SOCIAL SCIENTIST immense power over our subconscious self definitions. Television ads are seductively defining the persona of the "modern" woman, an entity that we, within the women's movement cannot ignore. And it is because of this seductive though ambiguous projection that we find, echoes of a familiar rhetoric popularised by the struggles of the women's movement, being appropriated in the service of systems and structures that these struggles were and are being waged against. The meanings of words like rights, equality, freedom or even empowerment seem to be sliding out of our control and even beyond our comprehension. In what follows, I attempt to address this process, but not in order to reject it as one more ploy of capitalist patriarchy to keep the gendered status quo in operation. Rather, the object of this exercise is to ask whether, given the power and effectivity of the medium and the genre itself, is it possible to use these for our purposes? "Honest, Sexy, Smart - Cosmopolitan - Are you up to it?" Thus ran the copyline for the Cosmopolitan launch ad in the print media. This international women's magazine came to India in 1996, and brought with it the ambiguous idea of "post feminism".1 The print ad was further buttressed by the television ad that showed a pair of hands, one male and the other female emerging out of the opposite ends of the screen and shaking in mid-screen. The voice over said, "The magazine that believes that the battle of the sexes should end in a draw - Cosmopolitan. Are you up to it?". The copylines of both these advertisements pose a direct challenge to the ideology and practices fostered by feminists. First, they interpellate Indian women from an apparently more sophisticated, global woman's position. This western woman is obviously more "modern" and her modernity and westerness are each reciprocally and mutually comprehensible. Now if the Indian woman is to emulate this evidently more sophisticated example, she will have to stretch herself in order to be "up to it". And what are the tangible qualities that she will have to acquire in order to be up to it? Honesty, sexiness and smartness. The latter couple of adjectives may well make feminists committed to debates on sexuality, choice, depth, beauty and the like sit up and take note. Yet, can we fault the open assertion of sexuality, the celebration of one's confidence and pride in one's own body, a rejection of age-old inhibitions and discourses of impurity, taboo and shame? Here we are caught in a bind - for without spelling it out, in a single economical move, the rhetoric of our engagement over a crucial issue has been shorn of its context, its political implications and its complexity and presented as a life-style definition.