Author: Urbii Utthasani
DOI Link: https://doi.org/10.70798/Bijmrd/04060009
Abstract: In June 2026, a 10-second clip from a Gurugram comedy show did what years of policy debates could not: it froze the entire country mid-scroll. A man in the audience said he had spent ₹370 on biryani, and so intimacy was “owed” to him. The video exploded. NCW filed complaints. FIRs were registered. Newsrooms ran 24-hour loops. For three weeks, India argued about ₹370, about men, about women, about who was offended and who was overreacting. But while the country fought over a plate of biryani, something quieter was happening. Consent training modules in Gurugram offices stayed un-updated. POSH complaints kept piling up in drawers. And the word “consent” itself — hard-won through decades of feminist legal work — got cheaper. It was used more, but meant less. This paper tells that story. Not just the story of ₹370 biryani, but of two other masks from the same year: a medical student’s joke about cadavers that turned medical ethics into a gender war, and a Bengaluru techie’s suicide note that was turned into a manifesto. All three wore the language of feminism — dignity, patriarchy, justice — but none delivered the boring, unglamorous work feminism actually requires: rewriting laws, auditing wages, training police, updating syllabi. Using critical discourse analysis and the idea of “counterfeit currency”, I argue that the real sociopolitical crisis is not feminism. It is counterfeit feminism. This paper critically examines the reconfiguration of feminist discourse within contemporary social media ecologies. Drawing upon critical discourse analysis, postfeminist theory, and media studies, I argue that platform affordances—algorithmic amplification, attention commodification, and affective virality—have catalyzed the emergence of “pseudo-feminism”: a counterfeit iteration of feminist politics characterized by symbolic performativity, lexical appropriation, and the evacuation of material praxis. When feminist words are spent for virality without material return, public trust inflates and crashes. The cost is polarization that kills coalitions, backlash that erodes trust, and attention theft that starves real reforms. The paper ends with a simple test to unmask content: does it have a policy ask, an outcome metric, and accountability? If not, it is costume, not cause.
Keywords: Pseudo Feminism, Radical Feminism, ₹370 Biryani Case 2026, Counterfeit Legitimacy, Gender Discourse, Affective Polarization, Post-Feminism, Platform Capitalism, Counterfeit Legitimacy
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