What’s the good word?

Let’s not trivialise sexual harassment by coyly calling it ‘eve-teasing’

Of all the words that seek to hide a grim reality behind innocuous euphemisms – honour killings, collateral damage, dowry deaths – the most ludicrous has to be ‘eve-teasing’. And of late we have been getting an overdose of this word in our media because of the horrific murders of two Mumbai boys, Keenan Santos and Reuben Fernandez.

These two young men were out with friends one evening when some ‘eve-teasers’ started misbehaving with the girls in the group. Keenan and Reuben objected to their behaviour and got into an altercation. The miscreants left, only to return with a gang of rowdies. A fight ensured, in the course of which the goons stabbed both Keenan and Reuben. (I wonder, does that make them ‘knife-wielders’ rather than murderers?) Keenan died on the spot. Reuben passed away a week later in hospital. And we were told that the boys had paid the ultimate price for standing up against the menace of ‘eve-teasing’.

Funny old word, isn’t it? Eve-teasing. It evokes pictures of bashful young girls being playfully ‘teased’ by mischievous young men who are just looking for a lark and some laughs. It brings to mind bucolic images of a beautiful Garden of Eden in which nubile young girls (the Eves in eve-teasing) are gently joshed with by well-meaning, witty men. Yes, it sounds nice and soft, all romantic and wonderful, doesn’t it?

The reality, of course, is quite different. What ‘eve-teasing’ means in real terms is the incessant, unremitting sexual harassment of women by men who take a perverted pleasure in tormenting them. There’s the boy whistling loudly at a girl as she walks down the street. There’s the man passing lewd comments on the physical attributes of the woman who works with him in office. There’s the boy who brushes up against a bunch of teenagers in the mall. There’s the man who pinches the bum of the woman nearest to him in a crowded bus. And much, much worse.

Yes, sexual harassment can take many forms. But not one of them qualifies to be coyly termed ‘eve-teasing’, with its connotations of playful joshing and the sense of how ‘boys will be boys, yaar’. And yet, we are constantly being bombarded with the subliminal message that these ‘eve-teasers’, those naughty boys, are just out for some innocent fun and a few laughs. And honestly, we shouldn’t take it so seriously.

At one level, this laid-back attitude to the sexual harassment of women is a by-product of our patriarchal culture in which men are allowed to get away with murder (sometimes quite literally). Their bad behaviour is excused or explained away on one pretext or the other; their various misdemeanours treated with indulgence. And never more so than when their victims are female.

But if you ask me, our popular culture is just as culpable. In India, of course, that translates into the movies. And our cinema hasn’t exactly helped by elevating ‘eve-teasing’ to an art form. Remember those Sixties movies that made Shammi Kapoor a star? In which he chased his heroines relentlessly through the first hour after which they obligingly fell in love with him? The same formula has been repeated in every decade after with everyone from Rajesh Khanna to Govinda, from Salman and Shah Rukh to Imran Khan following this peculiarly Hindi-movie style of courtship that is more harassment than romance.

There is a word for a man who follows you around, insists that you give in to his advances, won’t take no for an answer, and continues to believe that you are in love with him despite all evidence to the contrary. In the real world he is called a stalker. In Hindi movies, he is the hero. And somehow, the heroine always obediently falls in love with him in the course of the second song sequence.

As a consequence, all the men who grow up watching their heroes indulge in what is coyly described as ‘chhed-chhad’, come to believe that this sort of harassment is completely acceptable behaviour. It’s all about breaking down her defences. It’s all about brow-beating her into submission. And then there’s that old chestnut: she may say no, but she actually means yes. You just have to keep at it until she says ‘yes’ as well.

In other words, these men begin to see stalking as courtship.

But real life is not the movies. And real-life women have this irritating way of not falling in love with their harassers unlike Hindi film heroines. Unfortunately, the men can’t seem to tell the difference between reality and the movies and continue to act as if harassment is actually a legitimate form of interaction with the opposite sex. And as a society, we are implicit in trivialising this sexual harassment when we refer to it as ‘eve-teasing’.

I think the tragic deaths of Keenan and Reuben should serve as a wake-up call in this regard. These two fine young men didn’t die because they were objecting to ‘eve-teasing’. They died because they took a stand against the sexual harassment of women. And the fact that nobody stood up for them as they were being stabbed to death shows us just how de-sensitised we have become as a society.

The Santos and Fernandez families will never get their men back. But let’s not besmirch their memory by our constant references to ‘eve-teasing’. They didn’t die because they didn’t have a sense of humour. They died because they had a sense of honour. Let’s at least respect that.

Leave the kids alone

We need to take a long, hard look at the overtly sexualised depiction of children in popular culture

What would you say if you saw a fashion magazine spread featuring a young model, draped in a low-cut dress, wearing sky-high heels, posed provocatively on a couch, all sexy red pout and tumbling blonde hair? Nothing much I daresay, given that this is pretty much par for the course.

Except that, in this case, the model in question is ten years old.

Yes, that’s right. Thylane Blondeau, the daughter of a former French footballer and an actress-TV presenter mother, who was featured in the pages of French Vogue – guest-edited by Tom Ford – is all of ten. And yet, there she was, posed like a sex symbol, a latter-day Lolita, in images that would look appropriate only if she was a decade older.

I’m not sure what the editors at French Vogue were thinking of when they shot that photo-feature or whether they anticipated the furore that resulted from their publication, but I have to admit that I find the pictures distasteful, even disturbing. Yes, we know that fashion is all about pushing the boundaries of good taste, but sexualising a ten year old should surely be beyond the pale.

And sure enough, the images have been roundly condemned by everyone from child psychologists to concerned parents, and in response to the controversy, Thylane’s mother has taken down a Facebook page dedicated to her daughter.

But while this is an extreme case, the sexualisation of young children continues apace all around us; and nobody seems to notice, or even care very much. Go into a store and look at the kind of clothes that are being sold for eight to 14 year olds. Some of them are just as provocative and overtly sexual as those sold to young adults.

What’s worse is that so many parents don’t seem to realise that they are complicit in the sexualisation of their kids when they dress them up in these faux-adult clothes. I was startled the other day to see a five year old wearing a T-shirt that said “I’m too sexy for my shirt...” with the word SEXY spelt out in lurid pink sequins. Her young mother thought that this was hysterical and couldn’t understand why I would have a problem with that.

But then, we seem to have a sensitivity chip missing when it comes to the depiction of children in popular culture. Tune into one of those dance competition-type shows that are targeted at kids and you’ll know just what I mean. Almost every girl who performs on these shows is just as provocatively dressed and heavily made-up as Thylane Blondeau was in the pages of Vogue. But instead of lying supine on a couch or pouting dreamily into the camera – which is all Thylane was required to do on the pages of Vogue – these girls are performing to Hindi film numbers, with much pumping of the pelvis or thrusting of (non-existent) breasts. And when they finish, the judges commend them on their ‘sexy’ moves and their ‘sensuality’.

No, I’m not kidding. These are terms that I have heard otherwise sensible adults use to describe the dancing style of children on such shows, with nobody as much as batting an eyelid at the inappropriateness of it all. In fact, far from objecting, year after year we continue to dress up our children and present them as objects of desire for every pervert and paedophile who cares to tune in to these shows.

In a sense, I guess, this is the fall-out of our far-more-relaxed attitude to childhood, as compared to the West where parents are so protective that they turn near-paranoid when it comes to their kids.

In India, for better or worse, we treat children almost as communal property. If you find yourself in close proximity with a baby in a lift or an aeroplane, you think nothing of making silly gurgling noises and trying to grab its attention. If a child wanders up to you in a restaurant you say a friendly hello and exchange indulgent smiles with the parents. In fact, complete strangers can come up and coo over our children, pinch their cheeks, say how cute they are, and we are just gratified for the attention. We really do believe that because we find our kids so adorable, it’s only to be expected that others would find them irresistible too. And this belief often blinds us to the fact that this ‘attraction’ may sometimes put our kids in danger.

I am by no means suggesting that we should become as uptight as the West, where every adult who comes in contact with a child is treated as potential paedophile unless proved otherwise. We don’t need to go to the other extreme where even parents are forbidden from taking pictures and videos of their kids at school concerts and games for fear that the images may fall into the hands of predators. I know I would hate to live in a society where teachers are scared to comfort their students by putting an arm around their shoulders for fear of contravening some ‘health and safety’ rule. (Or where you can’t coo over a baby unless you’re on first-name terms with the mother.)

So while, on the whole, I’m not in favour of banning books, movies or TV programmes, given the overtly sexualised way children are depicted in some of these so-called ‘dance’ or ‘talent’ shows, I think there is a case for taking a long hard look at how our kids are depicted in popular culture.