Blank Noise Project

My Blank Noise Project Blogathon post is way overdue - so here it is.

The Project is based on (or rather, against) sexual harassment, or ‘eve-teasing’ as it is euphemistically known in India. Being a guy, I haven’t had too much first hand experience of the same, but I do have plenty of opinions nevertheless.

India ranks quite high on the global country wise list for number of sexual harassment cases. On par with some of the worst countries in the world in this respect. I am not going to quote any figures, but it’s evident that for a woman India isn’t the safest country in the world. Almost any Indian woman would assure you of this much. And so would a lot of the foreign tourists in the country. Most Western female tourists, who are traveling to India alone, are advised before they leave to wear a fake wedding ring and carry a photo of themselves with a man and a kid. And while pretending to be married like this might put off someone who starts to show too much unwanted interest in you, it will do little about the constant stares and unnecessary brushes and touches you will receive on the bus or even the sidewalk.

In order to counter this, or at least make a pretense of doing so, most Indian women are either advised to or coerced into taking defensive action. Wear clothes that are less revealing, don’t go out alone after dark, avoid looking at strangers in the eye, travel by a special car on trains which is reserved only for ladies, don’t talk to strangers, etc. This isn’t really taking on the problem at hand. It’s just finding an ad hoc solution to help you handle an unpleasant situation in front of you.

To understand how the entire problem can be improved in a constructive manner, one needs to understand the cause of the problem to begin with. Why do Indian men behave in this way? Sure, men in other countries are no saints either - some better, some worse - but let’s just take a look at India for now. There are two main reasons, in my opinion, for this behavior of Indian men.

The first reason is that India in general (and Indian men in particular) are, to use a term that I first came across on Vikrum’s blog, ‘sexually repressed’. What do I mean by this? I mean that sex and all topics related to it have become so taboo in India, that most Indians do not have a proper means of releasing their sexual feelings. There is also a huge deal of ignorance in matters related to the topic in India. So, when a thus sexually repressed man sees an opportunity for cheap thrills by grabbing the ass of the woman in front of him in a crowd, he does it. I am not defending him, only trying to put forth possible causes for the action.

The second important reason is that Indian society has for quite some time been one that looks down upon women. It’s a thoroughly male-dominated society, where women are denigrated, considered inferior and even unsuitable for certain tasks. Indian daughters are either killed before (or sometimes at) birth, or are made to feel inferior to their male siblings. Often it’s not just their male relatives but even their own mothers that are responsible for this. I can’t really blame them, society has ingrained it into them. But I can’t totally forgive them either.

By the time she grows up, an Indian girl has already been told quite clearly what her role in society is. Or at least what it’s supposed to be. The few who try to buck the trend and swim against the tide, soon realize that this isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do. Some give up, others fight on. With the odds always against them. I respect such people. Society, unfortunately, more often than not doesn’t.

And when one lives in a society that is this biased against women, it is fairly obvious that men will start trying to use women in whatever ways they can to satisfy themselves, without really thinking much about how the woman might feel. So even though he knows that his pressing himself against the woman next to him on the bus makes the woman feel uncomfortable and unpleasant, but he does it anyway because he figures that he is more important than her.

How do we go about combating this? Do we, as a society, become stricter? I think we need to go about it the other way. We need to become more liberal! We need to do away with the taboo on sex related matters as soon as we can. We need to stop acting like hypocritical prudes and claim that anything that has to do with sex and sexual liberation goes against the ‘Indian’ culture! India needs sexual liberation and pronto! Things are moving to a very slight extent in that direction, but far too slowly. And they’re also getting worse at the same time. It’s a case of ‘one step foward, two steps back’.

Some months ago, I had written this post, in which I spoke about Iceland. Like I said then, Iceland has one of the most liberal societies in the world, and the frequency of crimes against women is almost nil. Why? Not because they have strict laws against all of it! But because they are sexually liberated. There’s no pent-up sexual tension in them that releases itself in pathetic ways like sexual harassment. India would do well to try and follow suit.