Debuk: Whose women? // Ratna Kapur: Men and the Conspiracy of Silence Around Sexism
the phrase ‘our women’ , whether it’s
uttered by white supremacists, national politicians or minority ‘community
leaders’, is demeaning and dehumanizing. We are not ‘your women’. We belong to
ourselves.
This week in
Yorkshire, a
local man named Thomas Mair killed the Labour MP Jo Cox on the street
outside a public library. He shot her, stabbed her and kicked her as she lay
bleeding on the ground, and witnesses report that he shouted ‘Britain
first!’ ‘Britain First’ is the name of a far-right political organization;
Mair, it turned out, had a history of involvement with racist and white
supremacist groups. Jo Cox, on the other hand, was a vocal campaigner for the
rights of migrants and refugees. The police have confirmed that she was
deliberately targeted—Mair didn’t just go on a rampage and shoot whoever got in
his way. Yet people who knew him described him as a quiet, non-violent man,
considerate of his neighbours and devoted to his mother.
Almost exactly a year
earlier, on June 17, 2015, another
white supremacist, Dylann Roof, had entered a church in Charleston, South
Carolina, and shot nine Black worshippers dead. As he opened fire, he
reportedly shouted: ‘I have to do it. You rape our women. You’re taking over
our country. And you have to go’. In Charleston, two thirds of the dead were women. But
they were not the women Dylann Roof was talking about.
As many people
commented at the time, ‘you rape our women’ was the cry of the lynch mob during
the era of racial segregation in the US. And coded versions of it now function
as dog-whistles for Europe’s increasingly popular anti-immigrant parties. Nigel
Farage, the leader of UKIP, recently warned that if Britain stayed in the EU
there would be an influx of Turkish migrants: ‘the time bomb this time’, he said, ‘would be about Cologne’.
He was alluding to the organized attacks on women that took place in the German
city last New Year’s Eve, perpetrated by men described as North African. Farage
is too canny a politician to utter the actual words ‘they’re coming to rape our
women’, but everyone knew that was the implication.
Writing in the wake of
the Charleston shootings, the sociologist Lisa Wade characterised these references to
raping ‘our women’ as ‘benevolent sexism’—treating women as precious but
fragile creatures who depend on men to protect them. I’m familiar with this
concept, but I’ve never been keen on the term. When men say ‘our women’ they
are staking a claim to ownership, treating women not merely as men’s property,
but as the exclusive property of men from a particular racial, ethnic or
national group. This is not an act of benevolence towards women. It is a move
in a contest between men. Men who are jealous of their prerogatives, and
outraged by the idea that other men might try to usurp what is rightfully
theirs. That’s also one of the reasons why mass rape is used as a weapon of
war: men humiliate their enemies by raping ‘their’ women.
Writing from Bosnia in 1998, the human rights lawyer Sarah
Maguireremarked on the way local politicians and officials used the phrase
‘our women’. They used it frequently when praising Bosnia’s many rape survivors
for the dignity and resilience that allegedly explained their reluctance to
testify against their rapists. ‘You know’, said one politician,
it’s amazing about our
women. You can beat them and beat them and the only thing that happens is your
arm gets tired. Women don’t break.
What Maguire saw was
not unbroken women choosing to keep a dignified silence, it was women who felt
exposed and unsupported. They feared that their testimony would provoke
reprisals against their families, and they did not believe the authorities
would protect them. But it isn’t just ‘the
enemy’s women’ who are targets of male sexual aggression....
Former ministers in
France have recently launched an attack on sexism in politics. The group
consists only of women and includes current IMF chief Christine Lagarde.
The women presented their collective voice in an op-ed in a
French weekly,Journal Du Dimanche. Despite their political differences,
they unanimously agreed on one thing: sexism simply has no place in any
society. “Like all women who reached circles that were once exclusively
masculine, we have been forced to fight against sexism. It’s not for women to
adapt in these circles; it’s the behaviour of certain men that must change.
It’s enough. The immunity has finished. We will no longer shut up,” the article
said.
This bold move is refreshing in the arena of politics, where successful
women are usually expected to tolerate what has been described as “casual
sexism”. These range from casual jokes to an institutional and systemic sexism
that assumes that an all-male political establishment or absence of women at
the upper echelons of power is simply normal. The demand for more visibility
and presence is regarded as favour rather than an entitlement or right.
Different forms of
sexism
Casual or everyday
sexism is subtle and more difficult to tackle than explicit sexual coercion,
blatant bigotry or overt forms of sexual harassment. It is the experience of
more indirect forms of discrimination on a daily basis that women are expected
to tolerate – it includes subtle everyday slights and gendered expectations in
the workplace, where women are expected to perform maternal or domestic tasks.
And yet it is equally humiliating, subordinating and infuriating. What is
most evident is that actions to counter it, it seems, must always be taken by
women – though in India there are no signs of women in the political
establishment coming together on any shared platform regarding sexism.
But what
is more troubling is that despite the presence of liberal men in positions of
power and in nearly every profession, there is no sense of responsibility that
they need to take any affirmative action to call out other men on their
behaviour or to take the lead in bringing about the requisite institutional
reform that can produce positive change. When measures are adopted in the name
of women’s rights, these are invariably protectionist, implemented most often as
a reaction to a particularly appalling event or act of sexual violence, or as a
cultural intervention to restore women to a position of “honour and respect”
that they enjoyed in some mythical past. This is not the recipe for increased
respect or freedom for women. Safety and security measures have almost nothing
to do with gender equality, which is a right, not a privilege. And culture has
become a stultifying edifice invoked by those who seek to safeguard their own
privileges and positions of power.
France’s female
politicians have taken an important step in encouraging all victims of sexism,
sexual harassment and sexual aggression to speak out and complain. The fact
that Lagarde has lent her support to this opposition to rampant and
pervasive sexism is particularly significant in light of the disgraceful
behaviour of her predecessor, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was forced to resign
after he allegedly attempted to rape a hotel employee in New York. And it
follows on the heels of complaints by nine women accusing the deputy speaker of
the French national assembly, Denis Baupin, of sexual harassment as well as the
admission by French finance minister Michel Sapin of inappropriate behaviour
towards a female journalist.
Need for men’s
intervention
In India, the focus on
sexual violence and criminal law has almost completely overshadowed the ways in
which sexism is pervasive, institutionalised and experienced by almost every
single woman across religion, ethnicity and caste in this country, though the
experience is intensified because of these differences. It exists on university
campuses and in the workplace, within the political arena including the Lok
Sabha and Rajya Sabha, as well as in the public and private sector. The fact
that many women do not speak out is partly out of fear of damaging their
careers or losing their jobs.
But what is so
egregious is the absolute silence amongst men – even those who claim to be
liberal, progressive men – who either fail to provide a supportive
environment or remain complicit in the silence. They may be fully aware that
their colleague – a fellow doctor, professor or senior counsel – has indulged
in these offensive and humiliating practices. These men are as implicated in
the culture of sustaining and perpetuating institutional and systemic sexism
where “respectable” senior colleagues in the legal profession, medical
profession as well as academia are exonerated for what under any circumstances
would be deemed as offensive, disgraceful and shameful behaviour.
Without
this support it is left to women to either organise against it or to simply
adapt to it. Sexism flourishes not simply because some men get away with it. It
flourishes because most men refuse to call out their colleagues, friends and
family for indulging in it. Sexism is not exclusively a woman’s problem. It is
first and foremost a problem of complicity amongst men. Sexism is widespread,
persistent and insidious discrimination that will not be repaired through more
laws or sexual harassment policies.
Women who refuse to
participate in this culture of silence or decide to complain pay a heavy price.
It remains appalling that in the 21st century women continue to have to fight
for their humanity – the very right to be treated as humans who are entitled to
dignity and respect. Yet it is also simply impossible for women to bring about
this change on their own..
