Easy explanations are suspect for the simple fact that they end up being facile generalizations. Internet technologies have made it impossible to make statements beyond what is dreadfully obvious. Do we live in a male-dominated, patriarchal, sexist and misogynistic society? The answer is a resounding “yes!”
Theory, however, does not always throw light on the complex nature of interpersonal relations. Yet, everybody is a social media-driven theorist. The downside of it is that nobody has to read anything; nobody has to go through the struggle of finding out the truth; nobody has to put themselves in the inconvenient position of being “objective” and “impartial” because these words are anathema to the postmodern ears, deadlier than the poison that killed Hamlet’s father and set in motion the revenge tragedy. Why bother with history when we might as well resort to politics!
It is the politics of the #MeToo movement I find problematic. It is fundamentally not different from any other identity movement which is all about “us” who are good, sweet, noble and trusting versus “them” who are evil, disgusting, ignoble and treacherous. It only depends in which camp somebody has decided to place you and sooner or later you start becoming that person. This kind of blackening versus whitening is problematic because it relies too much on the color of the paint and not enough on the brush or the canvas.
One of those rare nuanced Hindi movies Sheesha (1986) deals with the subject of an attempt to rape by a man in a position of power; throughout, the man is believed to be innocent by his wife who goes to the extent of convincing herself and finding evidence for the court that the accuser is in the habit of making false complaints against men wherever she worked previously. Dramatic irony prevails and we learn that the accuser was telling the truth; men harassed her everywhere and she fought to preserve her bodily and mental integrity despite the fact that she never succeeded in prosecuting her harassers. The woman did not compromise on her human dignity and she fought despite personal and professional costs.
The woman was fighting all along and did not wait for a small and safe corner in the social media in order to speak against her male oppressors. The complicity of the #MeToo women lies in the fact that they waited because at that point they perhaps felt it would not have helped to complain or it might have jeopardized their attempts to make a career. Once you have compromised on your human dignity which is greater than anything else on earth, including a name, job and a position, you have already compromised with everything that keeps patriarchy healthy and strong. If you accept the premise on which the system is built it is only logical that you accept the conclusion too. The premise is inequality and the conclusion is injustice.
Interpersonal encounters are a complex and slippery terrain. The sociologist Erving Goffman made an entire philosophy of social life in defining the face-to-face interaction as “the reciprocal influence of individuals upon one another’s actions when in one another’s immediate physical presence.” He further uses the terms “encounter” and “performance” with reference to “all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other participants.” While power operates within that interaction, encounter or performance, it is not always in a clearly prescribed manner like Foucault says in his book History of Sexuality, Vol 1. To quote Foucault, “power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.”
Every interpersonal relation is a “complex strategical situation” with its own surreal mechanisms operating between the one that has the power and the one to whom the power is expected to happen. We cannot see individual persons, whether men or women, as neutral actors, detached and mechanical seated in a chair either violating or tolerating the violation with a poker face. If the psychiatrist is evaluating the patient, needless to say the patient too is making his or her evaluation of the psychiatrist. To say that it is happening only in one way and not the other, would be an unfaithful representation of how power operates at the ground level.
We need to look at how people function at the interpersonal level by contextualizing the “strictly relational character of power relationships” (Foucault) and by the fact that power and resistance operate almost simultaneously since “points of resistance are present everywhere in the power network” (Foucault). It does not serve any purpose to reduce power to moral terms such as “innocence” and “guilt” because nobody is innocent in a way that they do not know they are a part of a power relationship and everyone to different degrees is guilty of being complicit in allowing power the freedom to operate with impunity simply by participating in the “secrecy” that is part of the cynicism of power. Both victims and victimizers, abusers and the abused, the powerful and the ones who resist power are there for a choice they made rather than owing to an invisible circumstance. As Foucault notes, “the rationality of power is characterized by tactics that are often quite explicit at the restricted level where they are inscribed (the local cynicism of power), tactics which, becoming connected to one another, attracting and propagating one another, but finding their base of support and their condition elsewhere, end by forming comprehensive systems: the logic is perfectly clear, the aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one is there to have invented them, and few who can be said to have formulated them: an implicit characteristic of the great anonymous, almost unspoken strategies which coordinate the loquacious tactics whose “inventors” or decision makers are often without hypocrisy.”
We need to look at “the great anonymous, almost unspoken strategies” that dominate interpersonal spaces before arriving at conclusions that might be either black or white without a notion that truth is often in a gray territory. A person is not innocent simply because he or she has been abused; to assume that such encounters resolve themselves automatically or are at best left for a later date—there is either naivety or pure cynicism in the afterthought.
I recollect going to a police officer with a complaint a few years ago. He heard me patiently and said, “I will have it verified.” What he said made sense to me. It is important to verify before you conclude that something is the truth. Only where there is truth, there can be justice. The latter exists once the truth is arrived at through a process of inquiry and verification. Assuming that all the women making the accusations are telling the truth, even then we need to have a system through which it is established that harassment of a certain kind has indeed occurred. The damage to the reputation has to come as a result of the verification and not out and out vilification.
In his “Nobel Lecture,” Mahfouz notes that the Pharaoh asked for the truth when he “learned of the existence of a sinful relation between some women of the harem and men of his court. It was expected that he should finish them off in accordance with the spirit of his time. But he, instead, called to his presence the choice men of law and asked them to investigate what he has come to learn. He told them that he wanted the Truth so that he could pass his sentence with Justice.” Mahfouz praises the “conduct” of the Pharaoh saying that it is “is greater than founding an empire or building the Pyramids. It is more telling of the superiority of that civilization than any riches or splendor. Gone now is that civilization—a mere story of the past. One day the great Pyramid will disappear too. But Truth and Justice will remain for as long as Mankind has a ruminative mind and a living conscience.”
For certain, the pyramids will disappear one day but truth and justice are going to be there as long as we inhabit the planet. A mind that contemplates and a conscience that feels the pangs of guilt at one’s own capacity for injustice—that is what any movement ought to be about. I want to know how most of the #MeToo women relate to the socially and economically weaker women in desperate need of help. I wish to know how they treat their poor, working class female domestic help at home. Are they ensuring that exploited women are able to live a life with dignity? Are they ensuring that the children of those women are given a decent education and upbringing? Are they paying those women enough wages so that they do not have to submit to men who could abuse the poverty and helplessness for predatory purposes? Are these women speaking to their fathers, husbands, brothers and sons about the need for a society in which there is no place for gender inequality?
Gender harassment is not without a context: in a country like India abusive behavior by boys is ritualized as normal by the family and popular culture that privileges a certain kind of manhood. Check out most Indian films: the boy looks at a girl; he likes her; he starts fantasizing about her; now that he likes her the girl has to like him too; he starts stalking her, driving her nuts until she finally says “yes” and then they supposedly live happily ever after. There is nothing like ever asking the girl for her consent. This article would be dishonest if as a man coming from a third world nation that privileges the male child, I do not admit to my complicity, either directly or indirectly, in a system of abuse and its histories of violence; the greater need, therefore, to face the truth about oneself. There is no way one could pretend that one is outside the system and or that one has nothing to do with it.
Forging relationships is about time, space and taking responsibility for both one’s own feelings as well as those of the other person. Gender harassment comes from a climate where you attack and intrude upon somebody’s sense of who they are and violate their physical and mental being with impunity because you don’t believe that you need to at least ask the other person what she feels about this kind of a behavior.
This does not alter the fact that public shaming is a primitive technique used in traditional societies which have no other means to deal with misconduct. In an extreme form, the shaming can become a means to justify some of the worst kinds of mob behavior. An accusation remains an accusation until it is properly verified. Thanks to social media, it is not hard to tarnish somebody’s reputation for no good reason. Somebody might not like you for one thousand and one reasons and might be looking for an opportunity to shame you in public. From experience, I know how hard it is to restore your reputation once it is lost. Insecure and untruthful people might actually be able to convince themselves that whatever they are doing is morally tenable.
That is the major problem with the #MeToo movement; in its attempts to seek retributive justice for past wrongs it turns bitter and vengeful. The unforgettable ruthlessness of Madame Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities is about pursuing with fanatical determination an enemy who from a human being ends up becoming an idea that needs to be nipped in the bud. Most online movements with the proposed intent of correcting past wrongs end up becoming as bitter, malicious and vindictive as Madame Defarge where the other person is not given a fair chance to explain his or her version of things.
Prakash Kona is a writer, teacher and researcher who lives in Hyderabad, India. He is Professor at the Department of English Literature, The English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad.
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#YouToo!?
Posted on October 30, 2018 by Prakash Kona
Easy explanations are suspect for the simple fact that they end up being facile generalizations. Internet technologies have made it impossible to make statements beyond what is dreadfully obvious. Do we live in a male-dominated, patriarchal, sexist and misogynistic society? The answer is a resounding “yes!”
Theory, however, does not always throw light on the complex nature of interpersonal relations. Yet, everybody is a social media-driven theorist. The downside of it is that nobody has to read anything; nobody has to go through the struggle of finding out the truth; nobody has to put themselves in the inconvenient position of being “objective” and “impartial” because these words are anathema to the postmodern ears, deadlier than the poison that killed Hamlet’s father and set in motion the revenge tragedy. Why bother with history when we might as well resort to politics!
It is the politics of the #MeToo movement I find problematic. It is fundamentally not different from any other identity movement which is all about “us” who are good, sweet, noble and trusting versus “them” who are evil, disgusting, ignoble and treacherous. It only depends in which camp somebody has decided to place you and sooner or later you start becoming that person. This kind of blackening versus whitening is problematic because it relies too much on the color of the paint and not enough on the brush or the canvas.
One of those rare nuanced Hindi movies Sheesha (1986) deals with the subject of an attempt to rape by a man in a position of power; throughout, the man is believed to be innocent by his wife who goes to the extent of convincing herself and finding evidence for the court that the accuser is in the habit of making false complaints against men wherever she worked previously. Dramatic irony prevails and we learn that the accuser was telling the truth; men harassed her everywhere and she fought to preserve her bodily and mental integrity despite the fact that she never succeeded in prosecuting her harassers. The woman did not compromise on her human dignity and she fought despite personal and professional costs.
The woman was fighting all along and did not wait for a small and safe corner in the social media in order to speak against her male oppressors. The complicity of the #MeToo women lies in the fact that they waited because at that point they perhaps felt it would not have helped to complain or it might have jeopardized their attempts to make a career. Once you have compromised on your human dignity which is greater than anything else on earth, including a name, job and a position, you have already compromised with everything that keeps patriarchy healthy and strong. If you accept the premise on which the system is built it is only logical that you accept the conclusion too. The premise is inequality and the conclusion is injustice.
Interpersonal encounters are a complex and slippery terrain. The sociologist Erving Goffman made an entire philosophy of social life in defining the face-to-face interaction as “the reciprocal influence of individuals upon one another’s actions when in one another’s immediate physical presence.” He further uses the terms “encounter” and “performance” with reference to “all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other participants.” While power operates within that interaction, encounter or performance, it is not always in a clearly prescribed manner like Foucault says in his book History of Sexuality, Vol 1. To quote Foucault, “power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.”
Every interpersonal relation is a “complex strategical situation” with its own surreal mechanisms operating between the one that has the power and the one to whom the power is expected to happen. We cannot see individual persons, whether men or women, as neutral actors, detached and mechanical seated in a chair either violating or tolerating the violation with a poker face. If the psychiatrist is evaluating the patient, needless to say the patient too is making his or her evaluation of the psychiatrist. To say that it is happening only in one way and not the other, would be an unfaithful representation of how power operates at the ground level.
We need to look at how people function at the interpersonal level by contextualizing the “strictly relational character of power relationships” (Foucault) and by the fact that power and resistance operate almost simultaneously since “points of resistance are present everywhere in the power network” (Foucault). It does not serve any purpose to reduce power to moral terms such as “innocence” and “guilt” because nobody is innocent in a way that they do not know they are a part of a power relationship and everyone to different degrees is guilty of being complicit in allowing power the freedom to operate with impunity simply by participating in the “secrecy” that is part of the cynicism of power. Both victims and victimizers, abusers and the abused, the powerful and the ones who resist power are there for a choice they made rather than owing to an invisible circumstance. As Foucault notes, “the rationality of power is characterized by tactics that are often quite explicit at the restricted level where they are inscribed (the local cynicism of power), tactics which, becoming connected to one another, attracting and propagating one another, but finding their base of support and their condition elsewhere, end by forming comprehensive systems: the logic is perfectly clear, the aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one is there to have invented them, and few who can be said to have formulated them: an implicit characteristic of the great anonymous, almost unspoken strategies which coordinate the loquacious tactics whose “inventors” or decision makers are often without hypocrisy.”
We need to look at “the great anonymous, almost unspoken strategies” that dominate interpersonal spaces before arriving at conclusions that might be either black or white without a notion that truth is often in a gray territory. A person is not innocent simply because he or she has been abused; to assume that such encounters resolve themselves automatically or are at best left for a later date—there is either naivety or pure cynicism in the afterthought.
I recollect going to a police officer with a complaint a few years ago. He heard me patiently and said, “I will have it verified.” What he said made sense to me. It is important to verify before you conclude that something is the truth. Only where there is truth, there can be justice. The latter exists once the truth is arrived at through a process of inquiry and verification. Assuming that all the women making the accusations are telling the truth, even then we need to have a system through which it is established that harassment of a certain kind has indeed occurred. The damage to the reputation has to come as a result of the verification and not out and out vilification.
In his “Nobel Lecture,” Mahfouz notes that the Pharaoh asked for the truth when he “learned of the existence of a sinful relation between some women of the harem and men of his court. It was expected that he should finish them off in accordance with the spirit of his time. But he, instead, called to his presence the choice men of law and asked them to investigate what he has come to learn. He told them that he wanted the Truth so that he could pass his sentence with Justice.” Mahfouz praises the “conduct” of the Pharaoh saying that it is “is greater than founding an empire or building the Pyramids. It is more telling of the superiority of that civilization than any riches or splendor. Gone now is that civilization—a mere story of the past. One day the great Pyramid will disappear too. But Truth and Justice will remain for as long as Mankind has a ruminative mind and a living conscience.”
For certain, the pyramids will disappear one day but truth and justice are going to be there as long as we inhabit the planet. A mind that contemplates and a conscience that feels the pangs of guilt at one’s own capacity for injustice—that is what any movement ought to be about. I want to know how most of the #MeToo women relate to the socially and economically weaker women in desperate need of help. I wish to know how they treat their poor, working class female domestic help at home. Are they ensuring that exploited women are able to live a life with dignity? Are they ensuring that the children of those women are given a decent education and upbringing? Are they paying those women enough wages so that they do not have to submit to men who could abuse the poverty and helplessness for predatory purposes? Are these women speaking to their fathers, husbands, brothers and sons about the need for a society in which there is no place for gender inequality?
Gender harassment is not without a context: in a country like India abusive behavior by boys is ritualized as normal by the family and popular culture that privileges a certain kind of manhood. Check out most Indian films: the boy looks at a girl; he likes her; he starts fantasizing about her; now that he likes her the girl has to like him too; he starts stalking her, driving her nuts until she finally says “yes” and then they supposedly live happily ever after. There is nothing like ever asking the girl for her consent. This article would be dishonest if as a man coming from a third world nation that privileges the male child, I do not admit to my complicity, either directly or indirectly, in a system of abuse and its histories of violence; the greater need, therefore, to face the truth about oneself. There is no way one could pretend that one is outside the system and or that one has nothing to do with it.
Forging relationships is about time, space and taking responsibility for both one’s own feelings as well as those of the other person. Gender harassment comes from a climate where you attack and intrude upon somebody’s sense of who they are and violate their physical and mental being with impunity because you don’t believe that you need to at least ask the other person what she feels about this kind of a behavior.
This does not alter the fact that public shaming is a primitive technique used in traditional societies which have no other means to deal with misconduct. In an extreme form, the shaming can become a means to justify some of the worst kinds of mob behavior. An accusation remains an accusation until it is properly verified. Thanks to social media, it is not hard to tarnish somebody’s reputation for no good reason. Somebody might not like you for one thousand and one reasons and might be looking for an opportunity to shame you in public. From experience, I know how hard it is to restore your reputation once it is lost. Insecure and untruthful people might actually be able to convince themselves that whatever they are doing is morally tenable.
That is the major problem with the #MeToo movement; in its attempts to seek retributive justice for past wrongs it turns bitter and vengeful. The unforgettable ruthlessness of Madame Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities is about pursuing with fanatical determination an enemy who from a human being ends up becoming an idea that needs to be nipped in the bud. Most online movements with the proposed intent of correcting past wrongs end up becoming as bitter, malicious and vindictive as Madame Defarge where the other person is not given a fair chance to explain his or her version of things.
Prakash Kona is a writer, teacher and researcher who lives in Hyderabad, India. He is Professor at the Department of English Literature, The English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad.