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In the wake of #MeToo there are other trending hashtags like #NotAllMen to take away the focus from what women face everyday. In such a case, how can harassment ever stop?
With #MeToo, it’s an opportunity to take cognisance of something fundamentally decadent in our sociocultural idea of “normal”, that one fine day strikes us in our face as abhorrent. I penned down my thoughts as best as I could, after conversing with a lot of friends, family, colleagues and some introspection:
Last week, my friend and I were taking a stroll after dinner at a well-lit, very wide, public area of Jaipur. It was around 9 pm. Four young men on two bikes were riding on the same road. As they approached us from a distance, their shrill high pitched laugh increased. They began to swerve their motorbikes all across the road. They eventually passed us and went ahead. That’s an objective report of a seemingly normal event. For a man, yes.
Following is how a woman perceives and responds to such social situations. This is how most of us feel throughout the day – in homes, offices, streets, in public transport, private cabs, you name it. And if you think this is something new, you’re not talking to women in your lives. This is neither exaggeration, nor victimisation and this has to stop. It is not normal. It is not healthy. Not for your girls, not for your boys and not for a trans-person.
When I heard the roar of bikes with the raucous, carefree laughter, the sides of my ears burnt bright red with anxiety. The muscles in my stomach tensed up and my sweaty palms curled into fists. My jaws clenched and within seconds my blood was full of cortisol and adrenaline, ready to trigger a triple F response (fright, fight, flight). I was no longer listening to what my friend was saying, he probably didn’t even notice the bikes or my tensing up. Normally a human body does this when faced with grave- mind you, grave- danger. For instance, facing a predator, like a lion. Or when in a fatal accident. Imagine what a female mind and body must go through several times a day when we walk into a room, a coach, a street full of men. That’s us trying to be safe. That’s us putting our guards on.
I relaxed slowly when the voices of the bikers had died down and they were a “safe” distance away.
You would suggest that I visit a psychiatrist for what they call GAD- General Anxiety Disorder. You may even be well-meaning to suggest controlled releases of SSRI, just to “relax”. You may suggest me some yoga, some therapy, some breathing techniques or throw some new age Zen koan to my face. Trust me, none of that is the answer. I am not the only one. As women, we are trained to be safe. With our training day in and day out, this is how we show up in your world.
We still manage to outperform you with our menstrual woes, with unequal pay, with lewd remarks, clever emotional manipulations, with omnipresent molestation and of course the trending word these days- misogyny. Just for a minute, imagine what exactly it is to be a woman, and that too a cis-gendered, able-bodied, mentally healthy, heterosexual, upper caste, Hindu woman – in your world. I cannot even begin to deconstruct the marginalized, the minorities or those of us who are “weirdos”.
We have more people on our ‘Blocked list’ than in our contact list. We have to think a lot many things when we get a text or a call before responding. Hell, we have to deliberate exactly how responsive to be. We have to carefully choose the amount of skin we show, the pitch of our voice, the intensity of anger, the level of ambition, the weight of modesty, the burden of values, the sitting, the standing, the laughing… it is exhausting. We have to account for the fact that if anything triggered a man’s ire, lust, rage or ego, there is a battle ahead of us. Clearly, your world doesn’t make it your responsibility to manage yourself. And we’re getting tired of it. Just tired.
This is not just women’s issue. It is your issue too. You’re too far from the human inside of you. You have been bullied and desensitised long enough. Come home to yourselves now. Stop deifying or demeaning women, stop being entitled, stop defending harassment with your hashtags of Boys will be Boys and your #NotAllMen, just stop it all.
#MeToo is also an opportunity to talk to men in your lives – friends, family, and colleagues. Many of them want to stand up to shitty behavior but simply can’t, because of an overreaction of lewd bullying that denigrates their conscience as being “impotent”, “effeminate” or “smitten”. Whether or not criminals are booked, whether the skeletons falling out of the closet is ephemeral or long-standing, with #MeToo, India has an opportunity to reflect on just how normalized harassment and misogyny is in all spheres of our society.
A chance to understand that patriarchy damages all genders equally – by either victimising or desensitising them into lecherous masochists. A culture which equals being anything remotely “like a woman” as something demeaning, is flawed to the core. It is also why straight men hate and bully gay men, lesbian women and trans people. It is also why men find it impossible to claim that they were harassed without being psychologically traumatized by manly men around them. It is also why the bullied turn into bullies, it is also why our boys grow up to be emotionally unintelligent violent men and it is also why men can’t stand up to the insane pressure of always being in charge, performing and protecting in order to be socially valuable.
It doesn’t have to be an actual rape in order to classify someone as an accomplice or in order to ascertain what went wrong. We are all accomplices- even women. As far-fetched and radical it sounds, unless we start calling out misogyny and sexism for what it is in our movies, songs, daily conversations, in raising children, in “chalta hai” memes jokes and puns. We will forever be stuck in a vicious circle of “boys will be boys” and candle marches when another naked bloodied female body surfaces on our newsfeed.
Image Source – Still from the movie Judwaa
I am working as Deputy Manager in State Bank of India. I have opted for rural posting in Rajasthan in order to be able to understand, engage and serve the people who need public sector read more...
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My house-help asked excitedly, “I am going for wedding. Can you let me wear your red & black saree? To be honest I was stumped for a moment; I didn’t know what to say but I still said yes.
I lent a gorgeous saree to my house-help for a wedding in her family. Soon I stated getting questions if I would wear that saree again or if I was okay to be seen wearing the same saree my house-help was wearing?
We are all so conditioned to give our used clothes to our house-helps but are we okay to wear the clothes they were wearing?
A few days ago she came excitedly to me, “I am going for a family wedding. I want to wear your red & black saree, Ill wash and give it to you after the function. Please can you let me wear it?”
Beauty is a very clever, very evil capitalist tool. It traps those who have it into hanging on to it for dear life and those who don't into mutilating, torturing themselves to achieve the unachievable.
I recently wrote a piece about MP Shashi Tharoor’s tweet in which he had shared a pic with six women parliamentarians tagging them and saying “Who says the Lok Sabha isn’t an attractive place to work?”
There was a rash of comments on the post shared on Instagram, which ranged from “chill, it’s just a compliment” and “stop overthinking compliments”, to (worried) men lamenting about “these feminazi”.
Here’s my answer to all those comments.
Though #MeToo is getting widespread support, it is not free from criticisms. It is unwise to condemn the whole movement due to some of its loopholes.
Sexual harassment is coercion of an unwelcomed sexual nature by an individual towards another individual. It includes a range of behavior like humiliation, physical or mental abuse, and assault. Sometimes it is difficult for victims to describe what they are going through. The harasser could be a predatory harasser, dominance harasser, strategic harasser or street harasser.
In recent years many campaigns are being held for throwing light on sexual abuse. And The #MeToo campaign is one of them. Some people, which included both men and women have criticized it on the grounds that it would end up casting all men as perpetrators. While many people are supported this movement, few of them have actually fathomed the significance of this movement.
Some people fault the #MeToo campaign for not doing enough, but it is the first step to a world where we can say, #NotMe when it comes to sexual harassment.
Some people fault the #MeToo campaign for not doing enough at a practical level, but it is the first step to a world where we can confidently say, #NotMe when it comes to sexual harassment.
A few months back there was the horrifying sexual harassment scandal involving Hollywood Producer Harvey Weinstein. Before that, we have had too many – from Phaneesh Murthy to Bill Clinton. Sexual predators lurk everywhere. Last year, one of the topics trending on Twitter was #MeToo. It involved women speaking out about battling their own sexual abuse nightmares. The idea was to give a shout out to every survivor about the solidarity in the pain we share. Honestly, I don’t think there’s anyone of my sex who can say ‘not me’ here. It took me a lot of will power to revisit the dark memories and recount them.
Being groped, grabbed, touched inappropriately, flashed on the way to school, in crowded buses, in crowded temples, empty streets, railway coaches, overnight bus journeys for attending meetings at regional offices have occurred so frequently that at some point we have all started normalising such behavior and instead, chosen to stay alert. In one of the Kolkata hostels that I stayed for about three years, there was an incident of a pervert coming daily near the main gate at midnight, pulling down his pants to start masturbating to the silhouette of girls in the hostel. He could only make out the shadows of female forms, yet that was enough for him to get turned on. Despite reporting to the authorities, it took a while for the security guard to nab and hand him over to the police. But the audacity of the situation shocked us to a great extent.