Clearly the media and Bollywood are at work in this situation since "the heavily made- up and bejewelled, husband-centred glamorous figures of the soap operas" are what Indian women seek to look like even as they aspire to fuller participation in public life.

We in the US have similar pressures. Among those who benefit the most are the media companies who exploit these images.

Thank you to the WIP for using the medium of an online journal, accessible to women and men all over the world, to bring these issues into public awareness. This is a tool to counter the influence of profit driven media who collude with repressive sectors of government in what Manon Slome calls a system that reminds her of the propaganda mechanism of a totalitarian state.