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Rahul singh
Eve Ensler is an iconic feminist writer of our times. She is the American author of a play with an outrageously bold title, The Vagina Monologues. It debuted in 1996 and resonated so powerfully with women that it was performed to sell-out audiences all over the world, including India. It talked openly on subjects that had earlier been a taboo or only whispered about — incest, genital mutilation, violence against women, orgasms, consensual and coercive sex. A few years later, a #MeToo movement started, meaning there were other women who had been sexually harassed and assaulted but had remained silent. Then came the shocking revelations about Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein in 2017. And the floodgates burst open. They opened up in India as well. Two cases of high-profile editors are currently before the courts, accused of inappropriate sexual advances on female colleagues, along with that of the chairman of an inter-governmental panel on climate change that won a Nobel Prize.
Ensler has written another book, The Apology, which treads the same path as The Vagina Monologues, except that it is autobiographical. It talks about the violent sexual abuse she was subjected to from the age of five by her father. The book is on the apology he should have tendered to his daughter but never did. Ensler was recently in Mumbai, discussing her book and giving interviews to newspapers. I was at one of those discussions in which she conversed with Faye d’Souza, a feisty young journalist I admire, who writers for a popular Mumbai tabloid and also anchors TV programmes.
Just before I went to that discussion, I read about the sacking of Steve Easterbrook, the chief executive of McDonald’s, the US fast food giant. His crime? A consensual relationship with an employee. The company’s board said that this violated company policy. Easterbrook admitted he had made “a mistake” and that it was time “to move on”. Following that dismissal, I read an opinion piece in a British journal titled, “Office romance is dead in the age of #MeToo”. And that set me thinking.
Admittedly, the movement has emboldened many women, who had earlier been silent on the unwanted sexual advances they had suffered from their male superiors, to speak up and demand action. That corrective was badly needed. But I believe the movement has gone too far. What is wrong with a consensual relationship in office, college, or even while making and acting in films and plays? After all, romances often start and blossom where men and women work or study. Sometimes they lead to marriage, sometimes they don’t.
Earlier, women were not expected to work. But the scenario changed with education and greater mobility. When I began my first job as a young journalist in a national paper in Bombay, in the mid-1960s, there were hardly any women reporters or sub-editors. Even the secretaries and stenos were mostly men! Working women were then mainly confined to the government jobs, schools and colleges, and in the medical profession. But by the turn of the century, Indian women were working in virtually every field — in the media, in the service industry, even in manufacturing, sometimes outnumbering the men. Hence, the interaction between men and women was bound to increase at workplaces.
To me, that was a positive, laudable development. True, there were negative consequences as well. The divorce rate went up, married men and women had more extra-marital affairs. Men often used their superior positions at work to coerce junior female colleagues into giving them sexual favours. But there was happy, consensual sex as well. Nothing wrong with that, at least not by my way of thinking. At the end of the Ensler discussion, I asked, “Does that mean there should be no romance at the workplace?” Faye d’Souza answered, “Women work to become better professionals, not to look for romance”, or words to that effect, adding that even a consensual relationship, if it was between a man in a more senior position than the woman in question, was intrinsically “coercive”.
I strongly disagree. Nowadays, young working men and women can advance “professionally” and yet have a relationship with a colleague. Age difference and seniority should not matter. The latest Indian Nobel Prize-winner, economist Abhijit Banerjee, was a professor and his spouse, Esther Duflo (she shared the Nobel Prize with him), his student when the relationship started. Was that a “coercive” relationship and therefore condemnable?
When young men and women meet at their workplaces, they are often from different castes and communities. It is a virtual melting pot, a crucible for social change. Romance often takes place there, which leads sometimes to “love” marriages. I believe it is where our marvellous diversity is appreciated and understood. Age-old prejudices break down and there is greater social unity among us. Isn’t that where we as a nation want to go, a country of unity in diversity? D’Souza, on the other hand, as I see it, would ideally like us to have a joyless, sterile workplace, which women should enter only to advance themselves “professionally”. It should not be an area of fun or distracting romance, let alone romance with a senior colleague, because then it would become “coercive”. Her line of reasoning, taken to its logical conclusion, would have Indian men and women only have safe “arranged” marriages, between the same caste and community. No complications, then, of consensual and coercive relationships, and “superior” positions.
I rest my case. The floor is yours.
—The writer is a veteran journalist
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