Feminism in the time of MMS

What is the content? A girl bathing. A girl being manhandled in a public place. A girl performing oral sex. A girl kissing her boyfriend. At a time when newsmagazines are writing cover stories on the sexual emancipation of the Indian woman, it seems like there are a whole lot of not very emancipated men who are having a hard time accepting it. So hard that they must secretly film, and then disseminate the results to thousands of others.

And funnily enough, the more we talk about it, the more their plan succeeds. Simply because what we see upfront is not the criminal but the victim. Some time ago, model-turned-film star Bipasha Basu was molested in a Mumbai nightclub. Could anyone say what her molester looked like? The man who molested Jyothika, could anyone who viewed the clip describe him from memory? Nobody knows who put a camera in Trisha’s bathroom, if indeed it was really her bathroom. Everybody, on the other hand, knows about the exploitation of Miss Jammu and Kashmir but could anyone name her alleged exploiter off hand? And the one photograph I saw of the boy who was behind the Delhi school scandal was one with his head protectively covered by the police.

Most people, likely as not, would be shocked by the suggestion that they should care what the men — and they seem in these instances at least to be all men — look like. Why should anybody care to know what the perpetrators of such sick acts look like, one could say with justifiable outrage. Isn’t it enough to ask for the worst possible punishment for such people?

It is not enough for the simple reason that regardless of what happens to the offenders a certain message has already been sent home by the very act itself. The message: that it is shameful, to bathe, to walk the street, have sexual desires so on and so forth. And when the victims are successful women — and in this case many of them are — then the message carries an even greater suggestion of retribution. And this is where the connection between beauty contests and the abuse of new technology comes in.

Over the last few years we have seen an utterly irresponsible build-up of a culture devoted to the worship of physical beauty — more accurately, beauty that approximates a standard, internationally accepted look. Through the tom-tomming of beauty contests, fashion shows, youth culture, events associated with glamour and in a million more insidious ways, we have unquestioningly created a society that spins on just one human attribute. And now it is time to pay.

It is well known that developments of the modern age are often used to reassert the most regressive attitudes. The surge of middle class prosperity through stockmarket investments in the eighties, for instance, led to a stronger emphasis on dowry and wedding expenses. New technology offers an even greater scope for subversion.

If we want to stop the proliferation of exploitative, invasive media, if we want to protect ourselves from the potential abuse of new technology and if we want a liberal society where people of all gender can walk free, then it is not enough to think merely of laws and rules. We have to be conscious of the values and social messages shaping the minds that have to abide by them.