SOURAV BANERJEE
International Women’s Day is an occasion to place issues concerning women within a broad social, cultural and historical perspective. It is crucial, first of all, to understand the mechanics of the political-economy of sex and how it is intricately interwoven in the architecture of political domination and rule. Sexual exploitation, it is pertinent to note, is a weapon of coercion and the fight for women’s rights will carry on till civilization is not purged of the scourge of force and violence manifested in sexual domination. SP relives the bitter memories of the Holocaust 70 years ago, especially the history of humiliation associated it, and traces historical parallels in other parts of the world as well as in modern India to prove that sexual slavery, forced prostitution, torture and exploitation have always been inalienable parts of human history and happen to be the major issues that underlie contemporary gender discourse.
In the month of January, around 70 years ago, Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp, was liberated by Soviet troops and the era of Holocaust, marked by sex abuse and rape, ‘concentration camps’, ‘medical experiments’ (mostly on women and children) ended. The scale of sexual abuse and torture on millions of Jews, Gypsies, and different ethnic groups, was so immense that a Warsaw doctor once rued, “One continually hears of the raping of Jewish girls in Warsaw.”
Holocaust ended long before the anguish ever did. You can hear the same cry echoing in almost every corner of the world, from villages to metro cities, everyday. Thousands of women are violated and abused either in organised or individual form, in various houses (corporate, governmental, etc.) and homes, by family, friends and foe. The whole world is now a greater Warsaw. Incidents are many while there is only one thing in common — the motive behind — that is to dominate a body, be it being or gender. Underneath such violations cry some bigger questions — who among us can be counted as human? Is masculinity in decline? Will liberation of women be the key to the next socio-cultural change?
With the rape of thousands of women irrespective of their ages, colours, casts and cultures everyday all over the world, the subject and object ‘sex’ seems far more than a way of procreation, or experiencing pleasure. Rather it has evolved to have a relation only with politics of body and power; while sex as a form of knowledge deeply oriented to the physical activity involving one to his self as well as other, seems to have become obsolete. Sex is obviously not a sin, or a taboo or prohibited thing, or has anything to do with god or religious sanctity, but the problem of sex is how to manage it ethically and aesthetically while respecting the ‘private’ and ‘public’.
Sex as the assertion of power, hegemony, or domination is an age-old philosophical problem. And it will persist to remain coercive till it ceases to be a weapon of rule. How can there be political rule (in terms of body, being and gender) among individuals who are by nature free and morally equal? The contention lies in the core that if we are naturally free and morally equal, then no one is subordinate; there is neither a ruler nor a ruled. In that case, the body is free; free from oppression, and thus beautiful. But the rulers hostile to freedom and equality are yet to be destroyed politically and culturally. Ever increasing rape incidents are an irrefutable proof of the failure of masculinity, humanity and civilisation. So, (wrongfully) thought to be a privileged gender, men are lost in the wilderness and need to be saved before sex becomes boring.
Forms of sexual violence
Rule and Domination: Sexual violence is often committed to gain authority over a particular body or space, be it a government or gender or class or individual. Historically, sexual violence in an organised form has always been a most effective weapon of terror and domination, psychopathically unleashed over a group of people or individual of different identity or sexual orientation. During the Holocaust era, Jewish women were subjected to severe sexual violence: raped, sexually humiliated, and destroyed bodily. In the contemporary context, in their promised land Israel, the Jewish army is replaying the same thing with scores of Palestinian women in order to dominate their people and aspirations. Similarly, be it during the India-Pakistan ‘partition’, or in Bangladesh the liberation war of ‘71, or the secessionist and autonomy movements in Kashmir and North-east India, or the Tamil war in Sri Lanka, sexual violence has unexceptionally been applied with much seriousness by the warring state apparatus, as an instrument as well as strategy to spread terror and, thus, dominate target masses. It makes us to believe that wherever there is a body, there is an unacceptable violation of freedom and equality.
History bears enough evidence where in order to establish domination and hegemony, sexual violence has been categorically used aimed at ‘ethnic cleansing’ too. The Holocaust was indeed “ethnic cleansing” because forced sterilisations, castrations, and abortions, as well as heinous “medical” experiments prevented millions of Jews and Sinti-Romas (or Gypsies) from later conceiving children. Ethnic cleansing not only kills women, but also puts the natural system of reproduction in peril. Today we aren’t any better, the IS jihadis are reportedly popping Viagra to impregnate the captured sex slaves and produce more Islamic fighters from them.
Economy and Exchange: (Forced) sex as payment for receiving food, money, shelter, or to save children and kin, has always been a successful deal for the rulers, as if sex is an ‘exchange’ or currency. Man must have made money to buy another man. You can compensate sex with money, and society will gladly accept it. Nazis; their collaborators; Kapos (prisoners in charge of prisoners); male prisoners who had more food or privileges than the women; members of a Judenrat (Nazi-appointed council that governed a ghetto) all exploited women through various forms of sexual violence in lieu of food, clothes and shelter in the camps and ghettos under Nazi control. Post 9/11, the notion of rape as an exchange for survival has been firmly established as a norm in the lands ravaged by racial and ethnic conflict and invasion of foreign troops, like Iraq, Afghanistan etc. Forget the Holocaust, trading sex (un)willingly for favour, food or survival has been rampant all across the globe even today, and more prominent in the countries (mainly Asian and African countries) having poor economy and resources. As in individual form, sex in lieu of favour is rampant, too, in corporate houses and almost all the industries, including education, fashion and film, providing economy and livelihood. In that sense, marriage as an institution too interprets sex in lieu of shelter, well being and maintenance, as a kind of moral right of the husband, and thus indirectly legalise marital rape and coercion. While others exempt from considering such mutual exchange of sex for favour as rape, on the contrary, it is, in essence, nothing but rape.
The fast expanding market post globalisation sells everything under the blue sky, and unfortunately it doesn’t spare sex as well to remain a thing of pleasure in the private domain. From popular music and films to mainstream media advertisements, all need to look attractive and ‘aesthetically good’ in order to be sold, and they only find female body again in hand to their rescue. Thus, the system of overproduction and cutthroat competition sets women as commodities only to be sold and consumed than loved.
Now, the market has become immensely successful to inculcate a culture that comfortably accepts female body and sex as a commodity that comes with a price tag. It can be bought, either through cash, or kind. This notion further goes to the extent of legalising prostitution, which’s been a favourite subject of civil rights activists and the pseudo-progressive urban intelligentsia for long, as they suggest collecting tax from the profession, thereby making it a full-fledged industry.
Forced prostitution: It is the most common form of sexual violence practiced unabatedly almost all over the world in a hush-hush manner. Owning sex slaves is still in vogue. Scores of women, mostly under aged girls from the poorest economy are trafficked and employed in the ever flourishing flesh trade that combined with drugs and weapons, generate a parallel economy. While the bodies enthrall their customers in a brothel, they get enough dehumanised and depressed inside, which in many cases leads to a slow decay or suicide in a sly. The Archives of the International Tracing Service of the Red Cross have records that elaborate the history of 10 such concentration camp brothels, in which the names of 174 forced sex workers can be identified. There were also instances of private, forced sexual slavery in German officers’ homes. Forced prostitution as is indeed criminal because it includes unwanted pregnancies, thus abortions, forced sterilisations, mutilation and venereal diseases that leave women unable to bear children, and more often cause their death.
Tool of torture and silencing dissent: Rape and sexual violence has been used as a tool of extracting confession and silencing dissent from quite a long time. However, from modern day Abu Gharib, Guantanamo bay to Chattisgarh prison where our President’s gallantry medal winning DGP inserted multiple stones into a tribal dissenter, Soni Sori’s vagina, sexual violence in the custody gained its height but never before have been used as a tool of political as well as individual coercion. It flourished behind the shield of various power circles and state laws like AFSPA or UAPA, which if not directly, then indirectly, allows the administrative and enforcement apparatus (army or police) to ‘do anything it wants’ with the suspect in order to extract confession and, thus, silencing the voices of resistance. Rapes and sexual violence committed on thousands of justice-loving citizens and young students during Indira’s ‘emergency’, Naxalbari and ‘Maoist’ movements in India, US coup in Allende’s Chile or regime change in Latin America, justify the claim.
To humiliate: Rape, sometimes, has been committed in public or in front of relatives or folks with a sheer motive to degrade, humiliate and create a psychological scar in revenge that would haunt the body for the rest of its life. Survivors of sexual violence and their family members often experience social shame, and thus suffer in secret. In one “show” in Auschwitz-Birkenau, German soldiers raped 20 Jewish women in front of a labour group, who were supposed to stand and applaud, writes Helene Sinnreich in Sexual Violence. In another (in)famous incident, in 11 July, 2004, the Indian paramilitary unit (17th Assam Rifles) raped and murdered a Manipuri woman Thangjam Manorama in order to humiliate the dissenting democratic voices. Collective anger and shock over the incident gripped the world while media reports of the most spectacular and militant protest of our times poured in. Five days after the killing, around 30 middle-aged women walked naked through Imphal to the Assam Rifles headquarters, shouting: “Indian Army, rape us too… We are all Manorama’s mothers.” Padma Shri author MK Binodini Devi returned her award in protest. The perpetrators remain oblivious about whom the rape has actually rendered a shame; the rapists or the survivor?
CULTURAL GENDER ATTITUDES
Not surprisingly, in a patriarchal society like India, while men are let loose to consume, women are expected to prevent rape by following various prescribed dos and don’ts including embracing religious lives, not wearing revealing clothes or venturing outside with friends after dark et al. There are instances galore where the survivors were blamed as loose or immoral for what happened to them. It was considered their fault. This is yet another reason for the decades of silence. Some raped women feel they are no more eligible to marry; others are ostracised and shunned. Strangely, people, or even communities, try to identify ways in which a woman’s actions contributed to her own sexual assault, rather than standing by her to restore life. But the time has come to challenge the popular cultural attitude towards sex and sexuality, and establish that rape or forced sex is a shame to the rapist as well as society, rather than the victim.
GOVERNMENTALITY AND DISCOURSE
While closely examining the attitudes to sexuality in several major historical periods, and the history of thought on sex and sexuality, one of the major influential thinker of the century France’s Michele Foucault derides that sex is less about bodies, erotics and desire than it is about technologies of government (in terms of managing production and population) and technologies of self used to manage population. Herein lies the origin of social norms and standards that are established and enforced. It is here that we come to terms with the dialectics and discourses between our sexuality and our society’s rules. The idea that sex must be policed emerged in the 18th century and from that point sex became public property, which is always vulnerable to threat or misuse.
In short, sex and sexuality together comprise a set of practices, behaviour, rules and knowledge by which we produce ourselves, and are produced, as ‘knowing’ ethical, social and juridical subjects. It is a human experience that affects and involves the body (How does – and how should – my body perform? What are the mechanics of sex?), desires, forms of knowledge (How do I do sex? What does it mean), fears and social rules (What sort of sex is the right one? If someone finds out what am I doing, will I be punished?)
However, the point is that if we are rational and responsible, society would be based on reason rather than passion and set of beliefs, while its members would respect one another and their mutual obligations. And what this will produce is a community marked by companionship, care and mutual kindness – a healthy society with no place for oppression and perversion.
