Goddess and the Workingwoman

By Bharat Jhunjhunwala

The rape of a medical student in Delhi has led to the demand of instituting capital punishment for the rapist. Police inefficiency has also come for criticism. These measures are like putting more mousetraps for solving the problem of rodents. Mousetraps are necessary but they will be ineffective unless the causes of increase in rodent population are removed. Likewise we should remove the factors that promote rape.

*Radical feminist anthropologist Evelyn Reed says that the female is the initiator of sexual activity. "When the female is in heat.... she give the sexual 'signal' which inaugurates a new estrus season for the species.... male animals do not normally attempt to mount an unreceptive female." She quotes Phyllis Jay: The female "is the sole initiator of sexual activity......"

The social system of female soliciting and the male responsibility was suitable for the animal kingdom. But human society found it to be unsuitable. The human child requires about 20 years of nurturing. The women is unable to provide for her children for such long time if she also has to earn. Thus man created the institution of the family. The female agrees to provide exclusive sexual favours to the male in return of protection and bread for her and the children.

The woman would not solicit sexual favours from others men; and the man undertook to protect and provide for the woman throughout her life. This principle was enshrined in our tradition by saying that the woman should live under the control of her father, husband or son. The idea was to provide her protection so that she could devote to the task of homemaking comfortably.

The problem now is that women are genetically trained to solicit. They will wear ornaments, put on scents, walk provocatively but expect that man will not be provoked. They solicit in unsafe situations and invite rape.

*The demand for cheap labour by the capitalist system has made things worse. The modern economy wants a large supply of labour to keep wages low.

Workingwomen and coeducational colleges have increased the area of contact between the male and female. Solicitation was previously undertaken at specific location such as parichay sammelans. Now, it takes place all day long. The restraint in solicitation has been broken. Rape is but one step ahead.

*Women are being encouraged to work in addition to homemaking to increase the supply of labour. Men and women have been de-sexed. The employer is required not to discriminate between a male and a female employee. Women are expected to travel in busses, adhere to office work timings, be present on all thirty work days in a month irrespective of their menstrual cycle, etc.

The genetic makeup of woman requires that the woman be feminine, she solicit the favours of men, she wear sexy clothes, adorn her with ornaments and concentrate on homemaking. The modern society wants her to give up the sexy clothes and adornments and accept her identity as a de-sexed person.

Rod Van Mechelen writes in his article Causes of Rape: "Women who wear clothes that exentuate their female attributes are bypassing men's civilized veneer to communicate directly to the male libido. Usually, no harm is done because most men have discipline. But somethings, like alcohol or women's provocative behaviours, can erode men's resistance.

And sometimes that can lead to rape. "Of course, a woman who is dressed modestly can also be raped. But we have to see not the individual case but the overall social milieu.

If a man sees provocatively dressed women his genetic impulse is activated and he may rape a woman who is modestly dressed but is more accessible. The underlying cause is that of the milieu of provocation.

*Another factor is that of poverty. Rod Van Mechelen continues: "During the past several years, women's expectations have risen in step with advertisements. When female expectations rise to the point where a significant number of men cannot afford the ticket to women's hearts, the incidence of rape increases.

There had been two famous mass outbreaks of rape in Gusiiland, once in 1937 and once in 1950. Robert LeVine, an anthropologist from Northwestern University, investigated and discovered that in both years the price of a bride had soared beyond the reach of Gusii young men.

"Within any given community, poor men are far more likely to rape than middle - class and successful men. Surveys of the socioeconomic status of rapists in the United States indicate that the vast majority of offenders some from lower socioeconomic classes and are unemployed or unskilled laborers with only an elementary - school education or less. Cross - cultural studies from Denmark and Australia also confirm that unskilled, unemployed, and poorly educated males - those who lose out in sexual competition - are more often rapists than other men.

" The society should restrain from creating wild expectations of rich grooms among women; and poverty must be attended to in order to reduce incidences of rape.

*Modern advertising seeks to exploit the same sexual genetic impulse in marketing that it negates in production. Advertisements routinely portray beautiful women. 'Beauty' is associated with the women's breasts and hips-which represent the capability of childbearing. 'Sexy' woman is she who displays more of her ability to bear children. But the capitalist system also wants to procure women as de-sexed workers. Thus the women are in a deep conflict. On the one hand they are venerated as sex goddesses and on the other hand they are expected to leave their sexiness at home and come to work as sexless workers.

Eldrige Cleaver touched on this in his classic Soul On Ice: 'All our lives we've had the white woman dangled before our eyes like a carrot on a stick before a donkey: look but don't touch.' Expressing his torment, he concluded, 'I became a rapist.'

The stigma that women feel in reporting cases of rape arises from their being ensure of their true identity. They are pushed into the workingwoman model while their genetic being is that of sex goddess.

To report a rape implies that they have either failed in their workingwoman role in failing to protect them or have overstepped their sex goddessness, hence the stigma.

They have necessarily violated one of the two rules. The male society, including the police, also feels the same way. Of course, women are helpless because the two rules are diametrically opposed to each other and yet they are expected to conform to both.

The problem of rape is threefold. One, the different genetic makeup of man and woman is being negated. Women are genetically programmed to solicit the male and the social rules for such solicitation in the workingwoman model have not been established. Two, poverty leads to unfulfilled sex desire and promotes rape.

Three, advertisements provoke the sex goddess image of woman while the work environment is supposed to be de-sexed.

We will have to solve these contradictions for the world to become safe for women. It will not do to provide capital punishment or more police.

As Kiran Bedi rightly remarked, "Social will precedes the law." The society must face the contradiction between the workingwoman and the sex goddess.

Development and poverty

By Krishna Kishore Katare

The present policies and system of development could not solve the problem of poverty in our country. Though now we are surplus in food production, but still the number of hungry and malnourished population is increasing.

Andhra Pradesh claims to be an IT State and investing huge money on IT development projects, but it could not solve the problems of cotton-growers, handloom workers, who are denied minimum wages and minimum support price for their products. The development in education has produced Jobless educated crowd. The economic development is ignoring the problem of unemployment.

The Indian reality on development after fifty years of independence can be understood and translated in many ways. Poverty lines drawn and defined by the experts keep changing and the number of poor in various categories keeps rising. The original calculations by a commission and later in 1980s have all concluded that there are more and more poor below the poverty lines (although successive Governments and some political parties are struggling with statistics to show that there are less and less poor.) The Human Development Report (HDR) on South Asia 1997 concludes that 44 percent of the Indian population now live in absolute poverty. After 50 years of political independence, 57 percent live in the slums 640 million have no sanitation or safe drinking water and over 300 million are completely illiterate at the end of the second millennium. Fifty percent of the Indian people live and work in places where there are not roads in the modern sense of the word.

What about India after half a century of development planning? India is also the birthplace of world renowned economists who have spent their life in studying and analysing development. Today the current industrial model is working on the basis of ambitious economic policy objectives-seven to eight percent rate of economic growth, faster and faster track in attracting (not necessarily succeeding) foreign investment in terms of dollars. The Indian people are meanwhile getting a new taste of living higher standards through TV, media and hightech computers. They can stimulate modern luxuries in their homes without having to buy them. But these dreams create aspirations which gives rise to violence, if they remain unfulfilled. Some of them are getting this taste through Pepsi Cola, Uncle Chips which have successfully gulped the small producers of urban poor who are spilling over the nonexistent pavements on to the streets.

The concepts of development have defied dictionaries, they have bewildered the practitioner and have over-employed the academician. Development is now being challenged by several alternative paradigms throughout the world, where NGOs and several communities have begun their own systems of development. Each time this word is used in plans and policies, there is a theory or a concept that supports it, explains it or rejects it. And yet a large part of the financial and human resources of the world in almost all countries are being channelled towards development and its undefinable economic and social objectives.

Ask the developers, and they would explain development in terms of vir- gin lands to which their engineers and architects will bring electricity and water to build high rise buildings in cities without roads and without basic amenities. The size of the human being, specially the workers who will service them, is being reduced. He is becoming smaller and smaller in these huge monuments. They must walk longer distances without any facility of public transport, clean larger spaces without modern tools or the help of technology. The new buildings install high-tech lifts without the certainty of electricity and set up luxurious bathrooms without the security of flowing water. And this in India which has a long history or urbanisation and a long experience in building planned cities. On the other hand, the Development Agencies both at the international and the national level are in the development business in a big way. On their agendas, they have national priorities and programmes carefully prepared and planned. Financial resources towards specific communities are channelled while others are marginalised. Since 1991, globalisation and liberalisation have pushed development to the extreme edge of marketisation. Creating a spiral of consumerism which accumulates waste and toxic products at a never ending pace is the main aim; create markets through the private sector to put more money in the pockets of a certain class who will have more and more purchasing power to buy luxury goods. Development also creates a society where large number of people feel increasingly deprived, where traditionally they had austerity as an ethic and were doing with- out most of the modern trappings. After their com- munity is ‘developed’, they will not be able to survive without one thousand products packed in plastics wrapping which cannot be recycled. "Development", to a politician, must appear like a white elephant which gives him the ability to choose programmes and projects which will keep him or her in power in perpetuity.

History has its own simple lessons; but men and nations prefer to make their own mistakes and suffer their own tooth aches. In most countries, particularly politicians in charge of governance today have not understood that the current economic and social policies called "reforms" are clearly leading towards dividing India into two hermetically sealed neat worlds in which the frontiers are clearly marked. On the one side you have rural India, where the majority of the population will continue to be deprived of the benefits of technological revolution. The marginal scientific innovations of the twentieth century which if properly used could ease the burdens of their daily lives. On the other side about 350 million people are aspiring to bring "Western Standards" on to the soil of India at the cost the majority.

Since 1950, each successive Development Plan in India has focused on eliminating, reducing or alleviating poverty through satisfying minimum or basic needs of the large majority of the Indian people. "Minimum needs" have been variously defined as adequate income, basic education, primary health care and decent shelter and these objectives have become an integral part of development policy of successive governments irrespective of the political party in power. Deprivation of these basic needs is now considered to be economically and socially "irrequitable" and unjust. "Equality of opportunity" in employment is recognised as a fundamental right; but social security, pensions of the elderly and unemployment benefits have become questions of social equity or social justice and they are not inscribed in the Indian Constitution. Earning enough to feed, clothe and educate the family continues to exhaust the energies of most of those who live in the villages. Thousands and thousands of women and children will die earlier than their natural span of life some times for the lack of an aspirin or the knowledge of dehydration formula of simply assess to a doctor or midwife. They will continue to struggle for safe water and sanitation and schooling. And very soon there will no spaces for morning toilet in the commons. The squeeze will affect women more than men and there will be more and more disease and sickness in the families. The other side of the divide of this world is the minority of the urban dwellers who will enjoy the "modernity" of the industrial model in having choices of luxury cars and models, soaps and creams and crackers. The rest of the urban dwellers will not find enough space to walk, ply their rickshaws or manueover their scooters. India is unique in many ways; no other country gives more space and freedom to its cows in the street at the cost of its people and higher traffic accidents. If cows are becoming a traffic hazard, no municipality dare remove them to another spot outside the city, so be it! Let us worship cows and neglect children; the gods and goddesses would be happier! These examples of lack of development or distorted development are clearly the results of a social system in which inequity rather than equity is the basic norm.

By and large the voters in India become victims of the number games, and are counted in terms of vote bank to satisfy the technical definition of democracy as numerous national elections have shown. Poor households are basically concerned with earning a bit more, living a bit better, eating a bit extra so as not go to bed hungry. Sleeping in a hutment where the roof does not leak could be a great luxury! Many women would like to see a simple magic; the tap turns the water begins to flow. In the next century it is estimated that the population will annually increase by 17 million and the labour force by 7.5 million, one-third of In- dia’s population will be perpetually hungry; one third of its children will continue to work in hazardous conditions for measly sum of money and ninety per cent of its women will continue to be malnourished.