CHENNAI : A s a self-professed media glutton, I am the contrary version of the three wise monkeys. For one, I am all of them in one body and secondly, I hear, see and say too much. All that consumption and conversation sure does get to me but at least I can’t be accused to feigning ignorance, looking away or playing it safe I suppose. Now you may wonder why I started off with this. It is because, well, I had a busy week with too much to report back, and also that I can’t pick one of the lot. So in a week that has been abuzz with the anthology Lust Stories on Netflix, I present by own — all connected by the cause of gender but each a separate note.
Interviewing a person on ‘Violence Against Women’ for a youtube channel introduced me to the phrase ‘social consent’. It sounds like abstract academic theory but it simply means that we all as a society sanction the everyday violence that is meted out to women. “Where does this start?” I asked her, to which she said, “Where we believe boys will be boys and when we ask women to cover up. We allow boys to grow up thinking that teasing women is a testament of their manhood, while teaching women to feel shame, not anger.
We reserve traits of bravery, strength and courage for men and patience, gentleness and elegance for men. We place the so called family’s honour in the woman’s vagina, refusing to her choose her partner. If faced with violence, we examine the goodness and badness of the victim before concluding if the person deserves our sympathies or not. So it begins with us, and it is in us, and till we change we are all allowing violence to go unquestioned.” Then we are all guilty, even if we feel removed from the experience of someone else. And how do we change this I asked, to which she said, “By promoting healthy relationships between people but mainly by dissolving the ideas of man and woman.”
And that dissolving happens ever so rarely in our homes, but at least once a year at the pride parade it happens on the streets. This weekend Chennai saw it’s 10th pride march and what a celebration it was! The colours were galore, as were the identities as expected of a pride parade, but the diversities of people and connections made to other movements were quite something. ‘Destroy Patriarchy, Save the Planet’, ‘There is no national language or sexuality’, ‘Don’t tell me who to love or what to eat’, Ambedkar and Periyar were on the placards.
The message was clear — Gender and Sexuality cannot be disconnected from the above. ‘Seven colours in the rainbow, seventy identities amongst us, straight is one, it’s okay to be LGBTQQIIAA!’ they screamed, for gender and sexuality is bigger than a male-female binary. This is where I leave you hanging on an ‘Inception’ kind of note. You may guess or ask around to know what the letters in LGBTQQIIAA stand for, but you may have not covered every possibility even given a few years.
On Lust Stories I have not much to say. Women want to have sex, enjoy sex, sometimes without a marriage in store and sometimes outside of a marriage and desire more than just children. Okay? Okay. For those who haven’t seen it, I’d say the anthology is important, but it could’ve been so much more. And for those who have, after sitting through that, you deserve your own copies of the graphic novels Sita’s Ramayana and Drawing the Line: Indian Women Fight Back to make up for lost time.