Out for a morning jog around the colony of East Nizamuddin in New Delhi, I was suddenly aware that I’d trespassed into the territory of some fairly angry looking stray dogs. ‘Stray dog’ is a bit of misnomer in India. They’re not really stray. They know exactly where home is. And this lot weren’t going to have foreigners in it, especially running foreigners dressed all in black wearing a hot pink cap with a bit of mould on it.
Chased into a corner I held my ground against bared fangs and barked outrage, thinking ‘damn you Pamela Anderson for your sentimental interference in India’s dog curtailment programme, I’d like to see you jog around East Nizamuddin in your cossie facing this lot of rabid mange encrusted flea bags’. I was also reminded of other spaces that create such fang bearing moral outrage. While I’m sure the dogs of East Nizamuddin don’t care what my gender is, it seems members of India’s various Hindu cultural nationalist organisations still find it unacceptable that women should loiter in places they deem as places they shouldn’t be hanging about in.
Last week, for example, a group of women were beaten and thrown out of a pub in Mangalore by members of the Sri Rama Sene (SRS), the militant outfit of the Rashtriya Hindu Sena (National Hindu Army), panting and barking about ‘un-Indian’ behaviour. Why does what women do, say or wear still cause so much anxiety for some men? And why do women still have to bear the burdens of morality and tradition? And that’s not just in India. Europe’s in no position to be casting aspersions on the rest of the world. Please note the infamous arse slapping incident in 21st Century Dublin noted in the first posting on this blog. And English men seem obsessed with staring at the tits of Page Three Girls (oh sorry, that should be ‘glamour models’). Why did Karen Matthews become the pin up girl for male commentators who saw her as representative of the downfall of the UK (let’s not mention the myriad of men who control government and financial institutions and the mistakes they’ve made … instead it’s women who are to blame who have too much sex with too many men who end up fathering children they refuse to take any responsibility for). I’ve always been fascinated as to how George Bush Jnr reconciled his remarks justifying his invasion of Iraq to the Australian Parliament by stating that the United States was saving Iraqi women from the ‘rape rooms’ of Saddam Hussein, with killing tens of thousands of them in his military operations.
And what’s with the name calling? Apparently the SRS were throwing around invectives such as ‘prostitute’ and ‘whore’. I remember once walking down a street of Delhi respectably decked out in my usual salwar qamiz when, after refusing the advances of a group of well educated young men, I was called ‘a strumpet’ and ‘a harlot’. Clearly they were studying Shakespeare in the final year of high school. In a pub with a group of friends in Sydney, when we politely rejected the advances of a young man, his parting shot was ‘lesbians!’
Why all this acid throwing when a man, and by extension his sense of order and place in the world, gets rejected? In fact I think I’ll be so bold as to suggest that if we were to look at much ‘cultural’ conflict in our complex, diverse cities, we might find that it’s not always as much about ethnic difference as about gender, power and keeping sex in the family despite incest being our biggest taboo (‘family’ used loosely here to define a group of people with reasonably similar practices and values that tend to panic when someone transgresses the boundaries of expectations, like hoisting a dress too high, because that extra inch of skin on display challenges their authority over someone else’s body and mind, emasculating them in the process – I’m not referring to the genetic kind of family, I’m not that sort of girl!).
All this snarling and yapping and ogling and slapping. Time to do something about the dogs snapping at our heels, ladies. I say politely, pedicured with decorum, show them the underside of your joggers, your six inch stilletos, your doc martins, your loafers, whatever your footwear of preference!
Chased into a corner I held my ground against bared fangs and barked outrage, thinking ‘damn you Pamela Anderson for your sentimental interference in India’s dog curtailment programme, I’d like to see you jog around East Nizamuddin in your cossie facing this lot of rabid mange encrusted flea bags’. I was also reminded of other spaces that create such fang bearing moral outrage. While I’m sure the dogs of East Nizamuddin don’t care what my gender is, it seems members of India’s various Hindu cultural nationalist organisations still find it unacceptable that women should loiter in places they deem as places they shouldn’t be hanging about in.
Last week, for example, a group of women were beaten and thrown out of a pub in Mangalore by members of the Sri Rama Sene (SRS), the militant outfit of the Rashtriya Hindu Sena (National Hindu Army), panting and barking about ‘un-Indian’ behaviour. Why does what women do, say or wear still cause so much anxiety for some men? And why do women still have to bear the burdens of morality and tradition? And that’s not just in India. Europe’s in no position to be casting aspersions on the rest of the world. Please note the infamous arse slapping incident in 21st Century Dublin noted in the first posting on this blog. And English men seem obsessed with staring at the tits of Page Three Girls (oh sorry, that should be ‘glamour models’). Why did Karen Matthews become the pin up girl for male commentators who saw her as representative of the downfall of the UK (let’s not mention the myriad of men who control government and financial institutions and the mistakes they’ve made … instead it’s women who are to blame who have too much sex with too many men who end up fathering children they refuse to take any responsibility for). I’ve always been fascinated as to how George Bush Jnr reconciled his remarks justifying his invasion of Iraq to the Australian Parliament by stating that the United States was saving Iraqi women from the ‘rape rooms’ of Saddam Hussein, with killing tens of thousands of them in his military operations.
And what’s with the name calling? Apparently the SRS were throwing around invectives such as ‘prostitute’ and ‘whore’. I remember once walking down a street of Delhi respectably decked out in my usual salwar qamiz when, after refusing the advances of a group of well educated young men, I was called ‘a strumpet’ and ‘a harlot’. Clearly they were studying Shakespeare in the final year of high school. In a pub with a group of friends in Sydney, when we politely rejected the advances of a young man, his parting shot was ‘lesbians!’
Why all this acid throwing when a man, and by extension his sense of order and place in the world, gets rejected? In fact I think I’ll be so bold as to suggest that if we were to look at much ‘cultural’ conflict in our complex, diverse cities, we might find that it’s not always as much about ethnic difference as about gender, power and keeping sex in the family despite incest being our biggest taboo (‘family’ used loosely here to define a group of people with reasonably similar practices and values that tend to panic when someone transgresses the boundaries of expectations, like hoisting a dress too high, because that extra inch of skin on display challenges their authority over someone else’s body and mind, emasculating them in the process – I’m not referring to the genetic kind of family, I’m not that sort of girl!).
All this snarling and yapping and ogling and slapping. Time to do something about the dogs snapping at our heels, ladies. I say politely, pedicured with decorum, show them the underside of your joggers, your six inch stilletos, your doc martins, your loafers, whatever your footwear of preference!
