''Desire changed my brutal behaviour...I fell in love with Helena and that changed me.''
Franz Wunsch, (an S.S officer at Auschwitz, who felt attracted to and rescued Helena Citronova, and her sister, who were Polish Jews and inmates under his charge)
It is more than a year after the seismic wave of #MeToo hit the entertainment world in America; its aftershock has claimed many worthy names in my country, India as well. It is a year on and the horror stories of harassment and exploitation are trickling in, without pause, almost every day confirming our worst expectations of human nature and the depths of depravity it can reach down to-- all in the name of momentary gratification.
The stories of survival and resilience are no less uplifting either; the courage and hope displayed by women at its receiving end are exemplary too. Deeply inspirational and salutary.
No, they are by no means the weaker sex anymore. Patriarchy cannot silence their discontent and revolt under the pretext of propriety.
My concern, however, is elsewhere.
As women (and I was told by a male friend that some men too, especially as younger boys and teenagers) we have all been subjected to sexual abuse, in one form or another, to a greater or lesser degree. Some of us have bled in silence within the safety of our homes, families, marriages, others on the streets, on buses/ trains, in boardrooms, or suspended mid-air, in the sky, on an aircraft. That is no news to anyone.
What worries me, at this stage is what I would call a 'stigmatization of libido' that characterizes inter-gender exchanges, in a paranoid, post- #MeToo world.
There is a correlation between the unfolding narratives of inappropriate sex and the cinema industry: 'fantasy' being the operative word here. What Hollywood or popular cinema does, everywhere in the world, is activate and detonate fantasies, centered on power, control and sexuality, by giving them concrete visual representation. As audiences of popular cinema, we are guaranteed a collective release of our darkest, most troubling, most unspeakable fantasies, a socially accommodated orgasm, in the safety of the silver screen that is larger than life, not without a reason.
How can the human protagonists of such an erotically fraught enterprise be entirely immune to the ideas they are translating into flesh and blood? Flesh and blood will claim its due, at some point.
What begins as physical chemistry soon degenerates into gory tales of exploitation, humiliation and vendetta. That is the nature of postlapsarian sexuality itself: power and appropriation, in the absence of innocence and love.
Fantasy is inappropriate by definition. High and low art are united in using it as inspiration behind their complex and essentially sublimating articulation: Fifty Shades of Gray is indelicate and unimaginative, where as Lady Chatterley's Lover is philosophically rich and more complexly coded while delivering its message.
Much of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's fiction would be outlawed if we were to observe strict appropriateness and legality: in Of Love and Other Demons, a thirty eight year old ordained priest loses his place in the church trying to romantically pursue a twelve year old girl, in which lies his social destruction and spiritual salvation; indeed, it is through the road of this humiliating, paedophiliac obsession that he accomplishes a total transcendence of flesh and discovers the glimpse of the divine; the sordid becomes a vehicle of the sublime here, as it does in Death Constant Beyond Love, a quest of immortality in the face of death through sexual salvation promised by an underage girl.
Picasso would be convicted in our century, for the remorseless cruelty he inflicted on his wives and mistresses, and out of the darkness of which arose his most triumphant art. Roman Polanski, in our time is a similarly ambiguous icon who attracts equally fervent admiration and contempt for his cinema and life, respectively, to say nothing of Woody Allen accused of abusing his step- daughter.
The point is that surveillance and regimentation of desire is never good news for human civilization. It consolidates institutionalized regulation of the body, and sexuality that thrives in the site that the body is. Attempting to control this site results in the demise of imagination, art, individual freedom and the brilliantly beautiful manifestations of individual dissidence that have historically subverted and challenged, and in many ways re-configured, social control and institutional power. #MeToo, in spite of starting a timely conversation on a long-neglected topic, has also initiated a move in the direction of an expanding institutional control of desire and sexuality which I find dangerous.
Michel Foucault had identified four key areas of sexual discourse through which society extends its pervasive power on the sexual imagination of the individual: sexuality of children; of women; married sex; perversion. These four portals of discursive access allow power to penetrate family and society in ways that go to determine how they perceive, regulate, define and practise sex. This is Foucault's ''Repressive Hypothesis'' that postulates how society stigmatizes sex outside the haloed confines of matrimony, criminalizes sex that is decoupled from the express goal of procreation and tries to outlaw self-justifying sex through law, religion, psychiatry and communal censure, to make it invisible and unthinkable.
Conversely, like the underside of a tapestry, there are moral free-zones, that are created by this same process of repression: prostitution is one such area, as is, in our century, popular cinema.
The current movement, deploying the second and fourth constructs in conjunction, is giving rise to a problematic configuration, whereby women= victim, men =predator, strips women of all agency in the stories of initiating and imagining sex, which can be enormously liberating and empowering. The icons of modern entertainment, the adventurous women heroes of Hollywood knew it all too well: Mae West, Marilyn Monroe, Madonna are to name a few. They paid their dues to the censorious world, Monroe with her life, but that never compromised their status as towering icons of invincible erotic energy.
'' Whatever is silenced will clamour to be heard, though silently'', wrote Margaret Atwood, in The Handmaid's Tale, the chillingly brilliant vision of a futuristic dystopia where patriarchal- puritanical control of women's bodies have subsumed femininity under a starkly utilitarian role: that of a child-bearing machine, so that their bodies are subjected to the most degrading, stultifying and ultimately dehumanizing conditions. The erasure of individuality and difference, are important parts of this process--ergo, make-up, costumes, flirtation, sex outside the context of state-supervised procreation, even erotic eye contact are outlawed. Imagine a total, inescapable Talibanization on a global scale.
But even there, the heroine Offred's explosive and covert affair with two men-- illicit sex with Nick, her guard, and a non-procreative emotional affair with her master--serves as a basis for individual resistance, as well as of a political revolution against the dominant ideology. Her freedom and choice to fantasize, even under the most crushing and repressive external conditions, is a weapon of subverting control and authority that will ultimately change the course of history, or is it her-story?
Sometimes these assignations are downright humiliating for Offred, rendering her powerless and objectified in the hands of the two men who temporarily control her destiny. But she refuses to let go of the nostalgia of old times when there was abuse and exploitation for women, yes, but also the relentless pursuit of choice and individuality; flirtation, seduction, anxiety and heartbreak, yes, and also the terrifying beauty of erotic freedom. A lost age before the state got sexuality naked and prostrate under its ruthless gaze.
In our times women are co-opted in their own enslavement by being forced to surrender this freedom to institutional control in the name of welfare and protection.
The desired and desiring body, the subversive sexual imagination of the recalcitrant human subject are the ultimate obstructions posited on the path of the totalitarianizing tendencies of power. It is because this space of subversive liberation exists that attraction/ seductions happen within institutions: churches, schools, prisons, asylums, The White House and Auschwitz.
Helena Citronova, the Jewess rescued by the aggressively anti-Semitic S.S officer, Wunsch, from the gas chambers at Auschwitz engaged in a number of casual sexual encounters with him defying the notorious 1935 Nuremberg Laws, prohibiting sexual activity of Germans with Jews, a violation of which would result in death. You would think there is nothing new about the exchange of sexual favour for privilege, a trade-off women are most routinely used to.
After the war, in spite of the incriminating evidence of genocide presented against him in abundance, Wunsch was acquitted solely on the basis of Citronova's testimony: a startling narrative of whatever is high and sublime in human nature in the lowliest and wrongest of places. Helena Citronova was in love with Wunsch, who had retrieved her gas-chamber-bound sister Rozinka, inspired by nothing higher, at that moment, than blind libido, the erotic stirrings in his brain and probably groin. It was his momentary, base impulse that aroused him to fulfill his noblest act of heroism in that indefinable gray zone lying between right and wrong.
I just hope that an urgent movement aimed at the redressal of a grave wrongdoing that sexual exploitaion is, does not destroy in its wake the miraculous and unseen places of redemption, the unexpected or unimaginable beginnings of triumphant stories, the ennobling narratives of transformation and healing that the fallen, damned, and guilty imagination of man alone can dare to conceive. This imaginative freedom is what inspires the highest ethical as well as aesthetic ideal: charity, compassion as well as abidingly engaging art.
When surveillance and control take away this freedom we throw the baby along with the bathwater. A paranoid avoidance of freedom is no good for anybody.
Franz Wunsch, (an S.S officer at Auschwitz, who felt attracted to and rescued Helena Citronova, and her sister, who were Polish Jews and inmates under his charge)
 |
| Helena Citronova and Franz Wunsch: The Startling Revelation of Libido and Compassion in the midst of a Grim Tragedy |
The stories of survival and resilience are no less uplifting either; the courage and hope displayed by women at its receiving end are exemplary too. Deeply inspirational and salutary.
No, they are by no means the weaker sex anymore. Patriarchy cannot silence their discontent and revolt under the pretext of propriety.
My concern, however, is elsewhere.
As women (and I was told by a male friend that some men too, especially as younger boys and teenagers) we have all been subjected to sexual abuse, in one form or another, to a greater or lesser degree. Some of us have bled in silence within the safety of our homes, families, marriages, others on the streets, on buses/ trains, in boardrooms, or suspended mid-air, in the sky, on an aircraft. That is no news to anyone.
What worries me, at this stage is what I would call a 'stigmatization of libido' that characterizes inter-gender exchanges, in a paranoid, post- #MeToo world.
There is a correlation between the unfolding narratives of inappropriate sex and the cinema industry: 'fantasy' being the operative word here. What Hollywood or popular cinema does, everywhere in the world, is activate and detonate fantasies, centered on power, control and sexuality, by giving them concrete visual representation. As audiences of popular cinema, we are guaranteed a collective release of our darkest, most troubling, most unspeakable fantasies, a socially accommodated orgasm, in the safety of the silver screen that is larger than life, not without a reason.
How can the human protagonists of such an erotically fraught enterprise be entirely immune to the ideas they are translating into flesh and blood? Flesh and blood will claim its due, at some point.
What begins as physical chemistry soon degenerates into gory tales of exploitation, humiliation and vendetta. That is the nature of postlapsarian sexuality itself: power and appropriation, in the absence of innocence and love.
Fantasy is inappropriate by definition. High and low art are united in using it as inspiration behind their complex and essentially sublimating articulation: Fifty Shades of Gray is indelicate and unimaginative, where as Lady Chatterley's Lover is philosophically rich and more complexly coded while delivering its message.
Much of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's fiction would be outlawed if we were to observe strict appropriateness and legality: in Of Love and Other Demons, a thirty eight year old ordained priest loses his place in the church trying to romantically pursue a twelve year old girl, in which lies his social destruction and spiritual salvation; indeed, it is through the road of this humiliating, paedophiliac obsession that he accomplishes a total transcendence of flesh and discovers the glimpse of the divine; the sordid becomes a vehicle of the sublime here, as it does in Death Constant Beyond Love, a quest of immortality in the face of death through sexual salvation promised by an underage girl.
Picasso would be convicted in our century, for the remorseless cruelty he inflicted on his wives and mistresses, and out of the darkness of which arose his most triumphant art. Roman Polanski, in our time is a similarly ambiguous icon who attracts equally fervent admiration and contempt for his cinema and life, respectively, to say nothing of Woody Allen accused of abusing his step- daughter.
 |
| Picasso and his deeply problematic attitude towards women he objectified for his aesthetic ends |
The point is that surveillance and regimentation of desire is never good news for human civilization. It consolidates institutionalized regulation of the body, and sexuality that thrives in the site that the body is. Attempting to control this site results in the demise of imagination, art, individual freedom and the brilliantly beautiful manifestations of individual dissidence that have historically subverted and challenged, and in many ways re-configured, social control and institutional power. #MeToo, in spite of starting a timely conversation on a long-neglected topic, has also initiated a move in the direction of an expanding institutional control of desire and sexuality which I find dangerous.
Michel Foucault had identified four key areas of sexual discourse through which society extends its pervasive power on the sexual imagination of the individual: sexuality of children; of women; married sex; perversion. These four portals of discursive access allow power to penetrate family and society in ways that go to determine how they perceive, regulate, define and practise sex. This is Foucault's ''Repressive Hypothesis'' that postulates how society stigmatizes sex outside the haloed confines of matrimony, criminalizes sex that is decoupled from the express goal of procreation and tries to outlaw self-justifying sex through law, religion, psychiatry and communal censure, to make it invisible and unthinkable.
Conversely, like the underside of a tapestry, there are moral free-zones, that are created by this same process of repression: prostitution is one such area, as is, in our century, popular cinema.
The current movement, deploying the second and fourth constructs in conjunction, is giving rise to a problematic configuration, whereby women= victim, men =predator, strips women of all agency in the stories of initiating and imagining sex, which can be enormously liberating and empowering. The icons of modern entertainment, the adventurous women heroes of Hollywood knew it all too well: Mae West, Marilyn Monroe, Madonna are to name a few. They paid their dues to the censorious world, Monroe with her life, but that never compromised their status as towering icons of invincible erotic energy.
'' Whatever is silenced will clamour to be heard, though silently'', wrote Margaret Atwood, in The Handmaid's Tale, the chillingly brilliant vision of a futuristic dystopia where patriarchal- puritanical control of women's bodies have subsumed femininity under a starkly utilitarian role: that of a child-bearing machine, so that their bodies are subjected to the most degrading, stultifying and ultimately dehumanizing conditions. The erasure of individuality and difference, are important parts of this process--ergo, make-up, costumes, flirtation, sex outside the context of state-supervised procreation, even erotic eye contact are outlawed. Imagine a total, inescapable Talibanization on a global scale.
 |
| The Handmaid's Tale: A Dystopic Vision of Total Disappearance of Erotic Freedom |
But even there, the heroine Offred's explosive and covert affair with two men-- illicit sex with Nick, her guard, and a non-procreative emotional affair with her master--serves as a basis for individual resistance, as well as of a political revolution against the dominant ideology. Her freedom and choice to fantasize, even under the most crushing and repressive external conditions, is a weapon of subverting control and authority that will ultimately change the course of history, or is it her-story?
Sometimes these assignations are downright humiliating for Offred, rendering her powerless and objectified in the hands of the two men who temporarily control her destiny. But she refuses to let go of the nostalgia of old times when there was abuse and exploitation for women, yes, but also the relentless pursuit of choice and individuality; flirtation, seduction, anxiety and heartbreak, yes, and also the terrifying beauty of erotic freedom. A lost age before the state got sexuality naked and prostrate under its ruthless gaze.
In our times women are co-opted in their own enslavement by being forced to surrender this freedom to institutional control in the name of welfare and protection.
The desired and desiring body, the subversive sexual imagination of the recalcitrant human subject are the ultimate obstructions posited on the path of the totalitarianizing tendencies of power. It is because this space of subversive liberation exists that attraction/ seductions happen within institutions: churches, schools, prisons, asylums, The White House and Auschwitz.
Helena Citronova, the Jewess rescued by the aggressively anti-Semitic S.S officer, Wunsch, from the gas chambers at Auschwitz engaged in a number of casual sexual encounters with him defying the notorious 1935 Nuremberg Laws, prohibiting sexual activity of Germans with Jews, a violation of which would result in death. You would think there is nothing new about the exchange of sexual favour for privilege, a trade-off women are most routinely used to.
After the war, in spite of the incriminating evidence of genocide presented against him in abundance, Wunsch was acquitted solely on the basis of Citronova's testimony: a startling narrative of whatever is high and sublime in human nature in the lowliest and wrongest of places. Helena Citronova was in love with Wunsch, who had retrieved her gas-chamber-bound sister Rozinka, inspired by nothing higher, at that moment, than blind libido, the erotic stirrings in his brain and probably groin. It was his momentary, base impulse that aroused him to fulfill his noblest act of heroism in that indefinable gray zone lying between right and wrong.
I just hope that an urgent movement aimed at the redressal of a grave wrongdoing that sexual exploitaion is, does not destroy in its wake the miraculous and unseen places of redemption, the unexpected or unimaginable beginnings of triumphant stories, the ennobling narratives of transformation and healing that the fallen, damned, and guilty imagination of man alone can dare to conceive. This imaginative freedom is what inspires the highest ethical as well as aesthetic ideal: charity, compassion as well as abidingly engaging art.
When surveillance and control take away this freedom we throw the baby along with the bathwater. A paranoid avoidance of freedom is no good for anybody.
