Finding language for intimacy

Gadfly

The ‘Bois Locker Room’ fracas in Delhi has added another woeful episode to the nightmare that is the heterosexual male’s relationship with women. As we know, there were morphed nude photos of underage female students that were circulated in the chatroom that were outed. Alleged perpetrators were questioned; there is a police investigation underway. Some group members spoke about raping some of their female classmates. Over those messages, they mauled the personalities of the girls. In doing so, they hauled their own selves over the coals as human beings. Once more, Indian maleness gets implicated in the web of women’s violation. Whether they admit to it or not, innocent boys and men are part of a wider gender-violent, misogyny-enabling discourse.

This event, in a way, in the crème-de-la-crème of India’s capital, denotes the twilight of the heterosexual man. In public perception, in the last two years and more, the image of men has been plummeting in the eyes of women, though it was rarely good at the best of times. One hazards men’s collective comeuppance may be due soon: An equal counter to misogyny? Maybe. It’s tempting to think that now even innocent men might be prejudged by women as silent witnesses or complicit actors in the perpetuating of toxicity towards them. How are we to now see hetero maleness?

For North India, it’s even more dismaying. Despite the controversial changes in rape laws post-Nirbhaya, there haven’t been signs of thought-process progress. Generations of gender violence and inequality don’t vanish with bolstering a law or two. In her work and writings, the creative feminist Paromita Vohra has often argued for an urgent reordering of our education and values. She has also put herself in the shoes of “regular” men. She has humanised the ‘macho’ performative complexes of the middle-of-the-road Indian male. Male violence against women, in speech and thought, masks the fear, the uncertainty, the confusion, indeed the self-violence that men indulge in while thinking and talking about women. What are the social forces that make such men? Vohra and her organisation ‘Agents of Ishq’ raise these matters with gravity and play. In their workshops, they try to make men think about how they think about women and their own selves. She has argued for a new “literacy in intimacy” for men.

Even today, a majority of India’s 1.3 billion props up a popular culture that refrains from humanising intimacy as a subject: It’s kept mystified, abstract, satirised, and the foundation is laid for the noose of matrimony. Such a stifling set-up stands oddly against our forebears who created the amorous spectacles of Belur, Halebid, the Kama Sutra, Khajuraho, Konark and temple gopurams where the human nude and myriad sexual orientations found space.

In my view, one of the truest stories about woman-man desire in contemporary India is the Neeraj Ghaywan film Masaan (2015). In it, two young consenting adults book a room at a hotel in their hometown of Varanasi – that alleged cultural capital of Hinduism – and as they begin making out, cops along with the manager barge in and charge them with “indecent behaviour”. Soon their lives are wrecked, their families defamed, the boy goes on to take his life, the girl shamed, later brazenly propositioned, leaves town.

Masaan is fictional but its emotions feel like they are facts: North India is hell for its youth. How can a country of 1.3 billion be sexually frustrated and repressed? Our ancestors pass their pathologies to us. While it’s nightmarish for women with its many stated and unspoken curbs on their freedom, in many ways, it’s hellish for boys and men, too. Do they have support to lean on? In their social worlds, they inhabit a climate of toxic hypocrisy around love and hormones; they become clones of their parents. The wider culture shuts out openness. So, segregating women and men, is made the norm. If the interaction with the opposite sex is so rare, consider the scope for stereotyping and othering them. With all its poison and filth, the ‘Bois Locker Room’ also amplified male angst. While boys hurled abuses at girls, they pleaded their own emotional illiteracy and devastation.

(Rahul Jayaram believes we are living through the apocalypse @RaJayaram)