Daily Times

New York University (NYU), this fall, started offering sex therapy to its freshman class because of an overwhelming need expressed by the male student body. The programme itself was 35-years-old but there was no active outreach until this year. The programme’s co-director, Amy Rosenburg, attributed the need to treating sexual performance and, related to that, depression and anxiety among young men, “a rise specialists attribute to a ‘prevalence of porn’”.

Feminists have decided to fight amongst themselves over which side of the line they stand on when it comes to pornography and prostitution. The majority seems to be advocating the right of women to participate in either industry that enriches itself by demeaning and exploiting them. Instead of focusing on the violence women are inevitably subjected to in both lines of work, each side accuses the other hatefully and sometimes violently of selling out. Even more disturbing is that the issue that has attracted the most attention in the media recently by them is the word “pushy” being carelessly used in sit-coms and dramas to describe and therefore “suppress” little girls and women, young and old. How they chose to raise placards of protest there and turn mute while “rape”, “bitch” and “whore” pepper language in mainstream media for fun is a riddle indeed.

Feminists have attempted a horrendously weak argument for not raising objection to the word “bitch”, which is the most pervasively used. They liken themselves to African-Americans “owning” the word “n—-r” but fail to mention that unless they are in the privacy of a space that increasingly is not turning out to be as private as people seem to think it was, anyone other than African-Americans using the slur will most likely suffer a punch in the face, figuratively or otherwise. “Bitch” is used routinely by children on television, in films and social media to solicit a laugh under some implied cover of innocent cuteness. Simply put, it is not owning anything as much as it is surrendering everything as far as principle goes. The casual use of “rape” is not as pervasive in the entertainment industry (yet) but it is certainly part of the vernacular of the young.

Meanwhile, since Hollywood ate Bollywood for breakfast, the same features that glamorise porn and sexualise children in the US become invasively part of cultures internationally. Content for Indian movies is driven by US studios, regardless of the mindset of the audience, their society and environment. Once upon a time in India, taboo subjects that dealt with sexuality or women’s rights and roles in a society were the exclusive domain of the genre of art films that treated the subject with serious consideration. The films were thought provoking, beautifully acted and scripted, almost always unforgettable. Then, almost overnight, in-your-face sex and violence became Bollywood’s mantra across all classes and ages. Now people wonder how, of all places, Delhi is the rape capital of the world, even when the dominant religion in India, Hinduism, and the indigenous social culture focus heavily on a traditional, sometimes even oppressively conservative ideology when it comes to women.

In encouraging inappropriate behaviour by teenagers, commercialism is taking things to a new level, unforeseen and unexpected by the best of us. A department store in the Philippines was, until recently, selling a T-shirt with the tag, ‘It’s not rape, it’s a snuggle with a struggle’, with two hands forming a heart between the two lines. A woman who has a 13-year-old child took a photo of the shirt and posted it on Facebook with the note: “I was shaking; I could not take a proper photo. Insulting to women and girls and as a mom of a soon to be 13-year-old, it made me want to throw up.” The photograph went viral, the shirt was pulled with a letter of apology from the store. But why was it there in the first place? This is where one realises that are no answers to these questions; it is just about what anyone can get away with.

US courts at the state level ruled in 2011 that they would not interfere with content in any area of the entertainment industry because it directly conflicts with the right of free speech. So how does one address the primary desire and concern of any parent to prevent a violent experience in their child’s future (as perpetrator or victim), when no society is exempt from the exposure that seems to lead to it? When I was first thinking about this article, I made a list of admittedly lame and trite advice of the ‘my two cents’ variety: move to a rural area where birds exceed humans in numbers and hope the indefatigable virus of exposure to pervasive crassness is delayed as long as possible because it is inevitable. Children may hear long lectures and receive lists of instructions at home and school from a young age but ultimately they copy their parents in behaviour and that is where they learn their morality.

Then I realised that there was one thing that did matter and it happens to be one of the most important findings of my life. Suddenly it appeared relevant in this picture I was painting of gloom and doom: when it comes to children and what plays the largest role in shaping their psyche and character, the only factor that matters is loving them for as long as possible. When a child is deeply loved and protected from mean-ness and anger in any form for as long as humanly possible, any time they come across someone who displays that behaviour towards them, it sets off a red flag in their mind. They may not understand it, they may not even be unkind themselves, but they will know to back off and keep a distance. They protect themselves as an auto-response. Even though I was loved, because I was separated from my mother at age five to go to boarding school, that bond of love was cut short. Just like that I had moved to the other side of the line that divides the lucky and not-so-lucky children. In turn, it meant that over arduous years, I had to learn to protect myself from receiving as well as inflicting abusive behaviour through trial and error before I realised what I was doing wrong, how to correct it. My counterpart did it naturally, easily and usually kindly.

In a world that increasingly derides religion as a code of conduct or morality, the basis of both becomes every individual’s own to define. The only problem with that scenario is that the notion predicates itself on the ‘I’, the idea that one person’s ability to gather, then implement knowledge within and beyond the confines of their own experience reigns supreme. But that too turns out to be a fallacy because worldly knowledge is heavily influenced by the laws of the land, and the ones governing or policing social behaviour are forever changing. The colossal damage is caused when the shift of those laws is silent, unspoken, as in the case of a rise in ineffective police response to assault cases. The dos and don’ts then become obscure and lose meaning. For the fretting parent, it can feel like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the mountain, reaching the top then repeating the process every day until the child leaves the home for education or work, out of sight. The upside, even if it appears to be the opposite in most people’s eyes, is that the choice to defer to a higher power always remains and for those it categorically does not, life for their future generations might be just a function of another equally amorphous idea: destiny.

(Concluded)

The author is a freelance columnist