Nobody will ever win the Battle of the Sexes. There's just too much fraternizing with the enemy. **

Cocktail. A movie. Not the Tom Cruise one, the OTHER. Also a beverage. One that I need copious amounts of. A less sugary, non-fruity one if you will. Oh hell, just pour me a Martini.

If art imitates life imitates art, then Cocktail sure is a movie of times. (No it really is and you'll soon see why.) Good girls get the boy. Girls who drink, date, earn a living and live an independent life are good to bed, not to take to Ma. (Charlatans! Harlots!) That in gist, is the movie. Oh sorry, forgot the spoiler alert. But are you really surprised? Was that really a spoiler? 

And that's why to me the umbrage, the indignant offense almost all have taken to the Guwahati incident surprises me. Did we really not see it coming? (Not that it makes the incident any less offensive and outrageous. Or scary.) Here is a movie (Cocktail) an elite production team churns out which in it's most basic form will make every social anthropologist reach for the nearest pen to paper a theory. Exhibit A: Innocent girl from homeland that doesn't drink or engage in promiscuous sex or even dating. Cooks, cleans, prays. Exhibit B: A successful career woman (one assumes). Drinks. Dates. Heaven forbid, even occasionally gets laid. Exhibit C: The man. Beds Exhibit B but longs to marry Exhibit A. Did the movie really have to be set in London even? 

Did someone say regressive?

And this is a movie set in 2012. Also the year where one eleventh grader, a girl, was publicly attacked by a mob of men when exiting a pub.

These are the times. We seem to be a society that's largely been socially conditioned by murky margins. The outraged are real, but is their voice loud enough? Is their dissent weighty enough?

The movie is a mere dot on the board. The bigger problem lies elsewhere. The place where declarations like "She must've asked for it!" are flippantly thrown around. Where every rape, abuse, molestation is watered down to "Did she provoke it?" or "She must've asked for it!" but, that's a whole other post now, isn't t?

Am a woman. And am worried.

** A Henry Kissinger quote.