One of the professors in our
department sends out articles from time to time.
Usually they are on metals, or policies in Ayurveda. Sometimes they discuss health care.
Usually they are on metals, or policies in Ayurveda. Sometimes they discuss health care.
But today, he sent out a link to a column that gnawed at me very deep inside. It was a blog of a guy discussing his intentions to teach his growing child how to look at women.
I had an eerie sense that this man’s work would only take hold if many other fathers had the same conversations, and were able to do it articulately and accurately.
The reality is that boys learn from other
boys, and other boys are sometimes sowing seeds of rapisthood inside
themselves, from the abuse, violence and rape they are experiencing in their
own quiet lives. We never know who those boys are, but they go to school with
ours, and they influence them. So one
conversation from Dad is not going to counter months of contact with violent,
rough, tough, influential kids in school.
The column is linked to the news
today that the verdict of the Delhi bus rape case is to hang the rapists, at
least the four of them that still sit perhaps pondering why they let their
pants down on a dark December night.
Yet, living in India, I feel
safer than I do in the USA. I ponder
why. The USA is quite bent on showing
how unsafe the rest of the world is. They forget that 40% of girls on
university campuses report that they have been raped. I think the US strategy tries to justify all
the money they are spending on strange and excessive security measures that
stink of lack of intuition, fear, a deep bias of racial profiling, and a deep
invasion of privacy in the name of security. And, I feel more unsafe inside the country
than along its coasts. Furthermore, I sense that US Security workers are half-dead,
bored, and not very intuitive, not in tune with nature and their own dharma.
In India, there are many
religions, many creeds, many languages. But people live their lives with a
stealth, quietly protecting their right to follow their own dharma. Because there are so many people, there is a
strong sense of intuition about the people around, whether in restaurants, the
local morning bazaar, the bus, or the luxury hotel. In India, there is also a value on
relationships the way there is value on materialism in the USA: more is better.
There is also safety in
relationships. Bad things do happen, as they do in every land, but people who
know people are safer. This is one of
the truths I have learned in New York, Calcutta, Paris, Los Angeles, London, Washington
DC, Lagos, Philadelphia, Cheng-du, Boston, Lhasa, Chicago, and all the other
cities in which I have lived. When I
know the people around my neighborhood, and greet them everyday, I see that
life is nicer, but also that these same people will warn me of local news,
alert me to visitors, and occasionally, do nice things like holding packages
that have come. In upper Harlem, where I lived as a graduate student unknowingly in a cheap crack house, the brothers used to walk me home from the lab and protect me from the 'bad guys.'
In India, the men are more
respectful to women, less violent somehow. Some leer, but they don’t touch. And
most don’t leer. That happens only in certain neighborhoods, where addictions
are encouraged: booze, gambling, smoke, paan.
Is it a woman’s fault if a man leers? Should she hide her physical body
in case it allures someone? These are
the questions being asked for the past 50 years, since someone woke up and
realized that men should be in control of their actions (frankly, so should women).
But who is to blame for the
production of rapists? Who is to blame when ‘biological instinct’ becomes force
and violence? Answer:
when society sees that rape is about power and violence, and NOT about
sex, it will finally be able to shift.
This will require that people get
their own sexual selves together, understanding their own bodies and instincts.
Sex is about softness, intimacy, and
connection; not even Oprah could tell us that – she giggled, called in some
‘experts’ and focused on medical problems and psychological gameware and forgot
to discuss how to build intimacy first with the person you intend to have sex
with. Dr. Ruth discussed the organs as structure
without their real function: she forgot to counsel us that ecstasy comes through
intimate sharing, which requires a trust that only long-term investment can
bring.
Even the classic Bollywood industry
focuses on intimacy and relationship, not on sex as a recreational sport. Bodies meet, but only if there is attraction.
Even then, there is usually an investment in a long-term relationship. As an audience, that is what we need to see. We
don’t want to see someone using someone’s body and throwing it away: it is too
close to the fear in our hearts that makes us human. We want to be cherished.
And that takes time, consistency, and attention. That is why Bollywood movies are soooo long.
My mother, and many wise Indian
elders, says real love and real intimacy only begin after 11 years of
marriage. This time is required to
really understand intimacy. What does that do to the dating scene then? Why are people going to the buffet of dating,
sticking their fingers into every dish, tasting, rejecting, and moving on to
the next? Commitment begets love, and
love begets intimacy that allows that purely, life-bursting, heart-filling sexual
ecstasy that every young man wants. Now.
❧
A few days later, our group of
doctors are sitting in a restaurant and I see their roving eyes, as a group of
12 young ladies come in for a birthday party.
Their obvious stares are laden with the same desire that the column
spoke of, so I bring up the topic. One
firmly counters that if he doesn’t look, how will he know what he wants to
marry? Another replies that the columnist did not remember what it was to be
25.
Biological desire is a strong
force, stronger than any of us. So, we
do not conquer it. Simply, we have to learn to control it. I realize I will have to be the dad and have
a conversation on biological instinct vs. appreciation of a woman as a person.
As I prepare my words, I remember
my dear friends Rajan and Sajan Misra, towers in the classical Indian music
world, and incidentally children of the Benaras gharana. Eternally searching
for apsaras (muses) to inspire their
voices, to bring a nuance to the next raga they will perform, their eyes rove
at every concert, every dinner, every hotel. For 15 years, I have watched them
search for the objects that will inspire that gentle wind of biological forces
that stir the deep connection of body and soul, rendering mind mute in awe of
the power of chemical attraction. But,
Rajan and Sajan do it with such a grace, such elegance, that no woman feels
violated. She feels only caressed by the winds of Nature. She feels she is a
part of the Universe, which has witnessed her physical splendor as its own, and
delicately but harmlessly touched her in recognition of her place in the world
of beauty.
How will I teach these young men,
doctors armed with arguments of neuroscience and biological instincts, how to
flow that wind of biological force to look with their hearts, not stare and
stir below?
Subtlety is the lesson I have to teach. How
to court and to be courted. How to enjoy the vigor of being 25 without reducing
women to biological objects of desire. How
to find that centered place of knowing oneself so that one is not looking for
‘what he wants to marry’ but rather who
he wants to marry.
❧
This column acknowledges and prays for
the souls of Vinay Sharma, Akshay Thakur, Pawan Gupta, Mukesh Singh, bus driver
Ram Singh, and a 17.5-year old "juvenile" who according to a police spokesman, was the most
brutal attacker and had "sexually abused his victim twice and ripped out
her intestines with his bare hands.”
This column is humbly dedicated
to the 23-year old woman on the Delhi bus to Dwarka on the night of December
16, who was brutally raped then viciously and fatally injured in
her abdomen, intestines and genitals by
penetration with a rusted, L-shaped wheel jack handle. This column is dedicated to her and to all of
us who have been brutalized, raped, assaulted, abused, and mistreated.