Camera or Vase

A very disturbing thought has invaded my mind recently and has built a nest there – and every few hours I hear the silent squeaking and the mute screeching in my head...
I was a searing feminist – I was an independent soul ...and the women who chose to objectify themselves were the sort...the type....the category I used to call “victims of society”. But now, my surety in myself sitting at the other side of the fence is slowly shaking, I can feel that fence crumble, can see the shiver under my feet and can feel an earthquake jar my self identity from its very core. A very simple universal and a loud question knocks against my brain and asks me three words...
Vase or camera?...

It is an interesting way we look at both these objects...
A vase ...ornamental, mute body of beauty, holding within itself, flowers of every season, yet sitting in the same corner – stagnant, unchanging, rather boring...growing older... mouldy...and yet becoming an integral part of the household...

And the disposable camera... in new versions, models, makes and colours... an accompaniment of the vacation...a break...a change... makes moments, captures transient joy and then without a second thought, once the usage is over, once the moments have been developed and handed to the owner, discarded as easily as it was picked...

As women, have we become confined to these parameters? To these definitions? To usages and moments? To boring stagnating existences and mute objectifications?
Have we become the vase...have we turned into the disposable camera?

For all my sensibilities and my opinions, for all my individuality and my intellect – I seem to be no different... I seem to have fallen prey to both these definitions...and in a period of less than 6 months...
For one man chose to have snapshots of moments with me... he lives for the moment while he kills every other scope of any more moments for the other – he is the one that knows it all – which is the better model of the camera at what time, what he can have, what he cant have, what he can afford to have, what he cant reach to. But I suppose that is how the market works....that is how the market of consumption goods worked for him – for in his momentary fast changing technological world – there is no word called durability that exists.
And the other – who wishes to exhibit me to the family unit – to make me a pretty vase on display and keep me stagnant at one place and space, to hold seasons and to live a uni-seasonal life...to make me a domestic object.

In both cases, we are objectified...so are we limited to the dual narrow bracket of wife or slut? Virgin or waste? Mute or loud?... in this journey from myself to these two, somewhere I have lost myself...and nowhere have I been happy... I do not wish to be a camera, I wish even less to be a vase – so as a woman where does that leave me and does it even leave me with any options... I had a sea of options holding out its multiplicity to me once upon a time...and now it is time to reaffirm my identity and have a dive into that sea before, in this dual dirt, I lose myself.

Q: Camera or vase?...
A: Neither.