Sex and Mental Kids and Society.
About two weeks ago I happened to chat with an old old friend from school. Rashmi Kannur – the very first of the many ‘first bestest friends’ I had had right through Junior School. It took me back to what I was like as a child.
I was the type of the seven year old my twenty one year old self would take an instant dislike towards. I was overgrown (taller than the tallest boy in the batch for a long long time), made too many facial expressions and used too many big words. I spoke loudly and clearly, knew all the bad words a lot sooner than everyone else and walked around the corridors in school with six or seven girls flagging me on either side.
Back then I was sure that they were all as enamored by me as I was by myself, but looking at it in retrospect I feel like they( among the quitest, most impressionable people in the whole class) were really too afraid to not be friends with me.
Rashmi and I talked about the time when we were in the second grade as we were chatting (yes, on bloody facebook). I was of course, the leader of the gang. (a bit like Top Cat id like to think) And at some point I had taken the initiative to formalize our organization. Uthara Ganesh was President, Harleen Singh and Rashmi Kannur were Vice Presidents and five others were clerks or cheerer-ons or some such insignificant thing. These rather majestic looking gold buttons I had taken off a not entirely old blazer in the house were our ‘badges’. I had also drawn up an elaborate agenda with rules – many of which involved not having any sort of contact(even at the level of thought) with ‘males that were not related to us by blood’. Rashmi asked me once if it was okay for her to watch a Tv show (was it Tu Tu – Mai Mai?) that featured a few men in it. After a lot of high level analysis I had said ‘No’.
But I didn’t start off writing this entry to ascertain to everyone that I was in fact a MENTAL kid. It was really, to point out, that very very young, even the most rebellious, individualistic children somehow internalize an extremely awkward idea of how to interact with “males(members of the opposite sex?) that are not related to us by blood”. Of course it wears off as we grow older and all of that (sooner for me than anyone else perhaps), but there is a certain unease and anxiety that is retained. I would think this is truer for women, especially in a society where your sexual behavior is equated with such things as your “moral caliber” and “family background”. How respected a woman is, has much to do with how ‘good’ she is. And goodness has more to do with how much ‘unpermitted’ sexual contact she is having than anything else.
And it is institutionalized too, in so many ways. We have a school of ‘feminists’ going all agog about taking action against Rape (that odious, monstrous crime that the law equates with the cut-you-into-pieces type murder). The trauma associated with rape has so much more to do with the victims’ (and societies’) concept of sex and respect and ohiamdoneforness, than the actual impact of the physical act.
I feel like if people didn’t think all of these complex things about sex and women and respect, there’d be fewer rapes(because then it wouldn’t be such a ‘tool’ to ‘attack’ a woman) and that womenkind in general would have fewer “daddy issues”.
damn nice
I couldn’t agree more, as a woman having many people equate ‘goodness’ and a ‘self-respecting woman’ with chastity is really getting quite old and annoyingly hypocritical considering the fact that all the men around us are encouraged to (and often looked upon strangely) when they don’t have any sexual conquests by a certain age. And ofcourse our generation hasn’t helped things with terms like ‘player’ and ‘slut’ which in themselves just completely reinforce all those archaic ideas about men and women and sex and respect that one would HOPE would be fading away!
But I can’t entirely agree about your statement about rape – the trauma associated with rape mostly IS to do with the actual physical act. I mean I’m sure that society’s great ideas about sex and respect don’t help the rape victim feel any better, but you can’t really make the actual physical act of rape seem less significant than it is because any form of violence can really shake you up but when it’s sexual violence its a whole other story and maybe the physical act doesn’t physically hurt the woman a lot – although this sadly isn’t true in many cases – but it really screws you up and it’s got nothing to do with what you think ‘everyone else will think’ but just more to do with the fact that you were completely violated and felt so helpless and stupid during the act.
But what you say is also true because in many cases women who are raped end up BLAMING themselves for the rape because they think they flirted or dressed a certain way and ended up seducing the damn rapist.
It’s all about having power and even about being a sadistic moron or just not getting any and thinking its okay to violate a woman like that. Rape has been going on for centuries, at one point when a man raped a woman it wasn’t an insult or anything against that woman, but was against the man who ‘owned’ her (her father, husband etc.). And well, we haven’t come too far from that and that really is a scary thought.