rupees 9,999 plus taxes on the rest of the magazine’s pages. A caveat, however. Just as the most radical theory can sometimes emerge from the most entrenched and well-funded universities and think tanks (not frequently but sometimes), a valuable defence of women and their choices can emerge from the bowels of silliness. When I think of all the men who say they hate women who put on too much make-up, I immediately want to pull out my nail polish and high heels and overdo it. It has to be said – wearing “too much” make-up and being frivolous can annoy the s*&t out of a high-minded moral man, and for that reason alone frivolity and feminism must go hand in hand sometimes. Women didn’t single-handedly create these ironies, they were born into an always-already ironic world. So to paraphrase Marx, they must make their history in conditions not of their own choosing.

Then of course there are responses to the Vogue video by non-feminist men and women. One wildly popular one, apparently written by a woman but being gleefully reproduced everywhere by men asks a seemingly profound and heart-stopping “what if” question – what if men were also allowed to have sex outside marriage? Thereby missing the point spectacularly that asking for something that is already socially sanctioned doesn’t amount to the glories of free will and choice, it amounts in fact to its opposite – the demand for status quo – an absurd form of demanding if there was one. Such a response clearly depends on an understanding of equality between men and women as a question of following strict and mathematically precise sameness, historical hierarchies and patterns of gender be damned. However, again as feminists have been repeating ad nauseum, equality and sameness are not co-terminus. An egalitarian demand must accommodate history and difference as empirical platforms even while it demands equal treatment as a normative goal. Thus the attempts to impose strict sameness as feminists apparently are guilty of, can easily be spoofed. So we have a counter-video that spoofs Adajania’s by using what a “same-to-same” technique – it replaces women with men in the same glossy black and white style of the original, and proceeds lyrically and smoothly until the appearance of an intentionally jarring jumpcut – footage of some women roughing up and publicly questioning some man for being an adulterer. The question begs itself on hindlegs and two raised paws – how can Padukone and Adajania be held responsible for the views of those women? Evidently these women function within the framework of a conventional morality wherein both men and women are expected to be monogamous and faithful, even while there’s much looking the other way when men engage in transgressions of that social law. Conventional morality allows space for some backlash by women as well, and these women exercised it. Until the day that women can have sex outside marriage with anything close to the historical ease which most cultures have allowed men, the heart-stopping “what if” question is bound to remain underwhelming.

Then there is the frankly cringeworthy misogynist response to the Vogue video – one blog for instance informs us with a smug note of triumph that there’s a thin line between absolute freedom and choice, and compares what it thinks the feminist notion of absolute choice is to the ISIS “stabbing or shooting people on camera” – er, yes, go figure…because women having sex outside marriage is of course equal to murder. Murder of the male ego for sure, and ok, of the sacramental form of marriage. Thankfully, I found a sweetly misogynist sappy male response as well, confirming to my great relief that just as feminism comes in wildly different flavours, misogyny does as well – variety is the spice of life, and why should woman-ism and man-ism be any different? This video tugs at our heartstrings (not) by showing the incredible sacrifices of freedom that being a (family) guy constitutes. It’s an interesting response actually – because it lists quite accurately what feminists have been saying for ever – that masculinity in conventional patriarchal societies is like a tool that breaks the legs of both sexes and makes them walk on the crutches of gender roles for the rest of their lives. Ok, nobody used such gruesome language but you get the point.

There is one peculiar response I can’t help mentioning that manages dextrously to use this video to make this all about themselves. Sadly, at the moment, there is only one entry in that genre, which is a pity because this requires some talent. Finally, and my personal favourite – the confused-as-hell response, that keeps oscillating not only between praise and condemnation, but between completely contradictory registers of praise and condemnation!!…yes, Deepika it’s your choice, but maybe you’re just doing your job…is this a bold message? No perhaps it is in the wrong direction…and so on and so forth – I worry for logic in this country. I also worry for illogic disguised as rational argument in a new brand of writing that seems to get “up votes” on websites…but I digress.

So what can be said about this video? For one, Adajania seems to be saying nothing spectacularly new about liberation for women. Noooo, not liberation from men, but liberation from the set of institutions, practices and ideas that constitute “patriarchy”. More has been said, and more beautifully and powerfully, by hundreds of ordinary men and women who have been part of the women’s movement around the world. Including the part about sexual freedom inside and outside marriage – which is the part that seems to have caused such scandal that you have to wonder if people think this idea was born from Padukone’s mouth. To wit, the video also says to not have sex should be a choice women can exercise. What this video adds to that rich, complicated and ongoing history of feminism’s questioning of dominant gender norms is…nothing, really. Perhaps a punch-in-your-face style and lots of sexy black-and-white images of women of all ages. And yes, a bra being opened on a very lean female back. Which frankly led me to ask why this back, and not others, and like many others have enquired, why aren’t there sizes other than zero in this video – in the images, not the words. Which brings me to my other point – is there a way in which the words (from amazingly banal and frankly senseless – I am the tree not the forest, I am the snowflake not the snowfall…you are the snowflake?? – to the sweetly inspired – “to love temporarily or lust forever”) send out a different message from the images? The images are in fact cringeworthily stereotypical – the unhooked bra is a standard trope of saxxiness in the visual age, while the mandatory tribal woman is simply inserted into a video of upper-class Bombay women in all her token-totem glory. Most problematically, the images of these highly polished, beautiful women with Padukone topping the list take away from a message that is meant to be universal.

But most crucially, and this is why so many of the male responses sound hurt and scandalised, I think this video produces and disseminates, like a bomb, a fully-baked, hermetically sealed idea of female choice (with these highly ambivalent images), adding very little to our understanding of what the matrix of values and ideas is within which every choice is made and exercised. Simply asserting a woman’s right to choose is valuable, and a bomb of a good kind, given that it is precisely a denial of agency that women have had to live with for ages. But a video like this, with an idea of choice as hollow as a helium balloon, beamed out of the blue into a horrifically, deeply misogynist culture (especially an internet culture), is probably bound for the morass of counter-productiveness. As a teacher who deals with young non-feminist students in the classroom every day, I know what critical ground is to be made and lost over the tiniest of nuances when the discussion is on something as explosive and deeply-felt as sexuality and gender. I wish the video did more.

But a video like this also reminds us of how little the space for non-normative female expression is in this country. If Padukone can be subjected to the kind of visceral and often violent verbal abuse that she has managed to garner in the space of a week (for which, amazingly, our lawmakers can never find a ban), what is the chance that ordinary women have for starting a dialogue on their choices about sexuality? For all very same these reasons, however, I am glad that such a video was made, and I only hope it can remain, lingering, in our collective unconscious as a stream, however shallow, to the undercurrent of female power and agency that has existed through history.