Ritwik Agrawal: Mannequin Lingerie Ban in Mumbai – It’s about controlling women, not men
The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has decided that lingerie bearing mannequins are akin to “sex toys” and their public display is “embarrassing” to women. Furthermore, according to the Shiv Sena controlled BMC, such mannequins provoke men into sexual crimes against women.
A few observations:
While the BMC is trying to spin this move as a means to control men by removing from sight a ‘provocative’ object, it should be more than clear that the real attempt is to control women’s sexuality. The argument is eerily similar to one adopted by apologists for the burqa or by those advocating “traditional”, “decent”, “appropriate” dress for women – don’t provoke men, because if a women does, then the sexual harassment shes faces is, if not justified, at least causally linked to her mode of dress and her “behaviour”.
In an article published under the byline of “FP Staff”, the news website firstpost.com has asked the BMC to cut the men some slack. Much digital ink has been spilled in proving how the mere sight of lingerie, particularly on mannequins does not excite men into sexual violence. While this is true, the story only takes the claims of the BMC at face value and tries to refute them. But the action of the BMC cuts deeper, and needs to be understood as a step against women’s freedom and only peripherally against men’s (presumed) desire to get their sexual kicks off lingerie-clad mannequins.
The political and religious right has long been terrified of the appearance in public of any activities related to love, sex and individual choice. We can recount valentine’s day vandalism, the actions of the Sri Ram Sene in Mangalore where they attacked women in pubs and at parties, demands for ban on sex toys, frequent demands for censorship of films, support for curfews on women, exhortations to women to not forget their “Indian culture” and numerous other instances.
Coming as it does from the same political stable, the mannequin lingerie ban in Mumbai should be seen as yet another attempt to somehow efface sexuality, particularly, female sexuality, from the domain of everyday sights and sounds. This move is, thus, part of a larger political project which is inextricably opposed to liberal modernity as characterized by free choice of the individual.
Of course, the proponents of this political project will gladly take the technological side of modernity – they are particularly fascinated by guns and tanks and the like – but the individual freedoms side of modernity – upon which liberal democracy is based – is for them extremely cumbersome, as it necessarily involves questioning of tradition and continually altering or even rejecting past practices and prejudices.
This fear of individual freedoms is precisely why secularism means “India first”(=hyper nationalism) to the tall leaders of such ideologies. This is why their focus inmulti-million dollar campaigns led by American PR agencies is on “development” – as they dream of imparting to India the gleaming external gloss of modernity, but at the same time they want a a highly hierarchical, ordered, mechanical, hedonistic and gender-unjust society.
