The hotbed

Pity politics shapes the public imagination towards identifying women as distressed subjects under all and any circumstances. Of course, rape is an awful social reality, but it is not the only form of sex under patriarchy that women are interested in talking about, writes Amrita Narayanan

This October, I took an overnight train from Delhi to speak at a conference at a university in Allahabad. At the invitation of the university’s department chair, I drew from my book Women’s Sexuality and Modern India to talk about a cultural difficulty imagining women exercising sexual agency. One of the problems I said, was the paucity of cultural images about what sexual agency in a woman might look like. A deluge of images of women in distress creates the sexual politics within which women in India — and most of the world — must conduct their lives.

The moderator of the session, a senior male professor, congratulated me on my talk. Then, he objected to my having only mentioned one major rape case. Addressing the audience, he listed the highly publicised rape cases over the last two years that I had “missed” in my lecture. Taking his time to make an exhaustive coverage of rape victims across the country in the recent past, he concluded “and let’s not forget rape in the Northeast, the whole region is a hotbed of rape”.

By focusing on what I had not talked about — the magnitude and extent of the problem of rape — the moderator had avoided speaking about what I had talked about. Perhaps a routine procedure amongst certain academics, in this case, it was also an enactment of pity politics. Pity politics shapes the public imagination towards identifying women as distressed subjects under all and any circumstances. Of course, rape is an awful social reality, but it is not the only form of sex under patriarchy that women are interested in talking about. Pity politics amplify the illegibility of women’s sexual agency; it gives sympathy for women’s trauma while denying attention to their sexual desire and agency. Trauma, as British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips reminds us, is when something is remembered that would rather be forgotten. Under patriarchy, it is a crime to forget rape.

Don’t forget rape, hovered in the accounts of childhood of the women I interviewed for my book. Don’t forget rape was a theme in women’s magazines. It was delivered via a compulsory rape scene on the Sunday regional language films aired on Doordarshan, which my grandmother always watched. Rape and the threat it posed to women, was an implicit backdrop to the child-rearing practices of the middle-class Indian family in the era before liberalisation. Given this history, the discussion of rape is easily leveraged — even if unconsciously — to get women to self-identify as distressed subjects.

Women’s distress is an important topic for patriarchy — it distinguishes the good men from the bad men and it reminds women that they are in the words of Jadhavpur English professor Supriya Chaudhuri: “marked unsafe”.

Likewise, in their book Why Loiter? IIT professor Shilpa Phadke and her colleagues Shilpa Ranade and Sameera Khan persuasively point out how women are implicitly forbidden to loiter in public places because of an imagined sexual violence or community censure. And Kalki Koechlin via the comedic group All India Bakchod nailed rape culture in the viral, sarcastic video: “Rape, it’s your fault”. 

But what does it do to our sexual lives to have to think about women in distress constantly? In my book I argue it can make women feel guilty for sexual pleasure, indeed a guilt towards other women who might be in distress. I’m not the only one who thinks that the excessive emphasis on women’s distress has spoiled our capacity for pleasure. The cover of my book is an image by the artist Anupam Sud. Titled Olympia, it shows a topless man gazing lasciviously at a woman, also topless, whose body faces him, but whose face is angled provocatively towards the viewer. In an interview, the artist said that for her, the image illustrated the paradox of women’s sexual power under patriarchal heterosexuality: even when a woman is a sexual subject who desires, she is perceived as an object of male desire.

Our gaze is taken to the woman’s face in this image, slightly angled away from the man who is looking at her. Could she have her own project at hand, one that involves this man but within the framework of her desires rather than his? If you, reader, immediately identify my cover girl as being objectified, you might be under the influence of pity politics. Pity politics makes us sympathetic to women, but only towards their distress. It breeds anger against lascivious men, but it brings us no closer to women’s sexual desires. As African-American feminist bell hooks wrote in 2004: “The male bashing that was so intense when contemporary feminism first surfaced more than thirty years ago was in part the rageful cover-up of the shame women felt not because men refused to share their power but because we could not seduce, cajole, or entice men to share their emotions — to love us”.

As a form of attention, love owes its power in part to its capacity for recognition. Being loved makes us feel alive and real. Writing about Indian sexual politics in 1990, the psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar pointed out that patriarchy extends love to young girls and women except under conditions where they exercise their individual sexual subjectivity. Translated: love will be given conditional to the control of sexual desire.

How important this condition of patriarchy is can only be conveyed by reading desire beyond the bedroom. Sexual desire can never be cleanly separated from other desires. Do the psychological incentives for the control of sexuality influence women’s non-sexual behaviours as well? Given that the restraint of desire is often an unconscious process, how would its practice in the bedroom extend, if at all, to the boardroom? Acknowledging that there is no clear line between sexual politics and politics more generally adds a humorous angle to egregious man-splaining behaviour. Disappearing a woman’s voice, gaze, or point of view is the metaphorical equivalent of a non-consensual bedroom assault.

After the moderator got through his rape-list, he turned from the audience to me. With a kindle twinkle he said, into the microphone: “Amrita, you really should think about writing something about the material you presented.” Participating in patriarchy is not just about making sure women don’t go too far, it’s also about helping them go further; pointing them in the right direction of course.

(Amrita Narayanan is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. She is the author of Women’s Sexuality and Modern India: In a Rapture of Distress (OUP, 2023))