This slut wants your silence broken

(This article of mine appeared in The Financial World, the Tehelka newspaper. Here’s the official link. It resulted in a lot of fanmail and Facebook-sharing, and of course, untrammelled rightwing rage on Twitter. Quite the expected response, but I am happy that I got people talking/thinking!)

Celebrating the loud, slutty sensibility
Or how, the militant assertion of female sexuality can change Indian men

A TORONTO police officer’s off-the-cuff misogynist remark – “Women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised” – to York University students during a campus-safety briefing earlier this year triggered the first SlutWalk on April 3, and since then nearly 100 events have taken place, or, are being planned, globally to challenge the victim-blaming, sex-shaming attitude.

With slogans like “A dress is not a yes” and “We have had enough,” young women not only wear their riot-girl attitude in the open, they also go about reclaiming the word ‘slut’, declaring that irrespective of whether a woman enjoys sex for pleasure or work, it is never an invitation to violence. And since the corporate control over the mainstream media ensures that ‘sexy’ becomes visibile, SlutWalk is being heralded as the feminist revival of our times. Cheering the thousands of women who marched for the cause worldwide, feminist icon Germaine Greer spoke out in support of the defiant display of the right to be dirty, going so far as to suggest that “the rejection by women of compulsory cleansing of mind, body and soul is a necessary precondition of liberation”.

Women in the West are privileged enough to be loud and be heard, but the fight against street sexual harassment has been around for a long time in India. I can think of at least two young feminist initiatives – Blank Noise and Mend the Gap – that have campaigned against a prejudicial, protectionist mindset that provocative dressing leads to victimisation.

It is a known fact that beyond television and Twitter, laying claim to public spaces in central to every revolution. For instance, Brand MK Gandhi makes one immediately think of the Salt March to Dandi. A SlutWalk seamlessly fits into this fashion-forward formula. Given our inherent love of spectacle, how many Desi SlutWalks will have to be organised to break the shackles of silence around this everyday terror (that is ludicrously called ‘eve-teasing’ by the media and defined legally as ‘attempt to outrage a woman’s modesty’)?

In our context, merely fighting the manifestation of an evil will only provide a quick-fix reality-TV friendly solution that will not address, or attack, the disturbing root cause of the problem itself.

It is flawed logic to expect Indian men to not indulge in leching, leering, groping, harassing, molesting and raping women on the streets when they are seasoned wife-beaters at home. According to UN statistics, more than two-thirds of married Indian women have experienced domestic violence; when our homes are unsafe, it is impossible to imagine our streets will turn safe unless we address the fundamental assumption that men have a right to control women’s bodies.

While it is essential to foreground issues that require immediate attention, it is unwise to stick to a superficial approach that forgets the larger picture. I find that those who condemn honour killings and dowry deaths because it is the politically correct thing to do, rarely speak out against the system of arranged marriages that holds this nation to ransom through a preservation of caste and religious identities. They maintain a studied silence when it comes to the culture of impunity that gives caste-Hindu men the entitlement to rape and murder Dalit women at will.

SlutWalking might not save all or any of us. After all, the patterns of discrimination against women here is far more vicious, and is intricately entwined with the massive oppressive structure of caste. That is why,

in our country, when a man chooses to abuse a woman by calling her a whore or slut in any of the regional languages, he attaches a caste-epithet to the slur. Needless to say, such an epithet almost always carries a reference to one untouchable caste or another. We need a potent counter to this home-grown misogyny that we are warring against. We need to replace our meekness with some militancy, our servility with flamboyant or outrageous sexuality. We need to mix feminism with a message of caste annihilation.

Moreover, SlutWalkers are fighting against shame, because it is an oppressive tool in rape culture. But, here in India, a woman does not have to live long enough to be raped to learn its acid taste. It begins at birth when she is seen as the burden with a dowry tag. She does not have to wait to be shamed until she turns a slut. She does not have to wait until her endless sexual hunger sets the world on fire. She is shamed even before she has seen the light of day, when her sex is revealed in a shady scan, when she is not allowed to be born because she will grow up to be a woman. She is shamed when she joins a sisterhood of aborted girl children, 12 million in the past thirty years. She is shamed by deathly silence. She is shamed by us, the survivors who have not spoken out, either for her, or for ourselves.