Edition 02 — The Asking Price

Two sessions on women, backlash, desire, and the performance of freedom — August 2026

Every generation of women inherits a version of liberation and then discovers what it cost the previous one. Susan Faludi named the mechanism in 1991. Thirty years later the mechanism is still running, just with better branding.

Edition 02 looks at what women are asked to give up in order to be seen — as aspirational, as desirable, as free. And at the women who refused the asking price entirely, and what happened to them.

Session 01 — What does liberation cost? August 2026 · Venue TBC · 2.5 hours · ₹999

Susan Faludi's Backlash argues that every feminist gain produces a counter-movement designed to roll it back — and that this counter-movement works best when it's invisible, when it looks like culture, taste, common sense. We pair it with a film that watches this mechanism play out in contemporary India: women performing aspiration inside institutions that were never built for them.

One text names the structure. The other shows you where to look for it.

Pre-reading sent a week before. Film revealed on the night.

Session 02 — What does desire cost? August 2026 · Venue TBC · 2.5 hours · ₹999

Protima Bedi lived in ways that made people deeply uncomfortable — not because she was reckless but because she was free on her own terms, which turned out to be the more unforgivable thing. We pair her memoir with a documentary filmed in an Osaka host club, where young men sell emotional intimacy to women for a living, and everyone in the room is performing something for someone else.

Both texts ask what we are really exchanging when we call it desire.

Pre-reading sent a week before. Film revealed on the night.