More sinned against

Forms of male harassment are uncharted territory, not because male harassment doesn’t happen but because many men are unwilling to admit to sexual harassment.

The tenor of this male muting is reminiscent of the way women hid behind silence, because confession was shaming to the victim not perpetrator. The story of the victim condemned to further victimhood has found a new audience of silent men.

Conventionally, the known contours of harassment are of men abusing women but there is no reason to believe the direction isn’t reversed. The real question is whether mens’ reticence illuminates afundamentally different problem.

First, is harassment exhibited only as "acts" or actions that can be "seen"? Second, is sexual harassment only a set of acts that cross gender lines, whereas if things happen between members of the same sex they are not, by definition, part of the same complex?

We need to loop into history to find answers. In the course of their resistance to sexual harassment women stumbled upon an accomplished but brazen `molester’ figure — the Feminine Image. This image hijacked women as persons and held them captive, so that they not only needed to fight male molesters but also had to destroy a particular image of themselves.

Do men have images? Do men have images that imprison them? Do men need to reclaim for themselves an aspect of their lives and beings that free them from their image?

Do men need a feminist movement?

Clearly the first step is to unveil the contours of the male image and discover the way this image works as a fetter and a controlling device to keep men intheir place. We don’t have far to look because the male image is a hugely written-about and well-defined archetype, virtually deified in the writings of Sigmund Freud and others of his ilk.

The figure that is the centre of a huge body of theoretical literature ranging from psychoanalysis to gender studies is The Phallocentric Male. Feminists are familiar with The Phallocentric Male whose seeming invincibility and power has both obsessed and enraged them particularly because the living examples of this creature they see around them do not merit consecration.

In an odd way, the male image is very close to the outlines of its feminine counterpart, in the sense that both male and female images have an identifiable terrain – the body. And just as the feminine body image was fractured into a headless, breasts-and-legs figure, the male body image is butchered into choice portions that get attention and adulation, while other parts – the heart, for example – are buried into insignificance.

Fragmenting the wholeinto privileged and masked body parts is only part of the picture – the principle of division further splits the body into the living body of flesh and blood, and the sanctified image of The Phallocentric Male.

It’s time men woke up to the butcher in their midst who maimed them almost beyond recognition so that all that they see in the mirror is a mangled man. The first step is to map the relation between their split bodies because mapping is a political exercise of figuring, literally and metaphorically, the tyrannies that men encounter in the course of their everyday lives.

The mapping is not going to be easy because the relation between dual bodies has deep, historical roots. In the Christian West, for example, kings were thought to have two bodies – one human, the other divine. Roman emperors had two funerals for their respective bodies.

The first perishable body, the corpse, with its foulness of flesh was buried in a tomb. The other was declared immortal. The immortal Imago, or the iconic image,was consecrated in a temple so that, even after his death, the emperor remained doubly present among the citizens of Rome.

The point about all this body-splitting at death was that in life the king’s body was thought to be a "fusion" of an individual private human body and a public, political, divine body. Which made the King’s body not just different from a plebeian body, but also gave it a special kind of power.

Phallocentricism invests men’s bodies with a similar dualness. The "fusion" of the ordinary with the superhuman endows the male body with a special significance. It also has a double existence in two spares — the ordinary everybody world, and the set-apart sacred universe of Theory.

The schizophrenic splitting of personae between an existence as "mere mortal men" and as "Phallocentered Males", has enormous repercussions not just for feminists, but in fact and even more crucially, for "mere mortal men". Men need to realise how badly the deified Phallocentric body has treated them.

Mere menhave been treated like formless lumps of clay whose bearing, posture and movements have been manipulated, trained and reshaped into the deified Ideal. In fact, mere men have been treated as docile objects and political puppets by (hold your breath, guys) the imperious Phallocentric Male. Mere men are not active in their own right but are the objects of control of their own Imago.

And all along, I thought this only happened to women.

The political anatomy of the Phallocentric Male with its particular mechanism of phallic power has redrawn the male body in an image that has nothing to do with humanity. It is very far from any feelings of pleasure, of sensation or emotion, or indeed of a sense of well-being that can come from an alchemy of wholeness. Perhaps the most terrifying power of the Phallocentered Imago is its ability to snatch away all potential individual identity by eclipsing the flesh-and-blood body with the remote Ideal. The Image spares no one. It’s indifference impartially impounds mysingularity – and yours.

Men need liberation from their own Imago. They could take strategy lessons from "Take Back the Night" movements and launch an offensive to reclaim their bodies. Because if they don’t the Phallocentric Image will retain the power of generating docile corpses that produce and make phallomen.

The writer is a Reader in Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics