What a world!
June 2, 2013, 9:05 pmMumbai has, in what may be described as a fit of morality, banned mannequins clad in lingerie to ‘save Indian males from impure thoughts’ as an antidote to rape, as we reported the other day in the World View section. The local councillors who made that unprecedented decision are doing everything in their power to tackle the alarmingly high incidence of rape in that city and their concerns need to be appreciated. But, the question is whether such measures which smack of Victorian prudery and repression will work in the modern society where man’s mind is exposed to many a defilement.
Unlike in days of yore when conventional Indian helmers scrupulously employed symbols such as osculating swans to denote coital acts of humans, today, Bollywood chick-flicks are full of raunchy bedroom scenes and lewd, suggestive gyrations by traffic-stopping beauties whose lithe, hourglass figures almost in the buff make lingerie-clad mannequins pale into insignificance. Besides such celluloid eroticism, just a single visit to the Khajuraho temple complex, where bestial orgies have been immortalised in stone carvings, will fill a man’s mind with more ‘impure thoughts’ than all the lingerie displaying dummies in India put together! Then there are those electronic mind polluters called the Internet and the mobile phone. Mumbai like any other city either in India or in the world for that matter has numerous hoardings that display voluptuous female figures besides tens of thousands of women in figure-hugging garments on its streets and in micro bikinis on its beaches. So, how fair is it to blame the innocent plastic lay figures for polluting the male mind which, on the other hand, is already brimful with impure thoughts, carnal desires and evil intentions of all sorts?
In any society, there are, of course, many sick minds given to paraphilia as evident from some of the ancient Khajuraho carvings and they will get sexual arousal from virtually anything. Edmund Burke it was who famously said: "There is a boundary to men’s passions when they act from feelings; but none when they are under the influence of imagination." On Feb. 24, 2006, BBC reported that a Sudanese man had tied the nuptial knot with a she-goat! The Daily Telegraph on May 21, 2008 revealed a rare instance of mechaphilia—sexual attraction to machines especially cars, whirlybirds etc—under a catchy caption, Man who had sex with 1,000 cars. How are we to tackle this problem?
In justification of the ban on scantily dressed Mumbai mannequins, a female local councillor has quoted chapter and verse; a 1986 law, she says, prohibits the depiction of the female figure or any part thereof in such a way as to ‘have the effect of being indecent or derogatory to or denigrating women or is likely to deprave, corrupt or injure the public morality or morals’.
In the Victorian Era, state-sponsored attempts were made to improve public morals, but students of history are au fait with the fact it was a period of contradictions where a greed-driven, ruthless class system made life extremely harsh for commoners and turned a blind eye to child labour and prostitution, while emotions and sexual feelings were modestly expressed in the so-called language of flowers. That socio-cultural milieu had all the trappings of a Dickensian paradox. Similarly, the Mumbai local councillors are trying to set Victorian moral standards by fiat to prevent affronts to the dignity of women in a society notorious for untold suffering of widows including little girls forcibly married to greybeards, discrimination as well as heinous crimes against the girl child and the deplorable dowry system.
Another city administration—in Culver, a Los Angeles suburb—has seen red thanks to man’s adeptness at visualising things that are not there! The picture of a tea kettle marketed by JC Penney has gone viral on the Internet as some people think it resembles Hitler giving his trademark Sieg Heil salute. The problem with imagination is that one finds it is well-nigh impossible to ‘unsee’ a human face, an animal etc after one ‘sees’ it in some object. This is called pareidolia or perception of patterns or meanings that do not actually exist. But, Culver City Mayor, a Jew, has taken umbrage over a billboard advertising the so-called Hitler kettle, in his area!
As for the lingerie-clad mannequins in Mumbai, the problem, in our book, is not those plastic figures which, even if fully bared, have nothing exciting to reveal, but man’s imagination that tends to run riot. We believe it is the sick minds that need to be dealt with more than anything else in curbing sexual violence. Ad hoc measures are of little use in tackling a serious social problem which requires a multi-pronged approach.