Image Courtesy: Cinestaan

The woman in the eye of the storm was journalist Priya Ramani, who has been fighting against a criminal defamation case filed by MJ Akbar, an ex-minister in the Narendra Modi government and a journalist himself for many years.

Sunday was the second day of MJ Akbar’s cross examination by Ramani’s lawyer Rebecca Mammen John, during which Akbar flatly denied all accusations against him.

In October 2018, journalist Priya Ramani and at least 17 other women had accused Akbar of sexual harassment, and in one case, even rape. Despite the various accounts on public platforms, Akbar’s selective decision to sue only Ramani was called out by several women as vindictive. All of these women, including Ramani, had described the same pattern of sexual harassment where Akbar insisted they meet him for job interviews at hotel rooms.

In the Delhi court however, Akbar not only denied the defence lawyer’s charges, he also dismissed the evidence and said that he was only hearing about the cases by some of these women for the first time. He added that he could “not recall” the names of these women.

While Ramani was “cheered on by family, friends, and colleagues”, Akbar was alone and friendless. This image of women standing with each other against a powerful predator who came to the court room that day, and also on the first day of the cross-examination earlier this month,  speak volumes about women solidarity in the media.

On 18 May, a day before this hearing, a group of women artists were in Delhi to talk about sexual harassment at the workplace. Separated by geographical boundaries and professional spheres, the narratives of these women revealed similarities in the designs of powerful men who exploited and abused scores of young women and yet remained protected by institutions of patriarchy.

These women, Rima Kallingal and Padmapriya, both well-known artists from the Malayalam film industry, have been fighting against discrimination and sexual harassment for two years as part of the Women in Cinema Collective. Formed in May 2017, the WCC is a pioneering organisation constituting women creative workers from the Malayalam film industry. The collective continues to challenge the patriarchal world view of Indian cinema. It “has dragged into limelight the ugly underbelly of commercial film-making controlled by cliques, cartels, and celebrity power¹”. Despite its path-breaking overtures, the collective has not received much attention in national news media organisations set in Delhi or Bombay.

At a panel discussion organised at the India Habitat Centre as part of the ongoing Habitat Film Festival, both Kallingal and Padmapriya spoke about the formation of the collective, of the challenges it faced along the way, and those it continues to face. The panel was moderated by film journalist Anna M Vetticad who has been following the collective since its conception and director Judith Namradath. The screening of Namradath’s directorial debut film, Aabhaasam preceded the panel, and had come into controversy when the #MeToo movement emerged in Kerala. Actor Divya Gopinath who stars in Aabhaasam had accused senior actor Alencier Ley Lopez of sexual assault during the film’s shooting. In a moving video posted on her Facebook account, she wrote of the many occasions when Alencier had entered her room drunk. One time she was alarmed to wake up and find him in her bed.

Soon after Gopinath’s video, director Judith Namradath stepped in to support her. “I will reiterate Divya’s written and spoken words over a 100 times. Any sensible person who has worked in Aabhaasam will stand by her,” he wrote in a Facebook post. The women on the panel, including Vetticad, commended Namradath for his extending support to Gopinath and spoke about the importance of feminist male allies in the movement.
The account of the women on the formation of the WCC was as inspiring as it was enraging.

In 2017, a popular actress of the Malayalam film industry was abducted and sexually assaulted for hours inside a moving car. On the basis of the woman’s FIR, Malayalam “superstar” Dileep was found to be the prime conspirator in her abduction and assault because he had certain personal issues with her. “The WCC was started as a sort-of support group for the actress,” recounted Padmapriya. “But that one incident triggered discussions around sexual harassment that we had all faced at some point. All of us had these experiences to share that we had never spoken about to anyone for years.” As a result, the WCC was formalised as a collective in May 2017 and since then has been engaged in breaking down the structures of power and abuse. 

Moving forth, the members expressed the desire to not stop at fighting against issues of gender and sexual violence but also to shatter the glass ceiling, to enable women who are joining the film industry in larger numbers to “lay claim to legitimate spaces for self-actualisation and creative satisfaction.”

Courtesy: Indian Cultural forum

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Nearly one and a half years ago when Alyssa Milano asked women to click MeToo on their social media platforms, the #MeToo movement was born. Since then millions of women have indicated through social media that they too have been victims of sexual harassment or assault.

The racial nature of the campaign lies behind the poor uptake in Africa. shutterstock

The power of this movement has been its ability to show the world how pervasive sexual harassment is. And it’s had an effect on perpetrators. In the film industry producers and actors such as Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey and Bill Cosby all lost their jobs.

But is Africa part of this global movement against sexual violence? In her assessment of transnational activism in Africa, author Titilope Adayi, indicates that the global dimension of #MeToo has centred on the involvement of certain countries such as the US, the UK, France, India and China. There’s been virtually no mention of Africa or the Middle East.

But the visibility of #MeToo makes it easy to overlook the very powerful campaigns against sexual violence that go on in Africa. Most are happening outside the digital space.

MeToo was actually started by an African American women, Tarana Burke in 2006 – 11 years before #MeToo – to help young women deal with sexual harassment. Her campaign wasn’t on social media and didn’t become global. But it has now been tagged on to the digital campaign.

Before #MeToo there was the #EndRapeCulture campaign which was started in South Africa in 2016 by African women students. The #EndRapeCulture campaign was powerful enough to force universities in South Africa to appoint task teams to deal with the pervasive normalisation of sexual violence on campuses. But #EndRapeCulture didn’t become a global movement, even though it combined direct action (topless protests) with the digital campaign.

So why didn’t the #MeToo make big inroads into Africa?

The response of African women

One of the reasons for the lack of uptake is related to the racial nature of the campaign. It was started by white, wealthy women in the film industry in the US who had access to digital platforms.

Another reason #MeToo wasn’t that big in Africa is because of the very strong patriarchal culture in which women fear being stigmatised when they speak out about sexual harassment or assault. The very visibility of this kind of action makes them more vulnerable. Women are also afraid that their families may find out about the abuse. Women are therefore silenced by “cultures of respectability”.

And in many countries women are quite aware that the law won’t protect them. In a range of countries, including South Africa and Zimbabwe, secondary victimisation of survivors is rife in male dominated courts, where conviction rates for rape are on average below 10%.

But women in many African countries have staged street protests. This enables them to avoid individualised attention, but nevertheless makes their causes visible.

#MyDressismyChoice protest in Nairobi. Fickr.com/RubyGoes

In Kenya women started #MyDressismyChoice protests in the streets of Nairobi after a woman was assaulted at a bus stop for wearing a miniskirt. In Senegal two young women started “#Nopiwouma” to challenge Senegal’s silence on gender based violence. It means “I will not shut up” in Wolof. The campaign #Doyna, also in Senegal means “that’s enough”.

A consequence of not wanting to speak out about sexual harassment is that high profile men get away with this behaviour, and even when women speak out there may still be no consequences.

South Africa has a very high incidence of gender based violence. A recent example involved the former deputy minister of education Mduduzi Manana, who beat up two women in a nightclub. He resigned from his job, and was eventually forced to relinquish his parliamentary seat, but it took a very long time.

In Uganda, MP Sylvia Rwabwogo filed a complaint against a man who had stalked her for eight months. He was eventually sentenced to two years in prison but she was strongly criticised by Ugandans who expressed their sympathy for the “enamoured” student.

Organisations such as the African Union (AU) have also failed women when it comes to sexual assault. In January 2018, women staffers appealed to senior officials to end harassment in the AU. The matter was only dealt with after it reached the media. The AU’s limp-wristed response was to say that vulnerable young interns and volunteers hoping for permanent work were targeted, but that it could do little to protect them.

African novelist and film maker, Tsitsi Dangarembga, from Zimbabwe laments that #MeToo has not reached Zimbabwe were sexual harassment is also rife. She herself was in an abusive relationship for nearly eight years.

In South Africa women started another campaign, #MenareTrash, to challenge men to speak out about the epidemic of violence against women, especially intimate femicide by men killing their partners. There was a big push back by men against the campaign because some felt they were all being stigmatised.

This doesn’t appear to be a problem confined to South Africa. Globally men have problems showing solidarity with women speaking out against sexual harassment, assault and rape. This was clearly evident in Brett Kavanaugh’s case in the US. Accused of attempted rape, he went on to be confirmed as a judge of the US Supreme Court.

Courtesy: The Conversation

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Gillette’s ‘The best a man can be’ advertisement has dared to be different in how it speaks to its male audience. Gillette

Viewed more than 23 million times on YouTube, the advert has so far attracted more than 330,000 comments, about 650,000 likes and 1.1 million dislikes. No advertising campaign challenging stereotypes about girls and women has ever been this controversial.
Gillette’s ‘We Believe: the best a man can be’ advertisement.

Perhaps that is because those adverts have tended to celebrate an “empowered” view of girls and women. There is even a term to describe this type of advertising with pro-female messages – femvertising – that has its own dedicated awards.
Challenging gender stereotypes of men, on the other hand, is proving less straightforward.

Other campaigns that have explored modern versions of masculinity have taken a similar approach to femvertising. But Gillette’s new advertisement is different. It uncompromisingly confronts problems such as sexism, bullying and harassment associated with toxic masculinity. As a result some perceive it as negative – a denunciation as opposed to a celebration of boys and men.

It exemplifies a significant creative challenge for advertisers at a watershed moment in the movement for gender equality. How do you celebrate masculinity without acknowledging toxic masculinity in this time of #metoo?

Gender stereotypes in advertising

My research examines sexist advertising practice and how this more broadly contributes to gendered inequalities. For example, how advertisements that glorify the violent exploitation of women work to normalise violence against women.

Fashion house Dolce & Gabbana’s 2007 spring/summer advertising campaign was criticised for simulating a gang rape scene. Supplied
Gender stereotypes are another form of sexist advertising practice.

Because advertisements must simply and persuasively communicate a message that can be understood by a relatively broad audience, the industry has long been susceptible to perpetuating stereotypes – oversimplified ideas of the way people should be.
Recall how television program Masterchef promoted its 2013 series as a “battle of the sexes”. The women wore pink and men blue. They trash-talked one another with a litany of stereotypes: “men are more experimental!”, “women can multitask!”.

Critically, most creative work in agencies has historically been led and shaped by men using hypermasculinity as a model for creativity. One study has likened agency cultures to locker rooms – intensely competitive, structured by male bonding and rife with sexual harassment and gender-based discrimination. As a result few women have been able to break into and succeed as creatives in advertising.

But this has begun to change, and the industry has started to face up to the problematic way in which advertising has reinforced gender stereotypes. There is increasing resistance to portrayals suggesting a single way to be a man or woman.

Last year the World Federation of Advertisers launched guidelines for progressive gender portrayals in advertising, namely unstereotyping ads, that highlights the importance of diverse teams and gender aware cultures. The Australian Association of National Advertisers (AANA) updated its Code of Ethics to state that gender-stereotypical roles and characteristics, such as a man doing DIY, must not suggest these are always associated with or carried out by that gender.

Gillette’s parent company Procter & Gamble, along with other multinationals heavily invested in gender-based marketing, has joined the Unstereotype Alliance, a United Nations-backed initiative to eradicate harmful gender-based stereotypes in advertising. Alliance members commit to creating content that depicts people as empowered actors, refraining from objectifying people and portraying progressive and multi-dimensional personalities.
 

Challenging toxic masculinity

Toxic masculinity refers to norms and ideals of manhood that are both constraining and harmful. It fosters rigid expectations that boys and men should be dominant, aggressive, stoic and devoid of emotion. It is instilled by telling boys to “toughen up” because “boys don’t cry”. It is contemptuous of men “acting like girls”. It is harmful to both men and women.

The director of Gillette’s new advertisement, Australian-born Kim Gehrig, is no stranger to this territory. Her short film You Think You’re a Man explores the cultural expectations of what it means to “be a man” in Australia.

But the backlash against her work for Procter & Gamble highlights the challenge of addressing masculine stereotypes. A core criticism is that it lacks the positivity of femvertising, such as the 2014 #LikeAGirl campaign for Procter & Gamble’s brand Always, which turned a phrase used to insult boys into an empowering message.

The LikeAGirl campaign.

Other brands marketed to male customers have managed to avoid criticism while dumping the toxic stereotypes they have previously peddled.

Unilever’s brand Lynx (also known as Axe) is a good example. It had a history of using sexual objectification in its advertising for men’s personal grooming products. In 2011 the British Advertising Standards Authority banned six of its adverts for being demeaning and offensive.

In 2016 it reformed its image with the #FindYourMagic campaign, which challenged narrow notions of masculinity.

Real men can love kittens: Lynx’s #FindYourMagic campaign challenged masculine stereotypes. Supplied

It followed up in 2017 with its #IsItokforGuys campaign that aired the private struggles men experience with the pressure to “be a man”.

The Australian soft-drink brand Solo, owned by Schweppes, is another example of marketers dropping their reliance on aggressively hyper-masculine stereotypes without backlash. In its recent A Thirsty Worthy Effort campaign, a man is no longer engaging in extreme sports to get an extreme thirst; he’s making a costume for his daughter’s school play.
 

Uncomfortable dialogue

Lynx celebrated men being themselves and unpacked unhealthy and narrow expressions of masculinity. Solo used humour to celebrate men taking an active role in domestic life. Where Gillette has dared to be different is in how the advertisement speaks to its male audience.

It directly and unflinchingly tells men how they should behave: do not bully, patronise, speak over, humiliate or sexually harass women. It tells men how they should treat one another. It challenges men to hold one another to account and set better role models for the “men of tomorrow”, cautioning that “the actions of the few can taint the reputation of the many”.

It shows the huge creative challenge the #metoo revolution poses to advertisers. How can you celebrate masculinity without addressing the toxic behaviours exposed by #metoo revelations?

Gillette’s commercial appropriation of #metoo may sit uncomfortably with some, but advertising is often at its most powerful when it captures the zeitgeist.

Encouraging men to call out how others behave around, speak about and treat women is critical in affecting change and advancing gender equality. Gillette’s statement reinforces this: “If we get people to pause, reflect and to challenge themselves and others to ensure that their actions reflect who they really are, then this campaign will be a success”.

Its approach to challenging male stereotypes and expectations has raised an uncomfortable and provoking dialogue. Representing men as vulnerable, kind, empathetic and modest in advertising is imperative if we are to move beyond the limited cultural portrayals that we often see of men. It is a step forward for an industry with a very chequered past.
 

Lauren Gurrieri, Senior Lecturer in Marketing, RMIT University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Leader of the Commons Andrea Leadsom responds to questions about allegations sexual harassment at Westminster. Picture: PA. All rights reserved.

On 12 December 2018, the UK Prime Minister Theresa May faced a ‘vote of no confidence’ in her leadership. Her Conservative party MPs were invited to vote in a secret ballot, indicating whether they thought the prime minister should continue in her role. Conservative party rules stated that she would have to resign as party leader if she lost the vote.

May knew it was going to be a tight vote, as she needed the support of at least 159 out of 317 of her MPs to survive. The Conservative party then announced that two MPs who had previously been suspended following allegations of sexual harassment and abuse, Charlie Elphicke and Andrew Griffiths, would be reinstated ahead of the crucial vote.

Earlier this year, the Sunday Times newspaper revealed that Elphicke had been accused of rape by a former staff member. He had undergone a police interview under caution in March 2018, but no rape allegation was put to him on that occasion. Elphicke maintains his innocence and has denied any wrongdoing.

Griffiths had sent thousands of text messages to women in his constituency including explicit comments like his desire to “beat” a woman during sex. He subsequently said he’d sent these texts while having a manic episode, and that he was “ashamed and embarrassed”.

The Labour party criticised the Conservatives for “betraying” women by reinstating the suspended MPs ahead of the vote. A year after a series of #MeToo allegations broke in parliament, in late 2017, this welcoming back of alleged harassers for political expediency begs the question: what has changed for women in politics? And can this government be trusted to pay more than lip service to our rights when it’s political crunch time?

On 12 December 2018, the UK Prime Minister Theresa May faced a ‘vote of no confidence’ in her leadership. Her Conservative party MPs were invited to vote in a secret ballot, indicating whether they thought the prime minister should continue in her role. Conservative party rules stated that she would have to resign as party leader if she lost the vote.

May knew it was going to be a tight vote, as she needed the support of at least 159 out of 317 of her MPs to survive. The Conservative party then announced that two MPs who had previously been suspended following allegations of sexual harassment and abuse, Charlie Elphicke and Andrew Griffiths, would be reinstated ahead of the crucial vote.

Earlier this year, the Sunday Times newspaper revealed that Elphicke had been accused of rape by a former staff member. He had undergone a police interview under caution in March 2018, but no rape allegation was put to him on that occasion. Elphicke maintains his innocence and has denied any wrongdoing.

Griffiths had sent thousands of text messages to women in his constituency including explicit comments like his desire to “beat” a woman during sex. He subsequently said he’d sent these texts while having a manic episode, and that he was “ashamed and embarrassed”.

The Labour party criticised the Conservatives for “betraying” women by reinstating the suspended MPs ahead of the vote. A year after a series of #MeToo allegations broke in parliament, in late 2017, this welcoming back of alleged harassers for political expediency begs the question: what has changed for women in politics? And can this government be trusted to pay more than lip service to our rights when it’s political crunch time?
 

Abuse in the lobby

In October 2017, women around the world came forward under the MeToo banner, accusing powerful men of sexual assault, harassment and rape. From the Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein to news anchors, journalists, and Wall Street bosses, it wasn’t long before MeToo came to Westminster – the home of the UK parliament.

This year, a survey commissioned by MPs found one in five people working in parliament had experienced sexual harassment. Women reported twice as many cases as men.

Following disclosures of sexual harassment from the journalist Jane Merrick among other women, the defence secretary Sir Michael Fallon was the first to resign from his ministerial post, in November 2017, admitting his conduct may have “fallen short” of standards.

Sir Michael Fallon resigned from his UK cabinet position in 2017 following disclosures of sexual harassment. Image: PA. All rights reserved.

A few weeks later, the deputy prime minister Damian Green resigned amid allegations of inappropriate behaviour towards a young Conservative party activist (which he denied). A parliamentary inquiry had found these allegations “plausible” and that he’d previously made “misleading” statements about pornography on his work computer.

Over the last year, MPs, parliamentary staff, and activists from across parties have faced allegations of inappropriate behaviour, bullying, sexual assault, and rape.

The Financial Times journalist Laura Hughes exposed wide-ranging abuses of power at parliament. One parliamentary staff member anonymously told Hughes that a Conservative MP had boasted that he’d had sex with researchers on her desk. Another former staffer told Hughes that she knew of 10 women who had been harassed at parliament.

With two MPs resigning from ministerial posts (although not their seats), and other MPs and party activists under investigation or facing allegations of misconduct, it had become clear to parliament by the end of 2017 that action needed to be taken to change a culture of widespread bullying and harassment at the heart of British politics.

The extent of the Westminster abuse scandal was chilling. It’s precisely these people in these corridors of power who make laws about violence against women and workplace sexual harassment. How could these lawmakers be trusted to create fair and just policies to protect people from sexual violence, when some were alleged perpetrators themselves?

How could these lawmakers be trusted to create fair and just policies to protect people from sexual violence? 
 

The working group’s report introduced a new “behaviour code” for parliament, underpinned by an independent complaints procedure. It said that implementing this code would require training as well as human resources support, and called for a “cultural change” in parliament.

The code states that MPs and staff should “respect and value everyone”; that they should “recognise their power, influence or authority and not abuse them” and “think about how your behaviour affects others and strive to understand their perspective”.

“Bullying, harassment and sexual misconduct are not tolerated”, it insists. “Unacceptable behaviour will be dealt with seriously, independently and with effective sanctions”.

Importantly, the working group noted that sexual harassment is “qualitatively different from other forms of unacceptable behaviour, including bullying and non-sexual harassment”.

Confronting this “therefore requires its own set of procedures and personnel”, said its report, which recommended that an Independent Sexual Misconduct Advocate should be contracted to support those reporting harassment.
 

What’s really changed?

Can the government be trusted to put its own recommendations into practice? Or does the reinstatement of Elphicke and Griffiths, ahead of a crucial vote the prime minister needed to win, demonstrate that women’s rights are easily brushed aside when politics demand?

The reinstatement of these MPs isn’t the first example of political manoeuvering amid abuse allegations. Earlier this year, bullying allegations against the speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, were used as political footballs by his opponents and supporters.

In an article for the Guardian, a Labour MP wrote that many of her fellow parliamentarians “hate John Bercow and wanted rid of him and used the report as their opportunity”. They see victims of harassment as a “toy for them to play with for political and tribal ends”, she said.
Meanwhile, those who wanted Bercow to stay called it the “wrong time” to change speaker.They see victims of harassment as a “toy for them to play with for political and tribal ends”.

Accusations of sexual misconduct have also rocked parliament’s House of Lords.

In November 2017, the Liberal Democrat Peer and human rights lawyer, Lord Lester, was accused of sexual harassment by a women’s rights campaigner Jasvinder Sanghera. The House of Lords Commissioner for Standards conducted an investigation, upheld her complaint, and determined that Lester should be suspended for five years.

However, on 15 November 2018, Lester’s ally Lord Pannick voted to block the proposed suspension. Pannick accused the Commissioner of not acting “in accordance with the principles of natural justice and fairness” in her handling of the case.

In response, a House of Lords committee responsible for members’ privileges and conduct published a damning report on 12 December on how Lester’s case had been handled. Among other things, it expressed concern that the debate over Pannick’s amendment risked putting other women off reporting sexual misconduct in the future.

The report noted how during the debate, Lester’s supporters used their positions to “make wholly inappropriate comments about [Sanghera’s] character and behaviour”. It said: “We are concerned that some of the contributions to the debate will have deterred other victims of bullying, harassment and sexual misconduct from coming forward”.

One of the report’s footnotes adds that the committee’s “attention [was drawn] to the fact that in the debate on 15 November, ‘reputation’ was invoked positively 15 times to describe Lord Lester. It was not invoked once to describe the complainant. At the same time, the complainant’s credibility and motivations were questioned”.

This is important – so often in these cases, while men’s reputations are defended, women are deemed to lack credibility, or accused of having ulterior motivations. This obstructs women’s access to justice and can put women off reporting sexual misconduct or violence.  

Sanghera said that the investigation against Lord Lester had been thorough, and by blocking his suspension the House of Lords “undermined the whole process, and undermined the commissioner and me”. It also “undermined victims”, she added, saying that she wouldn’t advise other women to report cases of harassment if this is how they respond.

Lester did eventually resign, though he maintains his innocence. A further debate on 17 December censured him – but as he had already resigned, he cannot face any sanctions in parliament. Meanwhile, Lester’s is not an isolated case. Rather it typifies the problems women face when reporting sexual misconduct against powerful men in government.
 

What’s next?

From reinstating MPs ahead of a crucial vote, to treating bullying allegations against Bercow as a political football, the UK parliament has not inspired much confidence in its ability to seriously handle accusations of misconduct and abuse.

Although two men did resign their ministerial posts following accusations of sexual harassment, they have remained MPs. One wonders what Sir Michael Fallon’s constituents make of his admission that his conduct may have “fallen short” of standards as defence secretary, while apparently deciding that he was still suitable to represent them.

The case of Lord Lester meanwhile highlights how the way sexual harassment claims are handled may influence whether other women will report cases in the future.

While it is positive that new complaints procedures are now in place at parliament – thanks in part to the work of feminist campaigners – if women do not believe their allegations will be listened to and respected, then many still won’t come forward.

Going into 2019, it remains alarming that those responsible for making laws on issues like violence against women and girls seem unable to deal with them in their own workplace.

Sian Norris is a writer and feminist activist. She is the founder and director of the Bristol Women’s Literature Festival, and runs the successful feminist blog sianandcrookedrib.blogspot.com. She has written for the Guardian, the Independent, the New Statesman. Her first novel, Greta and Boris: A Daring Rescue is published by Our Street and her short story, The Boys on the Bus, is available on the Kindle. Sian is currently working on a novel based around the life of Gertrude Stein. 
 

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Students celebrating International Women’s Day. Kolkata, 2017. Photo: Saikat Paul/Zuma Press/PA Images. All rights reserved.

This year, I’ve been a part of the Me Too revival in India, having joined countless other women in naming and shaming our abusers.

Like many Indian feminists, I’ve found the past few months exhilarating. Our gutsy movement might finally rewrite entrenched patriarchal norms, at least in workplaces. A government minister resigned, a Bollywood production house shut down, senior newspaper editors stepped down, a millionaire casting director was sacked, academics were let go from universities – and the list of major impacts continues with fresh allegations still unfolding.

Attempts in 2017 to ignite a Me Too movement in India were nowhere near as effective. These began in October 2017, shortly after the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke in the US, and scores of women drew attention to the scale of sexual abuse with #MeToo posts on social media. That month, an Indian law student at the University of California Davis, released a list on Facebook with names of senior academics accused of sexual harassment.
 

The LoSHA list

Raya Sarkar’s LoSHA (List of Sexual Harassers in Academia, as it came to be known on Twitter) left many feminists uncomfortable, including myself.

It was a crowd-sourced list – an open Google spreadsheet, which could be edited by anyone with the link. It named perpetrators in one column and survivors in another, but in almost all cases it lacked details of specific allegations. In principle, its open-access structure also meant that anyone could add a survivor’s name to the list, even without their consent.

Not only did the alleged perpetrators not face any legal actions or university sanctions, some of the renowned academics named on the list even garnered sympathy: it was seen to violate their rights to due process. The Me Too movement in India failed to gain traction and eventually dissipated.

What’s different this year? Many feminists have contended that Me Too allegations by Indian women weren’t taken seriously by the press or the public in 2017 because Dalit women, like Sarkar, led the campaigns. In contrast, women steering the 2018 movement are from influential castes.

Dalits are historically oppressed castes. A Dalit woman who names her abuser is more likely to face social ostracisation, disbelief and stigma. But Sarkar’s 2017 LoSHA was vital. It laid the groundwork for this year’s advances. For many of us who outed perpetrators of abuse and harassment in 2018, it showed us precisely the landmines to steer clear of.

“It showed us precisely the landmines to steer clear of”

This year’s movement began in September, when a Bollywood actor alleged that a senior male colleague had sexually harassed her in 2008. Soon after, allegations of abuse surfaced among well-known stand-up comedians.

The first few women who named perpetrators on social media were inundated with private messages from other women detailing their own experiences of harassment and assault. Some remained anonymous; others wanted their stories to be public. The women receiving these waves of allegations became ‘gatekeepers’ for the Me Too revival.

This is a crucial cog that was missing in 2017’s LoSHA campaign. This loose collective of gatekeepers spend time talking to survivors and learning more details of the time, place and nature of abuse before outing perpetrators. They ensure that survivors are not re-traumatised, but that their stories have enough details that other people can corroborate them.    

Producer Vinta Nanda at a press conference discussing Me Too. Mumbai, 2018. Photo: Hindustan Times/SIPA USA/PA Images. All rights reserved.

This time, the only Google spreadsheet is a list of lawyers and mental health professionals who have volunteered time and services to support survivors.

Another crucial difference in the ‘second wave’ of this movement is the larger number of women who have mustered-up the courage to name their abusers and harassers. Thanks to Sarkar’s work last year, the burden of stigma had already started to shift onto perpetrators. The first disruption was necessary for the second to make strides forward. LoSHA loosened the lid of the bottle.

“This time, the only Google spreadsheet is a list of lawyers and mental health professionals who volunteered to support survivors”

In October 2018, Mobashar Jawed Akbar, a former leading newspaper editor, resigned from his post as a junior foreign minister after 27 women accused him of sexual harassment. More than half of these women were not anonymous. (Akbar denied all allegations and filed an ongoing defamation case against the first woman to accuse him).

More women are outing perpetrators online, but the Me Too movement in India is also pursuing court cases and knocking on the doors of Internal Complaints Committees at their workplaces. More than 20 women have also pledged to testify in court against Akbar, for example.
The 2017 LoSHA list was criticised for not following “due process” regarding alleged perpetrators. But this “due process” emphasis is also insufficient, too narrowly defining what justice looks like for survivors, and incorrectly assuming it means the same thing for all women. This year, many survivors have come forward about their experiences explicitly stating that they do not want to pursue legal cases. Some only want an apology, or their jobs back.
 

The POSH Act

In 2013, India’s parliament passed the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, also known as the POSH Act. But its implementation has been negligible. The Me Too movement’s current wave has pushed from its start for this to change – via Twitter and public statements, letters and petitions to government authorities.

In response, on 24 October the government convened a group of ministers, headed by home minister Rajnath Singh, to examine legal and institutional frameworks for dealing with workplace sexual harassment. The National Commission for Women also reached out to several women on Twitter and accepted their petitions, promising to take action.

This may be nothing more than lip-service. But recent supreme court verdicts decriminalising homosexuality and allowing menstruating women into shrines suggest those in power are finally taking gender equality seriously. Though there are still many pressing questions.
Many of the men who have been accused of harassment or assault in both waves of the Me Too movement in India are powerful, yet supposedly progressive, figures the media industry. What made these ‘liberal’ men ignore the basic principle of consent in their own workplaces?
“What made ‘liberal’ men ignore the basic principle of consent in their own workplaces?”

For decades, the veteran broadcast journalist and editor Vinod Dua has criticised religious inequality, caste-based discrimination and undemocratic processes in India. He too has been accused by multiple women of sexual harassment. He has denied all charges.
Criticising government politics or social norms was easier for these men than looking critically at their own behavior, practices and thoughts. These men were not taught how not to be abusive, while women were told to be always on guard. These men could transgress accepted social boundaries, while women had to tolerate abuse today for the promise of a better tomorrow.

Women’s spaces, whether community spaces or friendship networks, have always had their whisper networks. Me Too campaigns have dared to share these online, using social media to alter the social order. Of course, centuries of entrenched patriarchy cannot be upturned in a month. But this country finally looks ready for a feminist overhaul.

Raksha Kumar is an independent journalist, writing on human rights, gender and politics. She has reported for the New York Times, Al Jazeera America, The Guardian, TIME magazine, Christian Science Monitor, DAWN, Caravan, The Hindu and South China Morning Post. Follow her on twitter @Raksha_Kumar.

Courtesy: https://www.opendemocracy.net/
 

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Codex Manesse, circa 1305-1315. Meister Johannes Hadlaub, UB Heidelberg

In chapter 12, he acknowledges that in his early life as a hermit he had been rebuked by various women for paying them too much attention: in one case policing her clothing, in others for making sexualised comments about their bodies, and trying to touch them. In one case he “perhaps already had done so”. It all sounds remarkably like admissions of guilt – but very equivocal admissions at that: perhaps he’s already touched one or another of them.

American scholar Megan Cook of Colby College in Maine posted the passage to Twitter recently, suggesting that sexual harassment and inappropriate behaviour towards women socially and in the workplace are long established – but that if a 14th-century hermit could apologise, so can contemporary perpetrators.
 

View image on Twitter

Dr. Megan Cook@meganlcook

 

 

I am struck by this passage in Richard Rolle’s Incendium Amoris every time I read it

 

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7:21 PM – Nov 14, 2018

 

 

Is this then an early 14th century #MeToo moment, with strongminded Yorkshire women calling out the over-entitled young hermit?

Our first question is whether we can even trust that the events Rolle describes actually happened. About the same time as Rolle was writing, a London manuscript, the Smithfield Decretals, was extensively illustrated with lively scenes from life and fable. There is a series devoted to the story of the Bad Hermit who, living alone, is tempted by the devil – he goes to the tavern, gets drunk, has sex with the miller’s wife, is confronted by the miller whom he beats to death, goes mad, flees to the wilderness and is eventually healed by confession and recovered by a monk.

The parallels with Rolle’s account are striking. Rolle probably had not seen the Smithfield manuscript, but he was drawing on a well-known topos or what we might call narrative arc. Rolle was looking back some 15 or 20 years to his early conversion to the hermit’s life, and part of the purpose of his text was to show his journey from youthful sinner to now accomplished mystic.

Without sin and penance there could be no redemption. Nevertheless, the specifics of Rolle’s misbehaviour, clumsy conflations of moral and spiritual guidance and sexual interest, are so much of a piece with his later career that they are likely to be very personal. But they also raise questions about youthful clerical masculinity more generally.
 

Original sin

Rolle had been a student at Oxford before he abandoned academia for the hermit’s life. Students were mostly planning on a career as monk or secular priest but they were generally too young (in their teens) to have taken vows of celibacy. So a life that involved sexual contact with women, or perhaps more commonly an ambivalent attitude that both permitted but also disapproved of such contact, was a common part of their experience.

Rolle recognised that he had done wrong and that he needed to re-orientate his life from worldly pleasures to the love of God. The women acted as useful reminders to him – but he clearly felt his wrong was less towards them than towards God. It is notable that, on the second page of chapter 12, Rolle describes a fourth woman, who “despised” him saying that he had “a beautiful face and a lovely voice” but “had done nothing”. The woman’s words are a call to masculine action in embarking upon the penitential and purgative path towards God.
 

Improper intentions

Rolle was a man who owed a lot to the women in his life. At the beginning of his new religious life his sister gave him two of her gowns so that he could fashion a hermit’s robe and mantle, in contrast to the presumably shorter and more fashionable student gear he had been wearing (the outfit he produced is remarkably like that worn by the Bad Hermit).

#HimToo? Richard Rolle, 14th-century mystic and modern guy. British Library

Anchoress (a female religious recluse), Margaret Kirkby, to whom he acted as a spiritual director in his later years, promoted his cult as a saint at the nunnery of Hampole near Doncaster and numbers of his texts are addressed to women.

Rolle appreciated the value of friendship between men and women, and thought it rewarding, provided it was not distracted by “improper” intentions, but though “God does not want women to be despised by men” he also thought that women needed direction from men (particularly men like him).

Those unnamed 14th-century Yorkshire women knew what they were talking about, but Rolle was only half listening – and his response was about him, not them. It is to be hoped that their 21st-century granddaughters find the men of our own day able to do a better job. Jury’s out so far.
 

Pat Cullum, Principal Lecturer, Department of English, Linguistics and History, University of Huddersfield

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Austen’s words, a searing commentary on how patriarchy controls the narrative, remains relevant today despite tenacious efforts by women to wrest authorial control from men and narrate our own stories. Even as the struggle to find one’s voice and to be heard continues, we might also ask ourselves what we will be left with after we have successfully challenged male authority and supremacy in our stories, the idea of heroes and villains, of chaste wives and women of disreputable characters. In the moment of triumph, is there also a need of introspection? The MeToo movement, in India and elsewhere, opens our world(s) up to these and many other questions that do not have easy or ready answers. A standard reply, reproduced in several platforms when questions like ‘why now’ or ‘what next’ are raised is illuminating of the problem societies face when women tell stories: “For now, we should just listen to the women who want to speak up.” It not only represents the struggle to tell our stories on our own terms but also tell them without a fixed agenda or plan.

The current moment in Hindi cinema has been complementing these societal struggles, perhaps even foreshadowing the MeToo challenges to patriarchy by both wresting authorial power to tell stories of relatable people, especially of women, but also displacing plot devices and narrative arcs familiar to stories that end up reaffirming patriarchal authority. Perhaps, one of the biggest challenge to patriarchy is to just tell stories of women who do not want to be like men but such trends have also provoked a backlash. This article seeks to unravel some of these tangled webs of struggles witnessed in our popular, mainstream story-telling medium.

Subverting the Narrative
Veere di Wedding was promoted as the revolutionary film with four women play its leads but it rather represented a normalisation of a marginal trend in Hindi cinema, which has now become commercially viable. I cannot comment on Veere for I have not watched the film but I want to reflect on what it meant to have four-five women as leads in two other films, Lipstick Under my Burkha and Angry Indian Goddesses.

Angry Indian Goddesses started the trend with an account of privileged women, whose privilege is accentuated by the inclusion of a domestic maid in their sisterhood. It is sisterhood with an asterisk. In this film, men are included primarily as sexual predators and the only solution against them is presented as the ‘final solution’. One that many vigilante films have adopted before and after its release but there is one crucial difference – in Angry Indian Goddesses, the murders are not planned in cold-blood. It’s a reaction that comes from several women who are successful or accomplished at what they do but are frustrated with the world they live in. They realise that despite their merit they are never seen as more than sexual objects and, in fact, resented for the success that is never seen as rightfully theirs. They are angry not only because they have had enough, they also know that end to this struggle is not in sight. The film closes on a meta note with one of the characters espousing the hope that one day we will be able to tell our own stories.

Lipstick Under my Burkha is also a tale of frustrated aspirations. But unlike Angry Indian Goddesses, these women do not have the privilege or the platform to nurture their talents. The younger women know what they are capable of and aspire to a life different than the one they see around them. Those who hold them back are not unknown sexual predators, as in Angry Indian Goddesses, but people close to them (who also indulge in sexual abuse). Both films are about women struggling to make a different life for themselves and realising that the pushback from patriarchy can be swift and brutal.

MeToo reflects this very frustration, in India and elsewhere, that while women’s lives have phenomenally transformed through the opportunities now available to them, men have been slower to adapt. By this I am not just referring to sexual predators and sexist family men – in the struggle against the patriarchy, an attack on individual patriarchs is much easier for men, who believe in equality, to support. When it comes to addressing patriarchy, the pushback appears inevitably. When I read reputed film critic, Baradwaj Rangan, on Lipstick Under my Burkha, I could see this disjuncture clearly: “It’s not that these men don’t exist. It’s that we’ve seen them far too often in far lesser films, and it looks like a cop-out when a brave new film of today opts for the same black-and-white imagery.” Rangan’s specific complaint against Lipstick was that all the men in it were ‘cads’. As opposed to Arth or Parched, he continues, there are no sympathetic men in Lipstick Under my Burkha. This complaint did not find its way into the review he wrote for Angry Indian Goddesses, which had almost no redeeming men in the story. The review for Veere gets extra points from him for finding a guy as well as a (heterosexual) couple to root for. The larger question is, do films on women owe men a sympathetic male character to identify with? A hero, even if in a minor role? 

it is true that Lipstick is perhaps a tad indifferent to its men (except for the photographer Arshad’s character). The men are peripheral to the women’s story and their struggles and in this aspect, it is a mirror image of Dil Chahta Hai or Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, made by the Akhtar siblings. In those films, it is the women’s roles that are superficial, some bordering on the offensive, and they have been criticized for this. But when your sample size of multi-starrer films with women in leads is a total of three movies, complaining about how under-written male parts are seems a bit unfair.

The stories were about showcasing women’s aspirations, sexual and otherwise, and the factors that hold them back. Men and women around the women are patriarchal agents if not patriarchs themselves; they can be fleshed-out characters but their purpose here is to highlight the way patriarchy functions. Their roles are driving the plot symbolically rather than via embodiment. Buaji’s (the character played by Ratna Patak) swimming coach, for example, is a respectful and even sympathetic character who refuses to see a middle-aged woman as just another ‘aunty’, demands to know her name and adds a respectful ji to it. He encourages her to learn swimming, coming across as a warm, caring young man, ironically from ‘brute Haryana’. He is not perfect but considerate. That he wanted a mate of his own age and felt betrayed by Buaji’s actions does not make him a ‘cad’ but his character was not given enough time to dwell on this complexity. The movie was about these four women and taking attention away from them would be akin to weakening the subversive element. It might be interesting to know more about the coach but it is not owed.

The success of Lipstick Under my Burkha and Veere, along with many smaller movies without proverbial heroes, filmed in non-metro settings (Bobby Jasoos, A Death in the Gunj, Masaan, Bareilly ki Barfi, Shubh Mangal Savdhan, in fact the whole sub-genre of Ayushmann Khurrana films), hints at a larger trend in our consumption patterns – perhaps, we no longer need masculine heroes to drive plots in good, successful cinema. Khurrana appears to have realised this as he has been stating in interviews given ahead of Badhai Ho’s release that movies where he was cast as a larger-than-life protagonist have not worked and he has now decided to pick projects where his roles are defined in relation to other characters in the story.

Khurrana is not a card-holding revolutionary but his successful challenge to patriarchy lies in the refusal to accept emasculation in situations that may underline a crisis in masculinity (Shubh Mangal Saavdhan, Badhai Ho). Re-interpreting both femininity and masculinity is a thread that connects these divergent attempts at subverting cinema but a patriarchal backlash has also emerged somewhere between the hits and misses.

The Patriarchal Backlash, Violence and the Hero Image
Pink is a particularly well-crafted film in the context of subversive cinema. The story of three young women out of their depth as they fight against powerful sexual predators could have easily turned into an anthem for the male saviour complex. With a simple plot-tweaking, the filmmakers gave us an aging lawyer with manic depression who agrees to provide legal aid. The depression had no particular role to play in the film other than take the edge of hypermasculinity off. Consequently, unlike Damini, survivors of sexual assault in Pink no longer needed muscular heroes who will fight in the mean streets and scream in the courtrooms to protect and defend their honour. Amitabh Bachchan clearly did not understand this narrative subversion as he tweeted a picture in celebration of this unusual film, excluding the gutsy women from the frame. He assumed that he (and the filmmakers) were heroes although the film itself did not provide us with any.

We live in an age of cynicism where heroes in many of our stories have been replaced by real-world, complex and often flawed people. This can be frightening for some and I am not referring to the oppressed and the vulnerable who need hope – I am referring to those who watch Bollywood films to elevate themselves from their own insignificance. If male authors have used every advantage to write stories that cast men as heroes, there are other men who have sought solace in these plots, those who project themselves in the role of a hero.

Violence is integral to the image of a hero but can violence, once subverted through the lens of gender, caste or class, be reclaimed in service of a testosterone-fuelled hero? It has been reported that in Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, Aditya Chopra had not planned an action sequence as its climax but Shah Rukh Khan had insisted on one because the role had otherwise appeared to him ‘too girlish’. Twenty years later, when shooting for Chennai Express, Shah Rukh again sought to include a final action sequence although, in this film, he was supposed to be a timid guy (who called himself ‘a common man’ while shaking with fear in the face of burly thugs), slightly vulgar and bigoted towards South Indians. He was far from perfect but had some endearing qualities that made a much younger woman fall for him. The plot twist that turned this common man to a violent rampage against his rival represented an inability to accept the resonance the larger film plot of a timid man, alternatively insensitive and caring, held in the context of current Bollywood films. It was a bone thrown to aspirational and insecure men – and perhaps, the star himself – who could not accept a story where the hero cannot reclaim violence from the thugs. After the extended brawl, he also proceeded to lecture the thugs on women’s autonomy and choice, a move that would likely make the Angry Indian Goddesses angrier. Ironically, Shah Rukh had insisted that Deepika Padukone’s name to appear ahead of his own in the opening titles of the film – he just did not want her to speak for herself.
Over a period of time, there is one star who has harvested this masculine insecurity with more convincing stories than Chennai Express, appropriating tropes from subversive cinema more seamlessly in service of a larger-than-life protagonist. The erstwhile hypermasculine Khiladi, Akshay Kumar, has found a winning formula to reinvent the regular guy into a hero in the old-fashioned sense of the term. Featuring in a series of films where his masculinity is threatened, he often emerges as the ‘mansplainer’ par excellence who lectures women (and men) endlessly on how to save themselves – from themselves. With Padman, this agenda is no longer a secret. He wants to be a superman without using violence or intimidation and his method is simple and effective – he just tells women repeatedly that they are wrong. No wonder the insecure men with fewer role models flock to his films. (As they do with Salman Khan, who is at heart an anarchist.) Kumar’s films cleverly obscure their goals for domination, especially of domination over women.

Kumar is, in one sense, the quintessential neo-hero of the Modi era. In one of his recent films, titled Gabbar is Back, he brutally murders ordinary people who happen to be in positions where they could corrupt the system. A more nakedly fascist plot can only be seen in the Shankar’s Tamil films (South Indian action film plots, incidentally, work very well for our ‘Hindu stars’, Kumar and Ajay Devgn). According to Gabbar is Back, fear is an instrument to keep the society in check. The iconic villain of all times, the outlaw Gabbar Singh, is recast as a hero who can clean up the system by rejecting the rule of law.

The resonance of such a plot in post-2014 India is fairly apparent as lynch mobs, Hindutva terrorists and rapists are garlanded, celebrated or defended, respectively. Gabbar is Back is to India’s lynch mobs what Toilet-Padman is to Swachh Bharat Abhiyan – they are two halves of the same whole. Attractive slogans for ‘a clean-up’, created for the middle class to rally behind a pretend reformer, who challenges hierarchies and uses shame as an effective tactic. He encourages self-loathing as the means to demoralise and destroy you till you submit to his rule. This is a hero who emerged from the ashes of subversive cinema that had once successfully challenged dominant narratives. The neo-hero is vying for a renewed life among stories like Toilet and Padman, set again in small town India, with multiple, competing voices, seeking to push the simple narrative of a superman who is here to rescue us from ourselves but also to deny us control over our own stories and struggles.
The challenge to hierarchies that the right-wing ostensibly poses is also designed to displace the more liberal aspects of the mainstream society where women’s stories are shared and heard, replacing them with the patriarchal authority of a man who takes care of women’s needs because they are apparently incapable of doing so. Dismissing MeToo stories as liberal and elitist even as the right wing celebrates violence perpetrated by ‘son of the soil’ underdog men elsewhere highlights how central maintaining patriarchal authority is to our homegrown fascism.

Kumar, in short, is making fascist films by both appropriating from and indirectly delegitimising the subversive cinema at the same time. More disturbingly, he – and the anarchist Salman Khan – have been more successful in reclaiming violence than Shah Rukh has. Kumar’s films are a product of a crisis of masculinity created by a world where authorship of tales has finally been wrested from the monopoly of men. This has led to the popularisation of dictatorial men who privilege male supremacy over the rule of law. We are, consequently, caught between the utopic potential of subversive tales and cathartic MeToo narratives, on the one hand, and the dystopic popularity of fascist heroes, on the other. Modis of the real world or Gabbars in the reel world will keep returning as long as insecure men need heroes, even if they are fascist heroes. The struggle to control the narrative continues.

Rama Srinivasan is an anthropologist based in Germany.

Courtesy: kafila.online
 

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Therefore the news of Sotheby India’s MD Gaurav Bhatia’s caught in the # Me Too accusations are both disturbing and gratifying. The former because of the 18 year old who was subjected to a nightmare, pounced upon without solicitation ,grabbed and groped and forced into a servile position that left him “shocked and scared”. Such incidents are physically exhausting and mentally daunting not just for the victim but those well outside it, the audience. Assuredly the boy will need many years before he can come to grips with the experience. If he is lucky, well , he might be able to heal without the scars constantly simmering beneath the conscious and well adjusted façade. In case he isn’t quite that fortunate, he will join the ranks of those scores of people across the world who grapple with such violent and abusive experience without a time- space limit.

Women have largely formed a big part of those abused, sexually or otherwise. At some level the calling off of Gaurav Bhatia’s deplorable behaviour may have turned the entire movement towards a wider intellectual space. For one, it’s no more limited to gender, cases specifically of women assaulted by men in positions of definite power and authority. This accusation has taken the # Me Too scene beyond its restrictive confines although gender continues to be a major part of the discourse and debate. As Mr. Bhatia goes off unceremoniously on leave, the debate finally opens into its logical text -the ambit of Perpetrator vs Victim. The emphasis on gender was in a way diluting the fight. Now the spotlight seems to be back on the psychology of the person in power/ authority  who thinks it is quite within acceptable behaviour to ask an employee for sexual favours and if denied make things undeniably stifling.

Feminism, while taking up the fight for women for equality and empowerment is ultimately subsumed into the scores of movements that are against discriminatory practices, like casteism or racism. Of course millions do believe that equality between genders, all genders,  must be a part of our daily intellectual engagement, yet many find the word ‘feminism’ disturbing or overwhelming. Semantics be put aside, women’s issues need to be accorded the same importance as caste or class or race. Those who oppose the word and its representations often have never faced instances of discrimination in their personal lives or have been socialised so thoroughly that the awning gender divide seems like a piece of fiction. Patriarchy has deeper roots than one believes and the recent ugly accusations levelled against some women who have  blown a whistle on their perpetrators are indeed unhappy proof. The adjective ‘ patriarchy’ stands for a culture that believes in systematised hegemony and in India which also has a thriving caste- class structure, it is also deeply hierarchical. So a Dalit women faces the double disadvantage of gender and caste and her position is often the saddest. The # Me too gave some teeth to women, albeit those in a certain strata.

As stories of varying degrees of predatory behaviour came out, the world at large woke up to just how unsafe the workplace was. And as accounts and skeletons tumbled out a sense of victimhood overcame the majority. Denials by men, threats and emphatic arguments followed. This was also followed by a systematic effort to defame the women involved, the easiest method being to attack her character and make question her climb to the top. “ He did help her gain ground at the workplace, so why complain about it after so many years”. Collective consciousness is outraged. The moot point is why question the timing and the women’s credentials. Why not keep the conversation and the enquiry limited to the act of forcing a human into a position which compromises personal safety and mental sanity. This is where Gaurav Bhatia has contributed to the conversation. It does not matter whether he is found guilty or acquitted. The very allegations have contributed to the # Me Too. No more is the movement about man vs woman. Rather it is about a human who belittles rules of civilised society and strips the other of dignity. Yes, this is finally about dignity and respect, for one never forces those we respect or value into such  cramped hell holes of subjugation and exploitation.

Saonli Hazra is an educator and free lance writer.

Courtesy: https://countercurrents.org/
 

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In a solidarity event that voiced support for female victims of sexual abuse, female journalists have called on women from all spheres to speak up against abusers.

A slew of allegations made through social media have taken Bangladesh by storm, as women, one after another are accusing men in powerful positions of sexually harassing them without any consequence.

Female journalists held a demonstration in front of National Press Club on Friday afternoon, calling the nation to stand by these victims.

Speakers at the event also called on people to stand up to these social crimes against women in their homes, their workplaces and on the streets.

Bangladesh Nari Sangbadik Kendra (centre for women journalists) President Nasimun Ara Haque Minu said: “Allegations against rich, powerful and influential businessmen, journalists, publishers and university teachers have been revealed.

“No matter how talented, no matter how rich or powerful they may be, they cannot get away with this. We have to speak up, otherwise the offenders will continue to get away with their crimes,” she said.

“We have to stand beside and support those who have already spoken up,” she added.

She also said that these protests will continue in future and all female journalists gathered at the event are standing up against abusers.

Minu called on all employers to implement the High Court’s instructions on workplace sexual harassment, adding that this would significantly reduce such incidents.

Women Journalist Forum President Mamtaz Bilkis Banu lauded the Daily Star for addressing allegations raised against their staff.

“We hope that this will be an example for other organizations,” she said.

Bangladesh Women Journalist Forum General Secretary Sharmin Rinvi said many famous personalities had been unmasked by the revelations.

Bangladesh Nari Sangbadik Samity President Nasima Soma said there was no alternative to raising awareness in the family in order to prevent sexual harassment.

Journalist Udia Islam vowed to stand up against those who will try to stifle this social movement.

“This is not a new problem. For ages women and children have lived through these problems. But as conscious parents we cannot keep our children near these assailants. This is a mental disease,” she said.

Speakers called on assailants to publicly apologise and for social organizations to remove them as members.

Courtesy: Dhaka Tribune

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Current MeToo movement in India has exposed a few and frightened many. While there are still a very small number of women who have come up with their MeToo stories, a disturbing countertrend has emerged. Many people are trying to project the movement as against the whole Men Community. And on the social media platforms, jokes about the MeToo are trending innumerable times more than the movement itself. Where the first could be seen as a deliberate attempt to dissolve the movement which can perhaps unmask many predators; latter countertrend is definitely careless and insensitive as it normalizes the sexual assault. There are also a band of people who are trying to discredit the movement as an imitation of a similar movement in the west (which according to them) is arising not of genuine quest of change but out of inferiority complex.  Besides being untrue, it is but pitiable that it doesn’t reduce the seriousness of it by an ounce. Much before MeToo started in the Hollywood, a small but similar series of event happened when a Malayalam actress was assaulted by a group of men allegedly hired by an actor Dileep. It only gained a momentum when Tanushree Dutta reinvigorated the debate when she repeated her 10 year old allegations of sexual assault against Nana Patekar. It is rather unsettling to know that she did so not to seek out justice from a hopeless system, except to make things clear from her side against the public slandering wetted out at her, for she was being asked about them in the interviews all the way in America.

What MeToo has brought in light is a pervasive nature of patriarchy and that is what makes it very important a movement. Women not only have an immense wage gap with men, they also have to go through string of abuses to get what is rightfully theirs. MeToo doesn’t include flirting and exchange of numbers as a form of sexual assault as some would like us to believe. MeToo may not even be about bringing the powers-that-be to justice for their crimes. It is about creating camaraderie amongst the survivors. It is about cautioning the young women entering the educational or professional fields about the preying men or just about the harsh reality of it. It is also, in parts, an attempt to scare the men that although they might not be brought to justice but would be shamed in public. It is a movement that seeks to question the whole system that infringes upon atleast four fundamental rights of women in general – right to equality, right to freedom, right against exploitation, and right to constitutional remedies. It is also about questioning the conditioning that justifies the abuse to happen.

It is worthy to note a 2015 case in Australia in which an Indian man accused of stalking two women was able to escape the conviction by arguing that he was influenced by Bollywood movies. Should it really surprise us if India happens to be the most dangerous place for women? Misogynistic nature of Indian public is well displayed in its sex ratio (943 females on 1000 males). Reports suggest that every third woman in India has suffered sexual, physical (or both) violence at some point of her life and this comes out of paucity of data. It is imperative to note that both predators and survivors of these violence come from across political, religious, ideological, economical and professional lines. When women from positions and economically stable backgrounds come out with their stories, it not only shows just how much unsafe it is for them, it also hints at the larger picture of women from lower strata of the society. An NGO Sisters For Change has reported that around 60% of women have faced physical, verbal and sexual abuse in the factories. Many fear that the condition could be worse in the unorganized sector. Apart from violence, many women are often denied their wages in case any reporting of the violence is done. It explains the data from National Sample Survey Office [NSSO] which recounts the steep decline in Women’s Work participation in India. Between 1999-2000 (41.0%) and 2011-12 (32.2%) , around 21.46% of decline was observed, which particularly affected the rural women.

When people abuse the MeToo movement or make jokes about it, they automatically become complicit in the injustices being perpetrated against women. When women who have come out are called out Feminazis, it is nothing less than a vicious attempt at downplaying Nazism and vilification of justice seekers. It should be understood by all and especially those who say that MeToo shows the weakness of women, that it is not easy for anyone to come out no matter when they do; and it is equally challenging to recount the horror and to silently go through mental trauma of the abuse. It must also be understood that many women are still not able to come out for a variety of reasons and it in no way makes them coward.

Instead of cross-questioning the survivors or “alleged” survivors, real question should be asked from those who have been accused whether or not they have committed these heinous acts. It is not to suggest that all those who are accused are indeed complicit but in any conventional sense of justice, benefit of doubt should go to women because they are the ones who have been en-masse wronged against by every institutions for millennia. Ofcourse, no one should be convicted wrongly but to say that most women are abusing the movement for personal gains is destructive in nature.

Moreover, shouldn’t we as a society introspect ourselves for our fallacies? Shouldn’t we take a relook at all the conditioning that is done that legitimizes our misogyny? Shouldn’t film industry be held accountable for selling us the filth that legitimizes sexual assaults as fun? Shouldn’t we question the Superstars and singers for popularizing the songs that could easily be judged as disregarding the consent? Shouldn’t the questions be raised to those who hold sway about their silence and the reason of their aloofness from an issue that directly concerns half the humanity? MeToo may not solve the prevalent problem but it does raise many important questions.

Hanzala Aman is a political Columnist for HW News English. He has studied Agriculture Sciences and is currently pursuing M. Sc. Rural Technology and Development from the University of Allahabad. He freelances as a writer and translator.

Courtesy: https://countercurrents.org
 

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