Dia Mirza pregnancy trolled for coming just weeks after her marriage in February. So repetitive has this entire rut become - of trolling a woman for the time, date, year, moment in life she chooses to get pregnant - that it seems now like an overdone trope.
Will the public ever learn? Why can't we let women be? Should the decision of pregnancy be anyone's business except the parents'? Women have run themselves hoarse asking these questions. But to no avail. Society doesn't cease working to the tunes of its own misogynistic, tired, patriarchal systems.
Mirza is not the first to have evoked such a public reaction with a pregnancy that closely followed marriage. Going far back, it happened with Sridevi in the 1990s, when she gave birth to her first child Janhvi Kapoor weeks after marriage. More recently, we saw it happen with Neha Dhupia in 2018 when .
Heck, it even happened with Neha Kakkar last year, whose 'pregnancy photo' turned out to be a song promotion.
What's alarming is the consistency with which the audience reacts to life events that women exercise agency over. When Kalki Koechlin got pregnant without marriage, she was trolled. When Kishwer Merchant recently announced her pregnancy at 40 years, people said she was embracing motherhood too late.
Nothing ever seems to be enough. Except of course what society and social media trolls dictate.
Dia Mirza Pregnancy Trolled: Why Do We Invade Privacy So Easily?
Is it not a blatant policing of women's bodies, when pregnancy at a time of the mother's choosing invites reactions of shock, disdain or sheer disgust? Why must anyone even feel entitled to guess reasons behind the marriage linked to the time of pregnancy? Does fanfare translate to invasion of privacy that teeters into the territory of disrespectful voyeurism? Where must the lines be drawn?
Besides the showers of good wishes pouring in for the to-be-parents, the general reaction - on social media platforms where negativity multiplies like the plague - is crass, to say the least. It is yet another way to control women's choices for them, to decide what's best for them, to deem them incapable of independent decisions. And to pin derision on just the parent with the baby bump.
Dia Mirza pregnancy trolled: How social media is reacting
These barbs and snide remarks are almost predictable now, every time a famous woman steps over to cross the self-righteous lines of 'morality' drawn by society. But does that mean we'll ever stop speaking up? Never.
Views expressed are the author's own.
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