‘Kiss of Love' Protest And Patriarchal Aesthetics
By Sukumaran C. V.
08 December, 2014
Countercurrents.org
The educated individual is the adapted person, because she or he is better “fit” for the world. Translated into practice, this concept is well suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquility rests on how well people fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it —Paulo Freire
Can kissing in public be a protest against moral policing? Moral policing is an inherent part of our patriarchal mindset and, of late, when the females have started asserting their rights and individuality, patriarchy responded by strengthening its culture of moral policing in different ways. The trend of accusing rape victims for ‘inviting' the sexual assault, advising women that their wearing jeans and such attire is against Indian culture and attacking (only) women for entering pubs are the different ways of moral policing of the retrogressive patriarchal mindset.
We have never tried to create a social milieu in which the girls and women are treated as individuals equal to boys and men. Our schooling or education only helps us inculcate the already entrenched patriarchal bias against the female. As Paulo Freire says in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed , “ education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students, with the ideological intent (often not perc e ived by educators) of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression. ” This is the strong foundation where the principles of moral policing operate from. As long as we fail to eradicate the deep rooted gender bias from our collective psyche, moral policing will never cease to exist. Moral policing is a contagious disease and patriarchal mindset is the fertile soil where the germs which spread the disease grow aplenty continuously.
Therefore, what we have to struggle against is not the disease, but the culture that spreads the disease. To shatter patriarchy which controls women and denies them individuality and freedom, at first, we have to shatter the most powerful patriarchal institution called marriage or at least rebel against the institution, which traps women into virtual slavery, and mend it in a way that it can accommodate both the man and the woman as individuals having equal rights and say on everything. In the posh and pompous patriarchal marriages, the mutual respect and love, which should be the basis of a healthy marriage of minds, between the couple never matters! Religion, caste, horoscope, status and other meaningless things matter greatly, and the individuals, especially the women, suffer endlessly. Domestic violence, marital rape, verbal abuse and permanent moral policing are the routine things majority of the Indian wives have to cope with to simply survive.
Can the Kiss of Love protest be considered as a struggle against patriarchal morality and aesthetics? It has gained wide media coverage and publicity, while the ‘Standing Struggle' of the Adivasis who have been standing in front of the Secretariat (in the capital city of Kerala) for their basic right to live, for over a month, gained scant media attention and coverage. The reason is that while in the Adivasi Standing Struggle there is nothing that satisfies the sensual feelings of the middle class aesthetics, there were plenty of sensuous images and scope for voyeurism in the Kiss of Love ‘protest'. The media captured the images of middle and upper class girls and women kissing each other or middle and upper class boys and girls kissing each other. We have seen women kissing each other or men kissing women; but images of men kissing men were rarely seen in the news papers. And onlookers thronged and have shown much interest to photograph and videograph the event, betraying the culture of voyeurism. People and media were interested in the Kiss of Love affair because it catered to the collective patriarchal psyche of the middle and upper class people and the print and electronic media which furnish what the middle class ‘aesthetics' enjoys and wants to enjoy.
In reality, the Kiss of Love ‘protest' didn't even pose a grave threat or warning to our misogynistic patriarchal culture from which moral policing spawns. It spread the very patriarchal message — that the female is meant only to be kissed and other related matters. Patriarchal hold on the females grows more and more impregnable and is helped to be so by our media culture of advertising the female body to gain profit. Even the Kiss of Love event was brilliantly marketed by our media and the female was reduced once again to an object to satisfy the ‘feelings' of the patriarchal male. Many middle class and upper class girls and women who don't generally sympathise with the down to earth problems of the poor and the environment, and who ‘trim and dress' their bodies in accordance with the (patriarchal) market needs of cosmetics and dyes took to streets and displayed kissing, an act of intimacy and love, in public and catered to the patriarchal aesthetics in revolt against the patriarchal moral policing!
‘Humanity is male,' wrote Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex , first published in 1949, ‘and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being. Man can think of himself without woman. She can't think of herself without man. And she is simply what man decrees; thus she is called ‘the sex' by which is meant that she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex—absolute sex, no less.'
The basic problem still is that the female ‘is not regarded as an autonomous being, she is sex—absolute sex, no less.' Kiss of Love ‘protest' helped only to prove it further, it seems.
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I presume that everybody in India (at least in South India) knows Yesudas, the well known playback singer who is known as gaanagandharvan . And I am sure that there is no Indian who doesn't know Gandhiji. But if you are asked what the connection between Gandhiji and jeans is, you will be surprised. If I am asked to inaugurate the cleanliness drive on the auspicious day of Gandhi Jayanti, I will talk against liquour consumption, against smoking, against our habit of making our environment dirty and stinking, against harassing and sexually violating the females and such evils that torment India and hinder it from being a cultured nation.
But the noted singer, while inaugurating the cleanliness drive in the capital city of Kerala on this October 2 nd told that women wearing jeans should cause trouble to others and it is against Indian culture! If he had used the occasion to speak against liquor or smoking or sexual violence, of course many people would have thought against these evils and as Gandhi had dreamt about an India without having any of these evils; the speech would have been a relevant one to the occasion. Instead, the 75 year old veteran singer used the occasion to dole out the most misogynistic advice which is against the spirit of Gandhiji himself who said that ‘I shall work for an India in which …there can be no room for the curse of intoxicating drinks and drugs. Women will enjoy the same rights as men. This is the India of my dreams.'
Before the British colonized us the Indians, was there any Indian who wore pants and suits? Everybody knows the answer and it can only be a big NO. Then isn't men's wearing these attires against Indian culture? Has anybody ever advised men not to wear pants and jeans and shoes and socks as these things are against the Indian culture? No. But when the girls and women start to wear the same, suddenly we find out that their wearing the comparatively comfortable dress is against Indian culture!
What is this Indian culture? Does Indian culture mean everything that denies freedom and comfort to the females? Girls and women are harassed and molested everywhere in the Indian public space. We don't hear the wise advice or sermons cautioning us that the practice is against Indian culture. The number of rape increases each year in India and nobody says that it is against Indian culture. Female foeticide is rampant in India and nobody thinks that it is against Indian culture.
Whenever girls and women assert their individuality and become aware of their equality and independence, they are told it is against Indian culture. When men see women driving, they think that it is against Indian culture. (In February 2011, a Mumbai bound flight was delayed nearly by one hour at the Delhi airport by a middle aged man who, on knowing that the pilot was a woman, turned jittery and told the fellow passengers : “I don't want to die! She can't take care of the house, how will she take care of a plane?”)
If female foeticide is not against Indian culture, if rape and sexual violence is not against Indian culture, if women's wearing what they like is against Indian culture, if treating the females equal to the males is against the Indian culture, if considering the females inferior to the males is not against Indian culture, if annihilating caste is against Indian culture, if manual scavenging is not against Indian culture, if killing people and raping women in the name of caste and religion are not against Indian culture, if spawning communal riots is not against Indian culture; then we the whole Indians should be against this Indian culture which has nothing to do with culture.
And protests like the Kiss of Love don't even point the finger towards the rot within; such protests only augment the rot, I presume.
Sukumaran C. V., a former JNU student, is a writer based in Kerala. He writes against the communalisation of our polity, the inbuilt gender bias of the patriarchal world and the human onslaught against the Environment. Email [email protected]
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