By Sreeparna Chattopadhyay

ROMAN POLANSKI is a free man. The Swiss government refused to extradite him to the US. Does a crime committed by an Oscar winning director cease to be a crime? Should Roman Polanski be treated any differently because he is the director of The Pianist? Does the fact that he raped and sodomized a thirteen-year-old girl more than thirty-three years ago diminish the magnitude of the crime or its impact on the victim? The girl, little more than a child at the time met Polanski during a Vogue photo shoot in Los Angeles, California. He drugged as well as plied her with alcohol before he assaulted her in a hot tub in 1977. The charges against him were very serious including assault on a child under the age of 14 with under Californian law at that time, statutory rape. According to some newspaper sources his victim Samantha Gailey’s lawyer made a plea bargain with him so that she could preserve the anonymity of her client. He pleaded guilty to unlawful sex with a minor (a much lesser charge than his original offences) and spent a mere forty-two days in prison before he fled first to London (his home at that time) and then to France, his adoptive home.

Since then he has had an outstanding warrant against him in the US. However, there wasn’t an international manhunt for Polanski and his crime faded from public memory until a year ago when the US reissued a warrant and placed him under house arrest when he visited Switzerland to collect a lifetime achievement award. The actions by the American government may have had more to do with Swiss unwillingness to release information related to some of those at the helm of the Wall Street meltdown, than with their innate sense of justice.

Since his house arrest, the rich and the famous have rallied to his defence. His supporters include directors such as Martin Scorcese and Woody Allen and also French philosopher and intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy as well as many public figures in his adoptive country France. This I find less surprising. After all many of these are men with very flexible morals in their private lives.

What I find surprising are editorials such as this one by a female commentator in the ultra respected British newspaper Guardian. Agnes Poirier characterized attempts to arrest Polanski as ‘prurient hounding’. According to her

Finally, what was also most disturbing in the whole affair was the prurient voyeurism of Polanski’s detractors, indulging in the very details of his alleged crimes. Reactions to the case disturbingly revealed rampant moral McCarthyism. Anyone defending the film-maker was immediately accused of making an apology for rape. The end of the affair should hopefully bring back sense to those who had lost it for nine months.

Poirier does have a small point, in that in the retelling of the details of the crime we become unwitting (or sometimes deliberate) voyeurs and end up inflicting symbolic violence on the victim. In this instance however the crime deserves to be revisited, not least because Polanski’s actions are indefensible.

Perhaps attempts to re-arrest him are not true to the letter of the law as far as legal technicalities are concerned; after all he spent 42 days in prison as part of his plea bargain. But does the punishment fit the crime? A mere 42 days for this level of sexual violence on a defenceless child? If Polanski had been an ordinary citizen and not a talented director with many tragedies of his own (he is a Holocaust survivor and his eight months pregnant wife Sharon Tate was stabbed to death by a psychopath in 1969), he wouldn’t be the darling of the European media. He is talented, good-looking and tragic and that makes him interesting and allows commentators like Poirier to be dismissive of his detractors.

According to a documentary Wanted and Desired made in 2008 with Polanski as the primary subject, his victim does not want to see him in prison. That may well be the case and legally there may not be any recourse. But isn’t the job of commentators and journalists who have the ability to sway public opinion to be blind to personalities when crimes of this nature are concerned? When did talent and private tragedy, not to mention wealth and fame become reasons to not mete out punishments, especially for crimes as serious as this one? Why does the European media allow itself to become seduced by the cult and enigma of Polanski and not for one moment think of the drugged, traumatised and torn body of a thirteen year old Samantha whose trust in adults was probably destroyed for the rest of her life? I cannot help but see in my mind’s eye the Lolitalizing of young female children is what allows the likes of Poirier to defend the likes of Polanski. As a feminist and a woman I am utterly disappointed and disillusioned that Polanski walks free today.

***

Sreeparna Ghosh (nee Chattopadhyay) grew up in Bombay but now lives in Norwich, UK. She trained as a social scientist and is currently a University Survey Officer for the University of East Anglia. She enjoys cooking, reading, writing and taking long walks in the countryside.

Toilets, trees and gender? Can there be a connection? Is there a gender angle to a business story? Is gender in politics only about how many women get elected to parliament? Is osteoporosis a women’s disease? Why do more women die in natural disasters? These are not the questions journalists usually ask when they set out to do their jobs as reporters, sub-editors, photographers of editors. Yet, by not asking, are they missing out on something, perhaps half the story? This is the question this book, edited and written by journalists, for journalists and the lay public interested in media, raises. Through examples from the media, and from their own experience, the contributors explain the concept of gender-sensitive journalism and look at a series of subjects that journalists have to cover – sexual assault, environment, development, business, politics, health, disasters, conflict – and set out a simple way of integrating a gendered lens into day-to-day journalism. Written in a non-academic, accessible style, this book is possibly the first of its kind in India – one that attempts to inject a gender perspective into journalism.

Kalpana Sharma is an independent journalist, columnist and media consultant based in Mumbai. She writes regularly for several newspapers and websites on a range of issues including urban development, gender, contemporary politics and the media. She was, until 2007, Deputy Editor and Chief of Bureau, The Hindu in Mumbai. She has also written and edited several books and is a founder-member of the Network of Women and Media, India.

Laxmi Murthy, Rajashri Dasgupta, Sameera Khan and Ammu Joseph also collaborated on the book.

___

Have you written a book that would be of interest to feminists? Send me details to see it here.

Used right, ECP is an empowering tool allowing women more control over their reproductive lives, says Dr Kar. Therefore, they need to be made available over the counter, doctors say. Yet, awareness of the dangers of excessive and indiscriminate use of ECPs must be stepped up significantly, says Velankar, the health activist. And this necessarily extends to consumers, particularly youth, and even drug store owners.

YESTERDAY, I WAS LOOKING

It reminded me of this time I was talking to someone about writing for UV. She’s a quiet, dark-eyed girl who rarely gets emotional. On this occasion, she did. ‘What’s the point of all this talk?’ she said suddenly. ‘We just become more and more aware of our rage. And don’t know what to do with it.’

This sense of inchoate rage twinned with helplessness — I’ve often heard feminists talk about it. I suspect it’s why more women don’t write for UV (but maybe they just hate the super, dynamic masthead). God knows there’s hardly a dearth of issues to talk about in this country.

The feeling intensifies, I think, when the problem is at a remove. Not only is there a sense of ‘what can I do?’ but there’s also the fear that one doesn’t know enough or really understand. It can make one feel like a tourist in someone else’s battlefield. A bystander who’ll tell the story, then brush its dust off and walk away unscathed. This adds guilt to the dense mix. Robert Hass has talked about this problem of feeling like a voyeur or a tourist in relation to writing political poetry but it can be applied to any writing. Especially for a site such as this which does have an express political purpose. It affects what some of us choose to write about. It certainly affects me. How to talk about problems that have never touched my life, and most likely never will?

It’s easier to stay silent, stick to a few safe issues. Easier to talk about the personal.  Easier to remain within the margins of one’s limited knowledge and even more limited control. Yet this can lead to a baffling silence about other things, a disturbing silence. A silence which at its heart may just be careful, but in its effects may end up being plain wrong. As a blogger, I’m constantly conflicted by this. I don’t think I’m likely to find any answers soon but I wanted to put it on the table, a live thing for us to look at.

At any rate, I do believe in this: even when there are problems that we can do nothing about, it’s important to know. To note. To remember. Because forgetting would be the last nail in the coffin, the final bone burned to cinders.

So here are the excerpts:

• India holds the last position (134th) in the health and survival subindex. A huge factor contributing to this is poor maternal health, with only 42% of births in the country supervised by health professionals. Close to 300 Indian women die every day during childbirth or of pregnancy-related causes.
• India also has among the worst sex ratios at birth in the world. The strong preference for sons and the disproportionate sex ratio at birth make India one of the few countries where males significantly outnumber females and the imbalance is getting worse.
• Close to 245 million Indian women lack the basic capability to read and write. Almost twice as many girls as boys are pulled out of school or never sent to school.
• Women’s labour force participation, is at 36%, less than half of the labour force participation rate of men (85%). Women’s estimated earned annual income is less than a third of men’s income. Women make up only 3% of legislator, senior official and managerial positions.
• Over time, we’re closing the education gap but the health gap is getting worse.

You can download the full report here (pdf). There’s lots more info there including some cheerier stuff like the high level of political participation. Here’s an interesting related report at IPS. And she’s hoping Clinton will help change things.

One phrase from her rebuttal is particularly striking: I believe that the history of women can be seen, in some ways, as a history of language. Language, of course, is more than just words – it’s phrasing, intonation and intent as well as vocabulary. The uproar over Trunk’s tweet went well beyond shock that she had reacted with relief to the miscarriage – it was really more about the fact that she had trespassed some code of conduct by which women are expected to speak, or keep silent about, certain things. And even the way we’re expected to feel those things.

What the controversy throws light on is how in spite of many taboos about speaking about personal experience becoming obsolete, how they are discussed can still scandalize and shame the speaker/writer. If Trunk had tweeted, for instance, that she was devastated, or returned after a few tweetless days and sadly and diffidently “confessed” that the miscarriage had put her out of action, it’s almost impossible that such a storm would have brewed. The problem was honesty about an experience, outside the fray of acceptable understandings and acceptable retellings of such experiences.

Nobody is above bias, and we both judge and are judged. I considered what this means in my own life. On the one hand, what this means is that (with big thanks to Eve Ensler) I can say “vagina”, and not have anyone bat an eyelid, but if I say “cunt”, my own preferred word in both conversation and writing, I get nothing but disgusted looks – instantly, my upbringing, intelligence and feminism are questionable. It means that if I ask that someone dismiss my cattiness as PMS, it’s okay, but if I write a poem about how I love the experience of menstruation (as I did some years ago, to horrified reactions), something’s wrong. On the other hand, however, if someone uses the phrase, “that female” to refer to a woman or girl, my hackles get raised, indifferent to the fact that in India, the usage is not derogatory. Similarly, I am sanctimonious about people who define sex in heteronormative or phallocentric terms, in spite of knowing that they may have never been exposed to alternate paradigms of thought.

What about you? How are you limited – whether by your own expectations or by others’ – by the notion of singular ways to experience or express certain things? How does it affect your experiences as, or viewpoints towards, women?

Of relevance is Chimamanda Adichie’s speech about “the dangers of the single story”, which you can watch here.

My Kannada is not good enough to catch the nuances, but the emotions could not be missed. They sang of the families they had built for themselves, among people they could be themselves with – when everything else is denied to them. We have no mothers, no fathers, no sisters, no brothers, no work, no family, no home – except our own community, they sang, and even through through the underlying sadness, the sense of pride in the community was evident.

Then, a slightly built woman in a white kurta and jeans, began the ‘main’ performance of the evening. She started telling her story, a powerful one that kept everyone in the audience enthralled, despite the absence of any props or instruments. Told in the first person, in direct and evocative Tamizh, this was the story of a young boy’s journey to understanding his own nature and the long road to his finally becoming a woman. The life of the Aravani community, their challenges, their origin myths and their family dynamics were all part of the story, but the most powerful part of it was her longing to be a woman, and the desire for it which is so powerful as to enable her to endure the ritual castration, done by a traditional healer without anaesthesia. The performance was all the more gripping for its blunt edge, though laced with plenty of humour and witty dialogue.

So gripping was the story and its telling that I assumed it was the performer’s own story. Only at the end did we learn that the performer, Pritham Chakravarthy is not herself part of the community, but a theatre activist and researcher who has spent considerable time researching the stories of the Aravanis, and brings them to a wider audience through her story-telling.

One question remained at the end of the performance, which I was somehow reluctant to ask, but now regret not asking! Something which came up repeatedly during the performance was the attraction to objects traditionally viewed as marks of the Indian woman – saris, bangles, flowers. In urban India, at least, the markers of femininity themselves are in a state of flux.  In that context, is the Aravanis’ ideas of womanhood a constant or how is that changing? In other words, how closely is womanhood for them linked to the outward symbols of femininity and in particular, to these symbols? Do they need the ‘display’ of womanhood or is it simply enough to feel woman to be a woman? In this context, I thought blogger Deborah’s piece on the cluster-concept of being a woman was worth reading.

Ad 1: A little girl whines about how her hair isn’t as long as her mother’s was in her childhood. The mother apologetically mentions that she has to work while Nani (her own mother) was “at home all day.” As she drops her daughter off to school in a car driven by her, the girl whips around and retorts in Hindi, “Then don’t go to office!”  The situation is resolved by the mother saving the day, her job and her relationship with her daughter by producing a satisfactory solution, namely a bottle of Clinic Plus shampoo.

Ad 2: A schoolgirl, not much older than 8 or 9, boasts to the camera about how her mother is special because she lost oodles of weight on a Special K cereal diet that requires one to eat two bowls of cereal, twice a day as one’s only form of nourishment. The mother comes in at the end, smiles indulgently at her and then the audience and fondly asks “Bahut bolti hain na?” (Speaks too much, doesn’t she?).  And the ad ends with them sharing a cuddle.

So let’s think about this:

1. Mummies must primarily attend to their children’s every whim, to the point where their own needs/career aspirations must be sublimated. Vanity and shimmering hair over all else!
2. Little girls think it’s okay to be terribly proud of not-so-skinny mums turning skinny (so if they didn’t, would they be unhappy or embarrassed?)
3. Even if it’s half-jokingly, a girl who speaks “too much” must be chided, especially by her own mother.

Some ridiculously naïve part of me kept watching in the hope that the mother in each ad would rectify the daughter’s misconception but really, are the folks selling shampoo and breakfast cereal listening to a feminist rant? Three guesses, people.

On a more heartening note, take a look at this post on Saffron Tree. As a preschool educator, I constantly struggle with poor female representation in narratives and often create my own stories to compensate. But of course, the telly will keep beaming what it will as long as cereal and shampoo sell. Knew there was a reason they call it the idiot box.

I’VE LOST COUNT of the number of times I’ve opened the morning newspaper to chance upon matrimonial pages that read almost exactly like this: “Wanted: Fair, slim, beautiful, convent educated woman.” I don’t fit this bill at all. And neither do most of my friends. But it does not affect me. I’m blessed because I’ve been born into a family that treats its men and women equally. But just because I am secure in my personal space (in terms of my family and friends), it does not mean I am not considered subservient by those whose minds are moulded by stereotypes.

The prevalence of personal power equations — how a woman negotiates her space in a domestic relationship — is also often determined by the media. Take the Kyun Ki Saas bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi soaps. Not only are they detrimental to a woman’s stand, but they cater to a certain worldview that is excessively misleading.

The Madonna/ Whore dichotomy is being reinforced everyday by the mainstream media. The pornography industry (which,according to Forbes.com grosses about 14 million dollars in a year) uses stories that portray “illicit relationships” — very common examples would be a young boy sexually controlling a woman his mother’s age. A very recent example would be an Indian website called Savita Bhabhi where a middle aged Indian housewife is seduced by everyone from the door-to-door salesman to her young neighbours. This works at two levels — the attempt to control a woman’s body in order to subjugate her, thereby allowing the man to subjugate her. By “domesticating” her body, the man and woman are then falling into the established “norms” of society — a notion that the media helps preserve. The woman is yet again portrayed as subservient while the man exercises complete control. Virginity is equated with moral virtues. Unfortunately, instead of more and more people protesting against such “domestication”, women are either remaining virgins (for fear of societal pressure) or getting their hymens restructured so that they may not have to face the flak for not having catered to the diktat of a dogmatic society.

There are popular images of the new woman that are splashed all over the media — Sonam Kapoor is the new face of Loreal. She is, to many women, a youth icon of sorts. She endorses a fairness cream. What happens to those people who are not fair? I understand that commodification of products is all about marketing and saleability but does consumerism lead people to become their most insensitive selves? What is worse is that dissenting voices and alternative voices are in the minority and their voices are stifled by the booming voices of the media. Someone as beautiful and as intelligent as Nandita Das still cannot escape her label of “dusky beauty”. The dusky beauty phrase implicates that Nandita Das is dusky but beautiful. She too does not fit the bill that has been cleverly crafted by media architects.

The “Independent Woman” portrayed by the media suffers from much the same plight. On the one hand, she is a working woman who has economic independence and on the other hand, she has no control of her body and of her sexuality. It is taboo for a woman to talk openly about sexuality. In consistently aiding in the commodification and standardization of women as objects of desire that can be controlled by a man, there is no space for a free-thinking independent woman.

As a freelance journalist for various mainstream publications across India, I have often been told, “do not write so sympathetically about sex workers” or  “you will get into trouble for writing like this about women.” As a 20-year-old woman, I too, am expected to cater to the norms that society and the media have laid out for me. And because I have chosen to do what I think is right, there have been times when I have lost out on opportunities and got into trouble because of my belief system.

Studies have shown that pre-adolescents and adolescents rely on the media for their information on sexuality. Reacting to teen magazines has led to adolescents being dissatisfied with their own body. Anorexia and bulimia are on the rise. Isn’t it time that the mainstream media got a little more responsible?

Carol Hanisch’s essay was aptly titled “The personal is political” by her editors. Indeed, I strongly adhere to this feminist dictum. Our personal spaces are constantly eroded and the onus is on us to negotiate our private spaces. If we cannot even stand up for ourselves in our private space, it is difficult to fight the rigid social hierarchy that is in place.

***

Reeti Roy is a final year student at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Her articles have been published in The Statesman, The Telegraph and The Times of India. She has been assistant literary editor of a blog magazine called Ex Nihilo and is a member of the anti-ragging committee at her university. She has recently begun writing poetry and been published in Kritya. You can reach her at reeti.roy@gmail.com

THE TIMES OF INDIA piece “Beware of the Maid” (18 June, 2009) is a contemptible piece of writing that not only displays a complete lack of sensitivity and basic decency, but also shows up the standards of journalism in the Times of India group. It trivializes serious issues such as the abuse and ill-treatment faced by thousands of domestic workers — who are compelled by circumstance to be mute sufferers — by turning the focus of blame squarely on the victims.

Starting off with a note on Hollywood celebrities who have had affairs with nannies and various other types of domestic help, Sharma shifts the focus to India. Her opening point itself is completely off target as she says how “the issue that was till now the domain of the West has come closer home”. Wrong, so wrong.

It is no secret that class and gender distinctions plague everyday life in our society, and that the brunt of it is borne by those in the margins, including domestic workers, who have no recourse to redressal for the sort of ill-treatment meted out to them on a daily basis. Sharma’s bizarre display of ignorance only reinforces the prejudices faced by these women.

She then goes on to talk about the rising infidelity of men “at the hands of maids”, thus again making the assumption that the blame is automatically ascribed to the woman. In the very premise of her article, she appears to absolve men of all blame for cheating on their partners, reinforcing the harmful and regressive gender stereotype of men being unable to contain their desires. This reminds one of the ill-considered dress codes imposed by certain colleges on women students with the thought that it is their manner of dress that provokes sexual harassment, or worse, the theory that some women ask for it by their mode of dress and behaviour.

Sharma also objectifies domestic helpers — already powerless women, often illiterate and usually forced to work without any sort of expectation of fair treatment — as sexual objects by using some shockingly inconsiderate (and one hopes misrepresented) quotes from a noted psychologist. The author writes, “The fact is that men don’t really fall in love with a maid but feel like exploring the alternative world of headless, harmless women.” Notice the carefully chosen words “headless, harmless” — implying that playing around with such women is “safe”. She also adds how, since domestic workers in India are unable to stand up and fight for their rights, it gives men the power and control they crave. A female professional is quoted as saying that it enables men to “unleash the beast” in ways that they know their wives and girlfriends won’t put up with!

On the whole, it is demeaning and disrespectful on multiple levels. Besides the stereotypes of “men will be men when it comes to sex” and “women must behave appropriately”, there is also a deep contempt displayed for the working class. From the tone and the words used, it would appear that the writer thinks of the domestic help as a lower form of life, “harmless and headless”, and therefore not worthy of respect as a fellow human being.

She ends with some friendly woman-to-woman advice: “choose your maid with care”. Nothing about choosing your partner with care?

It has been long since one stopped expecting any sort of standards from The Times of India, but this time they have stooped to new depths. With popular culture and the media intent on maintaining the status quo in a society mired in patriarchy and class imbalance, one wonders what hope remains for those who need it most.

***

Payal Dhar is an author and freelance writer in Bangalore. She writes on technology for a living and fiction for young adults in the genre of urban fantasy. Her books include A Shadow in Eternity and The Key of Chaos, published by Zubaan. In her fiction, she tries to write about more positive female protagonists who question and challenge authority and tradition. She blogs at Writeside.

Theory must become practice at one point in time. Our bodies are the place where the power structures make their marks with their laws, their religions, traditions and their prejudices.

Our bodies are lines in the sand. Each one of us proclaims that the power of the state stops at our skin when we lay our bodies down for an abortion, saying, with that action, that it is we who will decide when and whether to bear children. Or when we leave a violent relationship. Or when we resist and when we take the right to sexual pleasure. And when we declare that we must live in freedom.

When you draw a line in the sand, you have got to be prepared to defend it, to take risks and embrace challenges. That, too, calls upon the body, as well as the body politick.

You should totally read the rest of the mag as well.  This issue’s got articles on what the UN needs to do about violence against women, looking at sex ed differently, Judith Brodsky’s art on One Hundred Million Women Are Missing, and knowing your clitoris.