The Glitter Boobs Girl and the One from Meerut

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The Glitter Boobs Girl

Itwas the night of Jan 11, 2018, when I first came across the glitter-boobs girl. In a footage shared on Facebook, I saw her walking topless amid a swarm of people, until a man sneaked up on her from behind, grabbed a breast and ran back to sit on the grass nearby. The girl, angry, returned to hit the man. The whole incident seemed to have been caught on camera by an onlooker, and later shared on Facebook, where it went viral and earned the girl her new nickname. You guessed it right — the girl had glitter sprinkled on her otherwise bare chest.

The incident, to me, was too absurd to deserve further thoughts, and the girl one of those bird-brained attention seekers who misuse Western liberalism and reduce feminism to a joke. I moved on. What stuck with me, however, was her anger. She was furious at being groped in public, while in a state that arguably asks for it, and she saw no reason to not act upon her fury then and there. Her total lack of embarrassment was new to my Indian psyche.

The One from Meerut

The next morning greeted me with a morose news headline — ‘Harassed for months, 14-year-old student drops out of tuition to avoid goons, commits suicide later’. The article read as below -

‘Meerut: Tired of being harassed for months together by four men that stalked and misbehaved with her, a 14-year-old in Uttar Pradesh committed suicide by setting herself ablaze.

The student was regularly stalked and harassed by four men — Shobhit, Ankit, Mohit, and Ravi –on her way back home in Bhawanpur, from her tuition classes located in G. She first dropped out of school and then she dropped out of her tuition classes, hoping that the harassment would stop. However, the four accused kept visiting her village to harass her.

Upset with the harassment and finding no other way to stop it, she set herself afire on January 6, the police said. Meerut CMO Ajit Chowdhury told PTI that the girl was rushed to a hospital with 80 percent burn injuries. She died during treatment on Thursday.

Her family has filed a police complaint against the four men claiming that they gang-raped her too recently emboldened by the fact that she couldn’t reveal the details of the incident to her family and chose to ignore the advances by the four grown men.’

Sickening is probably the word you’re looking for.

Unfortunately, such incidents are common in my part of the world. Once upon a time, they brought tears to my eyes. What they now bring instead is a little more fatigue, a grim reminder of my place in the world as a woman. Each time I come across such news, I’ve to put up this little internal fight to resist the thought that the Utopian land of gender equality exists nowhere but in the shared dream of a handful of wishful thinkers like me. I fear that the entire world will soon be claimed back by the sexist, supremacist forces that we thought had been cornered for good, and our sons and daughters will see a future different from the one us egalitarians had dreamt of.

On this particular morning, however, it was not dejection that overwhelmed me, but a sense of despair that refused to die down. This ill-defined restlessness dragged me back to Facebook, and to the page where Miss Madeline Anello-Kitzmiller’s glitter-chest appearance in a music festival in New Zealand continued to stir up hailstorms left, right and center.

The Jury Game

“If you choose to be naked like animals, so expect some animal’s acts”

— “No it’s called men being accountable for being unable to keep their hands to themselves…why am i groped when I’m fully clothed at a concert then dude? …”

“One way to express your “empowerment” — walk naked and expect respect. Feminism in its current form is stupid.”

— “How is that stupid?? There are just breast. Keep your hands to yourself. That’s really that hard??”

“If she doesnt want harrasment, why she goes in a beach without top ? i mean , how psychotic and lame an human can be! MANS ARE NOT ANGELS, some man can digest and resist themselves from teasing naked girls but not ALL! ! i am not saying what happened to her was right, but saying its both a men and women responsibility to be decent atleast for some part of body which is provoking ! but no one is getting the message!”

— “If a man can’t control himself then he shouldn’t be allowed in public … that simple”

“If it was a male revealing himself, we all would’ve cried “indecent exposure”… double standards much…”

— “I’ a male and I can go topless anywhere…”

Note: All of the above quotes are actual comments from Facebook.

Hundreds (if not thousands) of comments had already been posted on the footage, and many of them continued to attract responses. Men and women, conservatives and liberals, the religious and the rebels, all argued with a vengeance. Every opinion, however obvious or absurd it might sound up front, found support and ridicule from a hundred other voices.

A few minutes of this bizarre read left me grappling to find my own voice. It no longer mattered that Miss Madeline’s glittered assets were of no consequence to me. The world was at loggerheads on my boundaries as a woman, and my perfectly sensible voice suddenly seemed way too fallible. I wondered how the dead girl of Meerut would’ve responded to this conversation.

Was Madeline the answer to the question her death had left upon the world to answer?

A Deathless Question

It took me half a day to find my way through the chaos. Once I did, it became evident that much of the exchange around Madeline’s footage boiled down to one polar question — ‘Can rape or molestation be justified if a woman is less clothed than how the man in question would like her to be?’

In case your mind has already let out an emphatic shout — ‘Obviously not!’, remember that the acceptable limit for less clothed is not in your hands. Remember, when you take away the right of men to teach lecherous women a lesson, you also lose the power to scare the women in your society into wearing attire that suits your sense of propriety. Remember, wet T-shirt contests are a staple of college spring break celebrations at several parts of the world, and the absence of rape threats makes it so much easier for your wayward daughter from following suit.

But if your answer is ‘Yes’ (or any variant of it, like ‘No, unless’ or ‘Of course not, but then’), you empower those four lads whose daily amusement constitutes teasing school-going girls, and who one day decide to teach one girl a lesson for not wearing her dupatta right. You empower a Mukesh Singh who, while on trial for a gang rape and fatal assault that shook the nation, says on record that it was the girl’s fault because being a girl she was out of her home at night. You substantiate the worldview that women are like honey that must be locked away lest they attract flies. You lead to the acceptance of men being seen as creatures of uncontrollable urge and women objects of desire that must either be guarded or preyed on. In my opinion, it is a rather savage view that dehumanizes both genders.

But I Want a Decent World

Let us learn to see indecent exposure as an issue separate from victim blaming.

On a personal level, I believe in decency. My ideal world has no place not only for titillating skin show, but also for flashiness in general, or for cuss words. Men and women there strive to be recognized for what’s inside their skull and under their skin.

But the world need not subscribe to my sense of ideal, or that of yours, or that of preacher X or dictator Y. By all probabilities, your definition of right and that of mine are both products of upbringing and social conditioning. They’re way too narrow to be held up as a yardstick against the world.

In a free world where people are equal and master of their own choices, there are no sex objects, and censorship is an alien term, for people are in charge of their own sexuality. Unfortunately, we’ll not see a free world anytime soon, and the need for humans to control each other is here to stay. In a more practical setting, enforcing decency in public spaces must lie in the premises of the local lawmakers and administration, not a random man (or woman) looking for an excuse to feed his perversity or sense of moral superiority.

What emerges is -

1. If there’s a glitter-boobs girl at your local music festival and she makes you cringe, mutter under your breath and look away. Alternatively, call up the helpline for indecent exposure. However, if you see the girl being forcibly groped, try to stop it.
2. Similarly, if you see a highly inebriated girl exiting your local pub late to enter a car with men only, feel free to be vexed with the girl for having made herself so vulnerable. But you must also feel a concern, and act on it if possible.

‘If this ends in rape, she’ll have deserved it.’ is a very damaging thought.

Men predating on women who’re vulnerable, either due to life situations, immaturity or their own lack of judgment, can never be supported.

Conclusion

All battles, for better or for worse, are fought between people of extremes, and people of balance can only choose their side (okay, they also act to drive sense into the former and temper their views in due course of time!). Between the glitter-boobs girl and the one from Meerut, between their respective worlds, if I’ve to choose one reality for the daughter I don’t yet have, what do you think my choice would be?

Of course, the girl who can’t be shamed into wearing clothes wins hands down over the girl who could be shamed into a lonely, lonely, voiceless death.

And the world that tolerates Madeline’s glittered boobs wins hands down over the one that tolerates rapists.

Red

Do you like me?

“Who are you? And why on earth should I like you?” – You may ask.

Well, I am red.

“Red?!  That too with a small ‘r’? Didn’t they teach you grammar at school? Are you prone to typo-s? Is this the new trend of writing one’s name? Are you a redhead? No? You must be red in anger then; or in shame or embarrassment; or…”

Come on, I’m the color red. Is it that hard to guess? I’m also the color she despises the most. And before you can drown me in another deluge of questions, let me tell you who ‘she’ is; I’m referring to the idiot who is writing this piece.

She has just let her heart triumph over her ever-cautious brain and quit from her stable job of seven years. To put it mildly, it wasn’t an easy victory. Her heart now wants to raise a toast to her new freedom and write; her brain, still seething, has chosen me as her write-up topic out of sheer spite. Do you now see why I call her the idiot?

At first, she thought of writing about child rapes. She contemplated imagining the unimaginable agony of the countless victims she reads about in the daily newspaper; the helpless, senseless, universe-drowning pain of those little girls whose tender body they rip apart; the inescapable thrusts, each of which push them closer to a death they don’t deserve. I shuddered and closed my eyes.

“It’s relevant.” – She said. “And it’s a matter that has been haunting me for some time now.”

She kept rambling about the topic in her attempt to win me over. Apparently, she wanted sociologists, psychologists, economists, criminologists, political scientists and every other ‘ist’ she could recall to come forward and examine the society with their magnifying glasses and find out where it’s going all wrong. “It’s brutally urgent!” - She claimed. “We need to stop all the brouhaha about outrageously small and fast gadgets, driver-less cars, fancy space tourism and what not, and focus on the critical aspects of human advancement.”

All that’s fine, I thought, but how could I let her write a piece that would have the blood of the purest souls dripping from it and call it ‘Red’? I cannot let my name be maligned so! Why, am I not the color of the Gulmohar’s elegance? Am I not the tint of the sunrise and the sunset? Am I not the hue of the throbbing life force that flows to and from every cell of your body all your life? Think, red is your core color, the truest of your many shades. I was there with you in the earliest days of your existence, when you were a tiny ball curled up in your mother’s womb, much before you acquired that amber, green or hazel of your enchanting iris or the black of your hair!

The idiot was visibly dejected at my noisy, and as per her, nosy intervention. She started thinking about a large, large sky colored in the rich red hues of sunset, and tried to set it as a backdrop for a pair of parting lovers saying their final adieu to each other. In an hour, she found the story-line juvenile and raised a melodramatic ruckus to which I was the sole hapless audience. When I tried to cheer her up, she pretended not to know me and went on with some banking and investment tasks with a look of stoic resignation.

On the next day, of course, she was back with her mouse hovering on the haggard looking MS Word draft. This time, she was shaping her fantasies around a not-so-young artist who had taken up his paintbrush after a cursed slumber of years. The artist had reasons to be angry with the world, but anger is an emotion he had not mastered well. So he wanted to unleash his aggression on his paper; he wanted to paint a picture in red, only red, and the most assaulting version of it – the scarlet red! But deep inside, our artist was essentially a soul who loved peace, rain, croaking frogs and the smell of sodden grass. Every picture he tried to create in his mind-canvas took the shape of a woman with uncombed hair and eyes of moist lily, or a landscape with soothing breeze and serene huts and trees and ponds with ducks in them, while his hand created ugly blotches of discordant red on his sheet of fine handmade paper. He wanted to die, at least for a moment.

There I intervened again. You see, your friend can’t see any good in me. Green reminds her not of jealousy but of playful squirrels chasing each other along the branches of large trees in the park where she goes for her morning jog. Melancholy is the literal synonym for blue, and yet the color reminds her of deep, somber depths of the ocean in a strangely respectful way. And red brings to her mind loud, attention-craving, garish, pompous folks who can’t but be at the center of the world. She would rather have them wiped out from the face of the earth.

“What can you do, being a mere color?” – You’re probably trying to reason with me by now. “Colors are helpless beings… without free will. Colors don’t chime, clink or jingle either in pain or protest. All you can do is beautify the world as per others’ whims. To take control of your fate is not a power the Almighty has bestowed on your lot, you see.”

Says who? For one, colors can hypnotize idiots and take control of keyboards and mice.  Who do you think wrote this piece, that morbid, miserable friend of yours?

And what do you think of the social media post she made the other day, with photos showing the entire family dressed in red? Why do you think she scanned two supermarkets looking for a tiny red bucket all through the last weekend? Clueless you are? Now listen me out; I’ve found my way into that twenty month old mushy brain of her son, you see, to the point that the kid keeps blabbering about objects being red, or ‘not red’! Catch ‘em young, they say!

Finally, did you see that half-read book laid by her side right now? Come on, look closer… see its name… “Orhan Pamuk?”… Na, that’s not the novel’s name…. look again… “My Name is Red”!!! Tadaaaa…!

Puny human, remember, hell hath no fury like a color scorned! And a color ALWAYS has its way!

Do you like me now?

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Also published on Medium.