1. When Kerala women (and others) decided to celebrate the run-up to Onam by uploading videos of themselves dancing to a song about earrings, a thieving father and an alcoholic mother.
2. When we imagined IIT Madras alumnus Purvi Gupta meeting 13-year-old Aanya Soni in Antarctica.
3. When, in an inadvertently inspiring and significant win, “feminism” beat out “complicit” to become Merriam-Webster’s word of the year.
4. When we watched 46 women of different sizes, shapes and abilities dance to Fit Is Not A Body Type.
5. When we got proof of how awesome women in uniform can be, in the form of UP cop Shrestha Thakur, IPS Merin Joseph, IAS Gauri Parashar Joshi and Sasikala’s nemesis DIG Roopa.
6. When The New York Times investigative journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey broke the bombshell Harvey Weinstein story, leading to the Reckoning.
7. When thousands of Indian women on Twitter deployed the #MeToo moment for some major and obvious truth-bombs.
8. When way before #MeToo we kicked out a few of our own Weinsteins, from The Viral Fever’s Arunabh Kumar to filmmaker Vikas Bahl.
9.When the Indian women’s cricket team were runners-up at the World Cup and got its long overdue fanbase and mythologising.
10. When ex-politician Rakhi Sawant complimented Amit Shah’s khopdi and informed us that some Bollywood stars are born in a golden spoon.
11. When yarn shops (oh, America!) ran out of pink yarn thanks to the overwhelming demand to make pink pussyhats in time for the massive Women’s March on Washington. Also, when we heard the word ‘pussyhats’.
12. When 23-year-old Saikhom Mirabai Chanu lifted a total of 194 kgs over two lifts, giving India its first weightlifting World Championships gold medal since 1995.
13. When Culture Machine started a nationwide debate on period leave, which, in turn inspired Malayalam media house Mathrubhumi to implement the policy and Barkha Dutt to take a trip down memory lane to the Kargil War.
14. When Mollywood’s leading ladies made Kerala CM Pinarayi Vijayan feel awkward by taking a group picture with him to commemorate the creation of the Women in Cinema Collective, formed to ensure that women wouldn’t need to go crying to AMMA with their problems anymore.
15. When Raya Sarkar’s online list of Indian men in academia accused by women of repeated sexual harassment created a seismic, feminist moment.
16. When we read what 100 women had told Agents of Ishq about masturbation.
17. When the sight of so many revolutionary Dalit women at Dalit Women Speak Out inspired Radhika Vemula to speak about herself, and not her son, for possibly the first time.
18. When three notable grandmothers showed us how it’s done: Nannamal, the bendy 94-year-old yoga champ; Mastanamma, the allegedly 106-year-old YouTube celebrity chef and watermelon-chicken-maestro, and Tatiana Subbotina, a Russian grandma who spends her days using VFX to depict herself being carried away by a flying hawk or bobbing about in water bodies.
19. When we discovered The Grindmill Songs Project, which has recorded 3,302 women from 1,107 villages in Maharashtra singing while using the grindmill.
20. When Priyanka Chopra announced that she is producing a sitcom based on Madhuri Dixit’s life in suburban US.
21. When actor Richa Chadda looked into her crystal ball and predicted that #MeToo will hit Bollywood in 5 years.
22. When Delhi DJ Varnika Kundu told the country that it was her stalker, son of a high-powered-politician, who should be ashamed and hiding, not her.
23. When Main Kuch Bhi Kar Sakti Hoon, a Doordarshan sex-ed show, became India’s most watched TV show.
24. When power-lifter Kavita Devi became the first woman from India to get a WWE contract.
25. When the judges at the Supreme Court made us feel romantic towards them by telling the government to stop saying citizens don’t have a right to privacy.
26. When Indian cricket captain Mithali Raj became the highest run-getter in the history of women’s ODI cricket, and shut down a reporter’s sexist question.
27. When we stumbled upon the beautiful Girls At Library (GAL), a site for whom reading is a full-blown, fetishisable lifestyle.
28. When we heard that three of the six Infosys prize (Rs 65 lakh) winners were women this year and, for the first time, two in the pure sciences.
29. When decades of fierce campaigning by Muslim women’s collectives led to the Supreme Court declaring Triple Talaq unconstitutional.
30. When Delhi student Gurmehar Kaur reminded the country that beating up students isn’t nationalism but a violent attack on democracy.
31. When the largest study to analyse the diversity of sexual pleasure among heterosexual women concluded that (surprise!) there is no one-size-fits all solution to the female orgasm.
32. When we read Sujatha Gidla’s memoir Ants among Elephants: An Untouchable Family And The Making of Modern India, a passionate retelling of growing up Dalit, rebellious and intellectual.
33. When Kangana Ranaut kept giving all the nepotistic, cliquey thems in Bollywood the finger.
34. When it started raining condoms thanks to the government’s decision to distribute them for free, and the launch of India’s first condom delivery store.
35. When we had roaring and happy Eng Lit flashbacks because the year saw the discovery of a lost play by Edith Wharton and two lost poems by Sylvia Plath.
36. When a new book interviewed professional women drivers across the country.
37. When Mary Kom won her fifth gold at the Asian Boxing Championships.
38. When the Indian Army’s announcement that it would take on women in active combat roles gave us complex feelings, and when Shubhangi Swaroop became the Indian Navy’s first woman pilot.
39. When Indian women really couldn’t take the government’s defences of its exorbitant GST on pads anymore, and decided to send the Finance Minister hundreds of pads in the mail.
40. When Anaarkali of Aarah refused to stop singing or speaking.
41. When KC Rekha became India’s first and only licensed fisherwoman.
42. When teenaged sisters Nikitha and Neha Suresh in Thiruvanthapuram karate-chopped a policeman who groped Nikitha.
43. When the Internet gave us two Frida Kahlo gifts: Frida emojis and a rare picture of her in a saree flanked by two Indian friends.
44. When Katherine Switzer, who first ran the Boston Marathon secretly in 1967 when women were banned from the race, ran the Marathon again 50 years later.
45. When a Mexican teenager invented a bra that can detect breast cancer.
46. When Srishti Bakshi quit her job and set out to walk 3,800 km across India in 260 days to spread the message of women’s safety.
47. When a 10th century Viking skeleton in warrior regalia was newly identified through genetic testing as a woman, leading to angry arguments among archaeologists about the role of women in Viking society.
48. When Hollywood made this great movie about three female African-American mathematicians in NASA’s space programme in the 1960s.
49. When the Kerala government launched depression clinics to make women happy.
50. When Telangana MLA Geeta Reddy was ready to lend her copy of a book on surrogacy to the government for the greater good, but only if the government promised to return it.
51. When the Supreme Court said, “A woman has a sacrosanct right to her bodily integrity and it’s her choice” while passing a judgement allowing a woman to abort her 24-week-old foetus with grave cardiac abnormalities, and then a few months later dismissed a lawsuit asking for the “husband’s consent to terminate a pregnancy”.
52. When 20-year-old transperson Tarika Banu won her case to get a seat at a medical college in Tamil Nadu.
53. When Priyanka Chopra responded to being trolled by millions for wearing a knee-length dress when meeting the PM, by posting a photo of herself and her mother in short dresses.
54. When Yoko Ono got a songwriting credit on Imagine 40 years after the song was released.
55. When we realised The Muslimah Sex Manual: A Halal Guide to Mind Blowing Sex by the pseudonymous Umm Muladhat is a real thing and has tips for everything from sexting to bondage.
56. When the Karnataka High Court adopted some sophisticated legal reasoning to tell a woman she had the “right to be forgotten”.
57. When the Lipstick Under My Burqa poster made Pahlaj Nihalani wonder whether the finger was coming for him.
58. When Patty Jenkins made us all want to fall into Wonder Woman’s golden lasso, and Angela Robinson’s biopic of the creator of Wonder Woman gave a matter-of-fact treatment to polyamory.
59. When Serena Williams set a record with her 23rd Grand Slam in straight set after straight set in Melbourne, and then when she revealed that she had been eight weeks pregnant when she won.
60. When Teresa Woodruff invented a chip that mimics the way a multi-organ female reproductive system works, so that scientists could see the effects of different drugs.
61. When more than 6,500 women from 21 states danced the Kerala dance form Thiruvathirakkali and set a Guinness World record.
62. When Border & Fall curated an amazing online exhibition of sari drapes from across the country.
63. When international law expert Neeru Chadha became the first Indian woman to be appointed as a judge at ITLOS, a UN tribunal that deals with disputes related to the law of the sea.
64. When we realised that half the Internet had spent a December weekend arguing whether Kristen Roupenian’s short story about a date gone bad, Cat Person, was a good story, and then again when we heard that Roupenian had got a 7-figure, two-book deal.
65. When 17-year-old Indrani Das won the $2,50,000 (Rs 1.63 crore) prize in the Regeneron Science Talent Search competition for her research on treatment of brain injuries.
66. When artist Sudha Pillai won our hearts with her depiction of a woman praying for her husband to receive the Nobel Prize for marrying her, as part of her series parodying Malayalam soap-serials.
67. When a new drug promised a low-cost solution to massively reduce maternal deaths because of blood loss.
68. When Benaras Hindu University got its first woman proctor in its 101-year-long history, who then immediately showed her excellent, normal-human-person colours.
69. When actor Parvathy gave cinema, Malayalam and feminist crafts a boost with one single, mind-bending tweet.
70. When we heard Zohra, Afghanistan’s excellent and first all-female orchestra.
71. When the governments of Karnataka and Punjab both told girls that their education will now be free.
72. When a 15-year-old girl disguised herself as a boy and jumped into Sabarimala temple, joining several others who attempted the same risky move this year.
73. When Sia’s Cheap Thrills evoked everyone’s inner Bharatnatyam dancer.
74. When iconic Clarence Thomas-accuser and inspiration behind last year’s Kerry Washington-starrer Confirmation, Anita Hill, was made the head of a new commission to combat sexual harassment in Hollywood.
75. When the boss ladies of Pembilai Orumai refused to call off their protest against Kerala Electricity Minister MM Mani’s sexist remarks, demanding that he fall at their feet and apologise.
76. When left-arm spinner Ekta Bisht became the only cricketer to be picked by the ICC for both the ODI and T20I teams of the year.
77. When Pinjra Tod left bras on the walls of the Shri Ram Centre to protest judges deducting points from a student play which used the words ‘bra’ and ‘panty’.
78. When the biggest and most dazzling American female pop stars created a support system. Shine Theory, anyone?
79. When we found out that Christiane Nusslein-Volhard, the Nobel prize-winning biologist, set up a special grant for young women scientists that pays for assistance in household chores and for additional childcare.
80. When artist Kruttika Susarla took the 36 Days Of Type challenge to create a feminist reimagination of the alphabets.
81. When embattled activist and living legend Irom Sharmila invited fellow embattled activist and star Divya Bharathi to be a bridesmaid at her August wedding in Kodaikanal.
82. When Indian boxers became the top champions at the AIBA World Women’s Youth Boxing Championships for the first time with five gold medals.
83. When we heard that Delhi Police’s women bike squad Raftaar was prompting women students on campus to ask, “Kitna time laga seekhne mein, mujhe bhi bike leni hai, kitne cc ki hai, kitni speed tak chalayi hai?”
84. When a student leader at Aligarh Muslim University’s Women’s College, whose elections plank was seven days of outings, celebrated her victory with women roaring into campus on motorcycles.
85. When the Internet united one afternoon to out male authors who made their wives do their work for them. #ThanksForTyping
86. When we started following the adventures of Aisha Eshbani, a 13-year-old Karachi resident who is on a mission to read a book from every country.
87. When 38-year-old Anshu Jamsenpa became the world’s first woman to climb Everest twice in five days.
88. When PV Sindhu won the India Open Superseries, the Korea Open Superseries, silver in the 2017 World Championship and took charge as Deputy Collector in Andhra Pradesh.
89. When Tamil cinema buzzed with women-centred scripts from Aramm and Aruvi to Magalir Mattum.
90. When Nashra Balagamwalla channeled her end-of-US-visa blues into a board game where players escape arranged marriages and their transmitters, rishta-aunties.
91. When Saudi Arabia finally lost the distinction of being the only country that stopped women from driving.
92. When Tamil Nadu went bananas for Bigg Boss Tamil contestant Oviya.
93. When transgender plus-sized model Mona Varonica Campbell opened a Wendell Rodricks show.
94. When Jammu and Kashmir got its first ever women’s football team.
95. When Iceland, which ranks first on The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, decided to top its own personal best and create a law mandating equal pay for men and women.
96. When Punjab policewoman Manjit Kaur turned up at her lesbian wedding in Jalandhar decked out in a sherwani, pagdi and a garland of cash notes.
97. When 24-year-old Saffiya Khan stood with her hands in her pockets and smiled in the face of a racist British protester who was bullying another woman.
98. When our friends at Khabar Lahariya met local farmer Indira, Lalitpur’s first woman tractor driver.
99. When Lahore resident Khadija Siddiqi pursued a conviction, in the face of enormous intimidation, against the influential man who had stabbed her 23 times.
100. When an unidentified Punjabi woman was so invigorated by her own morning scooter ride that she broke out into a well-received bhangra on the highway.
https://twitter.com/UnrealTalib/status/848612510118932480?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw