What was that? A sexual signal?

A famous journalist and an even more famous judge have been accused of sexual harassment. We are all angered that such incidents could have happened.

We are a censorious people, especially so, when there is a hint that a person’s behaviour could possibly have had sexual undertones. Knowing that such predilection exists for quick social condemnation, the powerful male tries to protect himself by making censure rebound on the socially weaker person, normally a young female, easily suspected in our hypocritical prurient society of harbouring raging desires. Hence, whenever there is an accusation that an important man has harassed a woman, we find very quickly that there are counter allegations that it was the woman who invited the advances.

Many social contexts But the psychological context in which such incidents take place is far more complex than can be judged by law or vociferous public condemnation. Middle-class Indians in the present day live in several cultural spaces: that of traditional society with highly reserved social contact between the sexes outside of the family; the half-open space of ritualised Victorian courtesies with their now meaningless values; and the dream-world of media-sponsored licentious daring, to mention only the obvious.

Negotiating constantly between these self-contradictory social contexts can and does cause pain, especially when all of us feel fragile about half-expressed, un-understood, and socially unacceptable emotions.

The limits of expressing admiration, affection or regard differ according to social context, and while clear sexual predation can be made out in any context, there are a variety of ill-expressed and confused social messages which could unfortunately come to be classed among the offensive.

From the days of Saussure, linguistic scholars have made us aware that the true meaning of a sign can be deciphered only within the context in which it appears.

The situation is made worse when we cannot recollect in which of our many social contexts an event has taken place. When troubling social signals are experienced, the vulnerable subjectivities of the participants further confuse the intended meaning. Then, to cap it all, a defining imprint is many times forced on the event by third parties, persons of social authority, who impose their own rigid definitions, later accepted by all as to ‘what really happened.’

Michael Frayn’s famous play, Copenhagen , delves into the misunderstood space where even famous scientists Heisenberg and Bohr are unable to recollect later what exactly each of them said or meant. Arthur Miller’s Crucible about the 17th century witch hunt in Salem, which he wrote to condemn McCarthyism in the Cold War period, stands as a famous indictment of social condemnation based on an interpretation of an event forced on it as an after-thought. E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India is centred on the alleged rape of an Englishwoman by an Indian doctor, which the story reveals never happened. But what did happen? As in Frayn’s play no one really knows.

Gaining in sensibility We live in unequal and unjust times, with deep historical memories of hurt, and around the world there are contested divides, separating white from black, rich from poor, men from women.

Sometimes encounters result in hurt, sometimes casually unperceived by the ‘perpetrator,’ though resented and dwelt upon nonetheless by the other. Sometimes a perfunctory casual exploration, or even an ungainly compliment, could be misconstrued as threatening or aggressive.

But we have gained in sensibility in the last few decades. The silly ethnic joke has disappeared. And men are more aware in the presence of women thanks to the paradigm shift brought about in male egos by the feminist movement.

But beneath this visible level lies the unconscious where physical and spiritual attractions are inextricably merged, and both sexes as yet lack an appreciation of these ancient forces we harbour in our beings, whether old and male or young and female. A franker acknowledgment of the many facets of humanity may help us perceive ourselves and others a little more clearly, and avoid incidents that perhaps were never intended in the first place. A start needs to be made with a rejection of outworn patriarchal values, and a new exploration of what psychical equality means among the sexes.

(The author is Advisor, The Jung Centre, Bangalore)

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