I heard a disturbing story the other day. Two young people — let’s call them Anita and Rahul — decided to get together. Anita invited Rahul over, asked him to bring the booze. Rahul duly landed up, they drank, watched TV, talked. Anita grumbled that Rahul was being a “boring” boyfriend. Finally, she made the first move. So they kissed. It was fun. Rahul wanted more, Anita demurred, he stepped back. After a while, they kissed again. Cycle repeated. At some point they both amicably went to sleep.
End of story? Not really. The next morning, when Rahul texted to ask if she was okay, Anita replied by saying, ‘Wow, you really know how to take advantage of a drunk gal.’
Up until this point, the evening was, according to me, about par for the course. Both Rahul and Anita are young, and relationships aren’t easy. They were navigating it as best as they knew. Advancing, retreating, feeling the way ahead tentatively. It’s usually how such things play out. I was happy Anita made the first move. I was happy Rahul stepped back when she pushed him off. Anita isn’t obliged to do anything more than kiss. Rahul isn’t entitled to expect more. It ends there.
Which is why the message next morning makes me deeply unhappy. Why does Anita need to accuse Rahul? What is she absolving herself of?
The thing is, sexual freedom and how hard we fought for it be damned, women are still struggling to figure out how to handle that freedom. There’s the individual freedoms they want, there’s the situations they want to control, there’s centuries of conditioning they have to erase, there’s a certain social imagery they’re forced to deal with. Balancing precariously between these many stools, many women take the easy way out — they opt out of taking responsibility for their actions.
It’s only in the last couple of decades that women have, slowly, begun to take the initiative in relationships. It’s not a role that fits them easily, coming as it does after generations of being told that ‘good’ girls never chase. But even as they are trying to break this taboo, they are haunted by an abiding anxiety that they will be judged as ‘easy’.
God knows how many more centuries it will take to establish that ‘easy’ is actually a good word. If only we had more ‘easy’ relationships without having to second-guess everything to death we might even have fun in life. But I digress.
For the majority of women it’s so profoundly ingrained in their psyche that they must never be seen as the ‘seducer’ — ugh, what a foul word — that it becomes extremely important for their self-image and for the image society projects on them to pretend that they’re always the recipients (ideally, somewhat reluctant recipients) of sexual desire. I need hardly mention how much this trope has been played up in pop culture — the shy bride, the pretend-indignation, the no-means-yes.
For a woman to express desire has been considered terrible behaviour for very, very long. Every line Vatsyayana writes tells women to dissimulate, pretend, play hard to get, everything except say ‘hey I want you, can we make love’.
It’s not easy to break free of these shackles. So when young women do shed their inhibitions after a drink or two and actually make that damned first move, they are extraordinarily anxious the next day to hold the man, the alcohol, the kitchen sink, everything responsible for it rather than themselves. It’s tragic because after all, what do they have to own up to? Only to desire. To having expressed it. It should be an empowering feeling, not one of mortification.
The need to convert consensual moments to coercion is not so much a sign of dishonesty as of deepest insecurity. Deconstructing crime bureau statistics invariably shows how often both young women and their families report love affairs as rape or kidnapping only because of the stigma attached to premarital sex. So the insecurity is one that’s fed and bred by society.
Desire isn’t some awful crime that always needs to be blamed on someone. It’s a happy thing. I wish we would stop treating it like the parcel nobody wants to be caught with when the music stops.
Where the writer tries to make sense of society with seven hundred words and a bit of snark.