Some links (and scattered thoughts on the darker side of sexuality)

In light of the Delhi gang-rape and its aftermath, here’s a round-up of some of the more interesting pieces I’ve been reading. But first, anyone who hasn’t yet watched this video of a superb, rousing talk by Kavita Krishnan, secretary of the All India Progressive Women’s Association, please do (English translation here).

- Peter Griffin’s “The Problem is Us”. An excellent but far from comforting post, a reminder that some attitudes are so deeply embedded in the social fabric that significant change can happen – if it does – only at a painfully slow rate.

- Amulya Gopalakrishnan makes a similar point: “We can try to change the assumptions of a rape culture, by making sure girls and boys grow up with healthier gender roles, by making sexuality less repressed and dark than it is. These are all long-haul projects, the patient task of families and schools, and less emotionally satisfying than attacking Manmohan Singh.”

Prayaag Akbar’s “Why you shouldn’t call Delhi our rape capital” – a reminder of the dangers of journalistic shorthand, and how it can constrict our understanding of important issues.

Deepanjana Pal’s “The Great Young Hopeless”, about the nature and implications of the rage being expressed. (“Gathering in a public place, shouting slogans, feeling that sense of fraternity and shared passion–it feels so much better than sitting at home as though trussed by invisible ropes.”)

Shuddhabrata Sengupta’s “To the young women and men of Delhi”, an impassioned call to action for the country’s youth, with a reminder of some of the cultural contexts surrounding rape in our society.

Nilanjana S Roy’s reporting of – and thoughts on – the protests at Raisina Hill: notes from day 1; photos from day 2; at the heart of Delhi, no space for you.

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And a personal note about something that might not seem too central to the larger issues being currently discussed. One thing that has puzzled me about many of the columns/online discussions I have read recently is the perfunctory repetition of the idea that rape only has to do with power or control; that it has nothing to do with sex. Now of course, there’s no denying that power/control/subjugation are key factors, especially in a feudal society deeply divided across caste and class lines, where rape is often used as “punishment” or to put someone “in their right place”. And there is no question that for the victim, rape is emphatically not a sexual act or anything close to it. (It’s a pity this even has to be said, but it does. Just read a few randomly picked lines from Tehelka’s exposé of police attitudes, in which cops confidently state that the woman was a willing participant in many case of sexual harassment.) But why this need to convince ourselves that this is also, always, the case for the rapist?

For example, the Sengupta piece I linked to above summarily states that “the rapist’s intention is not sexual pleasure”, and then goes on to frame “sexual pleasure” in the warmest, most idealistic terms (“the ONLY way in which pleasure can be had is through the reciprocity of desire, through love, through erotic engagement, not through taking away someone’s agency by force and without consent”). One understands his imperative: to define sex only in terms of consensual sex that brings happiness to both (or however many) participants – as something beautiful and life-affirming. But might this be a little misleading, and not fully cognisant of the different ways in which men (or some men) and women might experience sex? Personally I think this particular aspect of the issue is more pragmatically expressed by Samrat in his piece “The Urge to Rape”:

The male sexual urge does seem to operate in a different way than the female [...] The rapes are not necessarily done to demonstrate power [...] They are probably done because, take away the restraining hands of law, faith and social decorum, and the beasts that reside deep in men assert themselves in those whose internal checks are flawed. Such men then do what they feel the urge to do. It is a physical and psychological thing. And this is not to say “men will be men”, but to say “men can be animals”.

That last sentence is a very important one. Perhaps a good reason why so many well-meaning people over-stress the rape-is-not-about-sex theory is to avoid worsening a situation where blame is so often placed on women for dressing provocatively. (In India, this attitude is widespread among even educated, apparently cosmopolitan people.) Or to avoid implying that the “uncontrollable urges” of men make rape inevitable. But I don’t see why such conclusions have to follow from an upfront, unblinking look at the complexities and variances in human nature.

In this context, an excerpt from the “Gender” chapter of a favourite book, Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate:

I believe that the rape-is-not-about-sex doctrine [...] is preposterous on the face of it, does not deserve its sanctity, is contradicted by a mass of evidence, and is getting in the way of the only morally relevant goal surrounding rape, the effort to stamp it out.

Think about it. First obvious fact: Men often want to have sex with women who don’t want to have sex with them. They use every tactic that one human being uses to affect the behaviour of another: wooing, seducing, flattering, deceiving, sulking, and paying. Second obvious fact: Some men use violence to get what they want, indifferent to the suffering they cause [...] It would be an extraordinary fact, contradicting everything else we know about people, if some men didn’t use violence to get sex.

Pinker touches on Susan Brownmiller’s vital 1975 book Against our Will, which helped change (mostly for the better) many attitudes towards rape, but which also spread the idea that rape is “nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear”. Essentially, Brownmiller said that patriarchial structures and the resultant social conditioning were the cause of rape – that it had nothing to do with anything inherent in human nature. It is this notion that Pinker sets out to question, while also stressing that this does not in any way mean giving a criminal a green chit:

As for the morality of believing the not-sex theory, there is none. If we have to acknowledge that sexuality can be a source of conflict and not just wholesome mutual pleasure, we will have rediscovered a truth that observers of the human condition have noted throughout history. And if a man rapes for sex, that does not mean that he “just can’t help it” or that we have to excuse him, any more than we have to excuse the man who shoots the owner of a liquor store to raid the cash register...

For a much fuller understanding of Pinker's position and the positions he is arguing against, do read the whole chapter – and the book, if you can. (Note: there is also a Camille Paglia quote in there, which might raise the hackles of many people debating the issues around sexual violence. Paglia does stir pots quite vigorously, and I don’t think I’ve ever read anything by her without feeling a tinge of discomfort, even when I’ve agreed with her basic thesis. Some of her not-always-politically-correct views on rape are similarly discomforting.)

[Also see: this post by “a retired call girl” who, I imagine, knows a thing or three about the darker manifestations of sexuality]

Update: two more links that may be relevant: Rapists Explain Themselves and Live Through This.

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P.S. This is of course a very complex subject and I’m not trying to disentangle the issue of power/control from the issue of sexual gratification – just to suggest that the two things usually operate together, with one or the other being more dominant depending on the context. For instance, soldiers clinically using mass-rape as a “weapon” in wartime is a very different situation from a horny boy date-raping a girl after a certain amount of heavy-petting; but I'm inclined to think that the male sexual urge (however warped it might be, and however much it discomfits us to think of it as sexual) does play a – proportionally very small – part in the former case too.

Anyway, I'll be patronisingly chauvinistic now and give a woman the last word. After writing this post, I had an email exchange with Nilanjana about the subject, and here is some of what she said:

You only need to talk to rapists to recognise that both parts of the act of rape--the domination, and the sexual act itself--bring them great satisfaction. Bluntly, in that brutal gangrape, only the woman was raped. Her friend was beaten up, and under different circumstances, men have also raped men to assert their dominance--prison, police stations and war zones are often theatres for male rape--but that didn't happen here. Their focus in terms of sexual assault was the woman; their focus in terms of violent, non-sexual assault is the man. Brownmiller wrote her book in the late 1970s, after Serbia and Bosnia, and she had a key moment of recognition: rape was not an individual act, but far more often a collective assertion of power by groups of men. At that time, it was particularly important to recognise that women raped in war, for instance, were not being raped out of lust: they were being raped as an act of extreme violence, in line with other acts of violence.

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Perhaps you have to contend with the idea that there are two kinds of what we call "rape". One, which Brownmiller and more recently Hudson and Den Boer speaks about, is rape used as a tool of power, as a way to assert caste, community, tribe or clan dominance. It is, in that sense, impersonal: any Dalit woman will do, any woman who steps out of line and "dishonours" the family can be used, any woman who is seen as property to be annexed will do as the object of rape. Often, in these cases, the rapists also have the tacit or open approval of the community, and will face no social censure or punitive action at all. Any lust the men feel is incidental to their role in these assaults, which is the role of the punisher, his authority sanctioned by the clan.

The other, and this has to be acknowledged, is an act of extreme sexual violence. It may have domination at its roots, but it also has pleasure, however ugly, as its goal.

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Another thought: don't underestimate the rage and the deep anger that accompanies rape, often as powerful and as important as sexual pleasure. In many cases of "close friends and family" rape, the act is intended as a punishment in exactly the same way as it is in caste rapes and some war rapes. The punishment is meted out to the woman who's out of line, or who has strayed away from her (male) protector. I think we do talk far too much about sexual urges, and not enough about how a sense of righteous anger--or sometimes absolute open rage, how dare this woman be free?--is the driver. 

Sunday Guardian snippets: on euphemisms, R K Narayan and a wordless comic book

[From my weekly books column; some earlier snippets here, here and here]

The evolution and use of language is vital to any study of our species, and for an insight into the human tendency to tiptoe around delicate subjects, you can’t do much better than consider the history of euphemisms. It goes back a long way. Thousands of years ago, predators were alluded to rather than directly named; since people couldn't always distinguish between spoken words and the things they stood for, they feared that simply saying “tiger” aloud would result in the undesired appearance of the beast. (Candyman, anyone?) Today we are a wiser lot – in some ways, anyhow – but plain-speaking is still well beyond our skill set, especially when it comes to subjects such as sex, death and bodily excretions.

Ralph Keyes’ book Unmentionables (originally published as Euphemania and now subtitled “From Family Jewels to Friendly Fire – What We Say Instead of What We Mean”) is an entertaining look at the history of euphemistic language, ranging from ribald Shakespearean lines (Iago to Desdemona’s distraught father: “Your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs”) to Winston Churchill being told by an American lady at a dinner party to say “white meat” instead of “breast of chicken” (a probably apocryphal story goes that he sent her a corsage with the message “Pin this on your white meat”). Along the way, Keyes reminds us of the often-surreal consequences of indiscriminate bowdlerising, such as the Associated Press article that changed the name of the athlete Tyson Gay to Tyson Homosexual, or the email filter in the Internet’s early days that prevented residents of Scunthorpe from registering themselves online. (Why, you ask? Check the second to fifth letters of the town’s name.)

Unmentionables starts to wear a little thin after the first few chapters (the book is primarily a trivia-trove), but I liked its recurring motif that certain words come to be perceived as “good” or “bad” as their associations change over time. Steven Pinker and other experts on language have written about how (for instance) the word “nigger” was once used benevolently – including by progressive-minded people who campaigned for equal rights – but eventually became taboo because of its widespread pejorative use by bigots. Many of its "politically correct" replacements have become similarly corrupted through association with prejudiced attitudes. In a world entirely free of discrimination, censorship of this sort would be unnecessary – but then, reading and writing would be drabber processes too. As it is, it’s fun to speculate that many of the words we today regard as being innocuous will have sinister connotations in a few decades.

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It’s been a good month for classic Indian fiction – Penguin’s new editions of R K Narayan books were followed by Random House India’s Classics Series, with Arunava Sinha translating Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Durgeshnandini into English. The Narayans gave me a chance to catch up with a writer whom many Indian readers of my generation take for granted – if your memories of Malgudi are restricted to short stories in class 6 textbooks, rediscovering him is quite an experience.

One myth about Narayan should be quickly dispelled: that his writing is “simple” in the sense that you can just pick up one of his books and race through them. This notion has been perpetuated by some of today’s mass-market writers who seek to validate their own non-literariness through association. For example, Chetan Bhagat has admitted to being influenced by Narayan’s no-flourishes style, which might create the misleading impression that Narayan can be read in the same way that you can read a Bhagat novel (it took me barely an hour to finish Five Point Someone). Certainly there is a basic directness in Narayan’s prose – an emphasis on narrative rather than “style” – but sentence by sentence, his best work has the refinement, the carefulness, the knack for observation and description, that you expect in good literary fiction. There’s little that’s casual about it.

Consider this early passage from The Vendor of Sweets:

The bathroom was a shack, roofed with corrugated sheets; the wooden frame was warped and the door never shut flush, but always left a gap through which one obtained a partial glimpse of anyone bathing. But it had been a house practice, for generations, for its members not to look through [...] A very tall coconut tree loomed over the bath, shedding enormous withered fronds and other horticultural odds and ends on the corrugated roof with a resounding thud. Everything in this home had the sanctity of usage, which was the reason why no improvement was possible. Jagan’s father, as everyone knew, had lived at first in a thatched hut at the very back of this ground. Jagan remembered playing in a sand heap outside the hut; the floor of the hut was paved with cool clay and one could put one’s cheek to it on a warm day and feel heavenly.

The prose here is functional, but it’s also assured and humorous, and commands the reader’s full attention (the passage is randomly selected, by the way; you can open the book almost anywhere and find another like it). One also senses a pioneering Indian writer in English trying to create a visual picture of his world for the foreign readership that he knows his books will reach - it’s ironical that many people take jingoistic pride in the idea that Narayan was a provincial man who never wrote for the West.

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“We wanted to challenge certain notions about what a comic is, about what it can do and should do,” says the editor’s note for a slim new graphic novel titled Hush. The book’s title couldn’t be more appropriate – this story about an unhappy, angry schoolgirl with a gun in her hand is completely wordless, propelled not by written text but by vivid black-and-white drawings. The experience of “reading” it can be initially unsettling, but as I turned the pages for the second time I found the images speaking with the force of a good, visually inventive sequence in a silent movie – a film made in an era when directors could aspire towards pure cinema.

Hush – based on a story by Vivek Thomas, and drawn by Rajiv Eipe – is the first title by the independent publishing house Manta Ray Comics, set up by former engineering students Dileep Cherian and Pratheek Thomas. Cherian and Thomas are big fans of graphic novels, but as the former tells me on email, they feel the need for more mature material in the genre in India. “We think we can produce original material rather than rehashing mythology for a Western audience, and we want Manta Ray to become a platform for original creators, artists and writers.” If one of their goals, as Cherian says, is “to amplify the voices of interesting people”, they've made a good start.