I’ve been watching Dubai Bling, and I think Desi Women need to enter a Self-Worth Arc.

I’ve been watching Dubai Bling, and I think Desi women need to enter a self-worth arc because colonialism took it. It’s just time, really. Desi women—and really all women of color that this applies to—need to stop playing the victim and the doormat. Because, honestly, nothing is going to change for us otherwise.

Whether it’s the beloved female Desi character on Dubai Bling or any show that depicts Desi women, we’re either acting like the controlling mother who gives to her own detriment or is the victim of other people’s shitty attitudes toward us—crying because they hurt our feelings and were mean to us. I get it. We are treated like shit, both in society and at home, across the world, really. We are treated poorly by our own families, where our mothers metaphorically perform fellatio on our brothers while wishing we were boys who made their life easier, and where our fathers range from emotionally absent to extremely abusive, metaphorically performing fellatio on the world to try and gain back respect that’s been ripped from them. Meanwhile, we receive constant criticism from the world even when we do exactly what they say.

It makes sense why we are cloyingly trying to gain the approval of the world that constantly denies us, but now is the time for change because we are clearly never going to get that acceptance outside of ourselves.

We hesitate to admit any of this because of the inevitable pain and rage that will come with facing how we’ve been treated and continue to be treated. But not dealing with these emotions keeps us emotionally reactive to everything—crying about some dick we chose to marry who treated us poorly without taking any personal accountability (see season 3 Dubai Bling). What in our upbringing attracted us to said jerk? I’m not saying they aren’t dicks, but take some accountability for trying to gain societal validation by following convention and inevitably failing because the system is designed to fail all women, and especially less privileged women.

Get some self-respect and stop caring about what other people think of you because, honestly, the evidence shows they don’t care anyway; they are caught up in their own pain.

Instead of whining about abortion rights, in a political system run by men that is designed to disadvantage women, stop giving your body and attention to substandard men and see how quickly everything changes, especially since we have some monetary power nowadays. Because at the end of the day, currently, our political system is run by men making laws that control us and the only way the men in power change is when their money is affected, whether that's in charging them for our attention or literally not giving them what they want without monetary benefit. Some may say that this sex work, and I would say that work is better than the current indentured servitude that most women have been experiencing in the form of marriage. Women are collectively ignorant of how transactional men are, especially with women. It’s just how they think—it’s not personal.

And if we want to live in a world with them, we need to speak in a language they understand because they’re too self-centered to try to understand ours.

Maybe they could, but they’re too busy being committed to their homoerotic relationships with each other. Why? Because society doesn’t expect them, as a class, to be emotionally or physically present fathers so they are raised by such men and perpetuate this cycle. Meanwhile, mothers play both roles, depleting themselves, and gaslighting themselves into thinking they’ve found “good men” to justify wasting their lives following societal conventions dictated by a world that doesn’t give a shit about women. Someone say, “Not all men”, I dare you.

Regardless, we need to realize as a collective—Desi women, women of color, all of us—that no one is coming to save us. White daddy isn’t coming. Brown daddy isn’t coming. No daddy is coming. Literally, no one is coming to save us. Ironically, the world teaches us that our value is in everything except what our actual value is in; which is our humanity that is cultivated in struggle against our instinctual desire for safety.

They tell us it’s in how much we give to other people—but no one respects women who give everything, especially men.

They tell us that being quiet and timid is “feminine” and that’s what will get us a “masculine” man that provides everything to the point that needing individual agency is unnecessary (this is infantilization). I swear I will throw myself off a building if I hear either of those terms again, used with zero understanding of what such transcendent concepts actually mean.

First of all, masculine and feminine energies are something we all have, and they’re culturally defined. (Please see my chart on how feminine and masculine energies are defined in South Asia versus the generic West.) Listening to internet personalities tell us how to act to earn male validation in the form of a relationship is the lowest we could possibly sink. This is the first time in history we’ve had the option to choose what we want to do with our lives because of the aforementioned, though nascent, monetary power—and seeing how bad the world is after being in the hands of men, it would behoove us to take a more active role in the world around us.

All this to say, woman to woman, I care about you enough to tell you the truth. Care about yourself and watch your world, and the world, change.