In the summer of 1990, I was an intern at Chennai’s South India AIDS Action programme (SIAPP) housed at Voluntary Health Services in Velacherry. SIAPP’s founder, Shymala Nataraj, a native of Chennai, was a brisk feisty woman, and perhaps one of my first local authorities for what would later be called Sex-Ed. Most of SIAPP’s work was to reduce the stigma around queer sexuality, but Shyamala once pointed out that heterosexuality was also strictly socially regulated. She told of how she and her husband were issued a warning when they had exchanged a peck — aka a ‘pop kiss’ — over dinner at a Chennai restaurant. The male server, who told them off had authorised his intrusion thus: “You can’t do that. This is a family restaurant”.
Over 30 years later, while the scenario may be more distant, the taboo on public physical affection involving women remains an integral part of patriarchal sexual politics. Psychoanalysts understand these politics as a set of measures designed to prevent the intrusive memory of early dependence upon an easily available woman — the mother. Physical and psychological efforts to regulate gender, sexuality, and open displays of affection between the genders are designed to push away the pain inherent in the adulthood of the highly patriarchal male to whom women’s bodies, once freely available in childhood, were brutally made off limits except in intimate moments and those too uncertain.
A case of lack
Women who love freely in public activate the memory of the early childhood loss of women’s bodies. At the heart of patriarchy’s grouse with the world is the fact that men are born of women, but don’t get to have women’s bodies. The patriarchal project could be thought of as projecting male lack — what the German psychoanalyst Karen Horny called ‘womb envy’ — onto women. In this act of transference, male shame for not having a female body could be systemically converted, via projection, into female discomfort with having a female body, particularly in public spaces.
If we believe the Calcutta psychoanalyst Girindrasekhar Bose, who shared a 12-year correspondence with Sigmund Freud, Indian men experience the desire to be a woman even more strongly than their Western counterparts because their initial intimacy with their mothers is more intense. Amongst psychoanalysts, the typical “Indian” style of parenting with its characteristic skin contact and devoted nurturing is thought to produce more intense feelings about women amongst Indian men, relative to their Western counterparts.
Patriarchal sexual politics are a protection against the melancholy of this intense loss. Its highly regulated and gendered performances are designed to manage male sorrow, anxiety, and envy about their primal separation from female bodies. The psychological theatre of patriarchy relies upon female bodies to represent male anxieties, leaving men ‘free’. Tense, nervous, women are necessary to this theatre, and they are produced via the practical arrangements of a patriarchal city: a lack of clean public toilets for women, an implicit right-of-way to male bodies in public spaces, and an overall public ethos in which groups of boys and men visually dominate the landscape produce the conditions under which women feel unsafe to physically relax in public spaces.
Provoking what’s bottled-up
Patriarchy demands that female bodies in public spaces are actively signed as unavailable because it is founded on the idea that men cannot bear the sight of freely wandering female bodies. A near-universally accepted belief of patriarchy is that the sight of a female body ‘out of order’ will provoke men’s bottled-up longing for female bodies so strongly that it will result in violence to the woman.
Consider, as an example of a thoughtful patriarch, my taxi driver, a few months ago, between the University and Delhi airport. Perceiving me rustling and wriggling as I changed out of my boots in the cab, he offered me a shade for the window. I told him that I wasn’t planning to show skin, and I did not require privacy. He responded that what was important was not whether I was removing my clothes but whether people thought I was removing my clothes. The fault lay in woh log — those people, but he added kindly — and a bit sadly — because the world was full of woh log, women would have to make these extra efforts.
To free women from the excessive psychological load that female bodies bear requires infrastructural support (better public toilets, public safety) and equally psychological change. As a collective, we need to hone our capacity to imagine men who can gaze upon women’s bodies without violence.
If we continue to believe that all men at all times become out of control when they see women’s bodies, then we are also subscribing to patriarchy’s belief system. If men are to cross the developmental milestone that should have been accomplished in late childhood — that of understanding women’s bodies are free — we cannot continue to treat them as if they are humans of rapacious appetite, incapable of seeing women as subjects.
We have to believe, as the African-American feminist bell hooks reminded us, in men who can love; men who have borne their first separation from a woman with their capacity for loving intact. Last monsoon, I went for a hike with my daughters and their father. We were part of a mixed-age but largely homogenous group of transplants to Goa. By the end of our walk, we were all soaked. The men quickly peeled their tops off, changing into dry t-shirts. Then one shivering woman asked her husband to hold up his towel so that she could change. Even though we were a group of friendly people alone in the middle of a forest, the anxiety about women’s bodies still prevailed.
I instructed my daughters to put on their t-shirts quickly, as the men had, and I did the same. Nobody said anything as we changed. As if we had transferred our collective anxieties to the weather, the talk turned to the looming clouds; Would it rain again?
(Amrita Narayanan is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. The arguments she makes in this article are further developed in her book, Women’s Sexuality and Modern India: In A Rapture of Distress.)
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Do women feel relaxed in mixed-gender public spaces?
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