This social media post was created using a public media advertisement designed by the Sri Lankan branch of the Unilever PLC under one of their popular brands VIM dishwash cleaner. It simply says that “teach your daughters young girls (only) how to clean dishes using Vim”. This has been originally published in Twitter by Anjula Hettige on his personal Twitter account and later it was widely circulated among Facebook and Twitter users in Sri Lanka.

This post was able to capture hundreds of Sri Lankan women’s’/girls’ attention as they experienced the same scenarios in their everyday lives. Personally, I was asked to learn cooking, cleaning, washing dishes since my childhood while my brother was spending his time watching movies or playing video games. Majority of the reactions for this post were either negative comments or angry emojis. It was observed that many reactors criticized the irresponsible marketing behavior of a multinational company like Unilever, despite the substantial efforts made to build a public and policy discourses on redistribution of household care responsibilities. Some reactors accused Unilever for using negative attention to promote the brand through an unsustainable strategy in spite of achieving gender balance across management globally as they published on their official website. Moreover, it was very interesting to observe that some of the young girls made an effort to show their displeasure on this advertisement and voice about their opinions on typical gender roles publicly. One of the reactors commented on Facebook: “First off the mother in the ad should be replaced with the father - irrespective of whether he is teaching the daughter or son. The changes need to happen in this generation, we don’t have to wait for the next”.

In fact, this type of negative content is based on the typical consumer behavior and belief system of the particular society. Not only majority of the Sri Lankans but also the most parts of the South Asia have the cultural mind set of traditional gender roles. As Nancy Fraser points out on her book Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis, these stereotypes are basically centered on the ideal of the family wage (Fraser, 2013) and male-headed patriarchal families, which depend on principally from the husband’s labor and earnings. The society which I born is expected to act and groom women and girls based upon their assigned sex. Different perspectives including religions and cultural philosophies have also backed this thinking and made people believe that women do exist to take care of homes and babies. Eventually, these ideologies are leading to deprive young girls from their education and getting them married at a very young age. In such a context, this type of advertisements and promotions would inculcate the ideas of typical gender roles and made lives more difficult for women and young girls. This made me to think how difficult is to live a feminist life and believe in feminist ideals in a developing society. When I talked about such topics at home or with my colleagues, I was blamed and labeled as a problem creator. As Sara Ahmed argues, our social circles believe that feminists do look for problems, it was not a problem until you point out so that feminists create new problems (Ahmed, 2013). When I reached my 20’s, I was asked often by my relatives whether I can make a tea or cook curries despite questioning about the status of my education or progress of my career. For them it was not a survival skill which everyone should learn, but a skill should be developed by women to make a happy family. Most of them are not interested to know whether women are happy with what they do. Sara Ahmed calls it ‘the lack of feminist consciousness’ or ‘false consciousness’ (Ahmed, 2013) Although the majority see the problem, they do not seem too conscious of what happens in front of them. False consciousness does not refer something that individuals suffers from, but the entire society or generation. Till people realize this, would be harder to build a feminist society which helps to live a feminist life. This is why I think the feminist consciousness is so important in order to realize the fact that gender equality could benefits everyone.