Tejpal, AK Ganguly and us: The vexing issue of consent
by Sandip Roy Jan 11, 2014
The other day an aunt was sharing a story about a long ago romance – decades before there were mobile phones and Internet chatrooms. A young man fancied a young woman in his neighbourhood. Unsure how to talk to her, he wrote a note and tossed it onto her balcony when she was standing there. She wrote a note back and tossed it down to him. After a couple of such letter exchanges, they decided to meet. The young woman said “OK, so when are you coming with the marriage proposal?” The young man, taken aback, replied “What marriage? I just sent you two letters.” She replied “And I replied. Doesn’t that mean it’s serious?” Eventually they did get married and the story just became part of amusing family lore.
But the point of the story is that consent - as in permission to proceed – is murky business whether it’s on a balcony in Kolkata or an elevator in Goa.
The stories of rape, molestation and sexual harassment have finally brought the issue of consent to our front pages. Even as A K Ganguly, the former Supreme Court judge resigned from the West Bengal Human Rights Commission dogged by charges of sexual harassment, another intern has leveled similar charges against another judge, Swatanter Kumar. It however does not mean it’s made it any easier to figure it out because consent sounds like it should be a Yes/No binary but it’s really a spectrum of nods, winks, smiles, maybes, maybe nots. Rape comes from the Latin word raptus - to seize, abduct or carry off. That's clearly understandable. But consent is far murkier.
In a fine essay about the minefield of consent for Open Magazine, Devika Bakshi explains just how tricky it can get.
Trouble is, our sexual culture revolves around subterfuge, around guesswork and hint-dropping, liberty-taking and going-along. Consensual sex does happen. But consent is for the most part given and taken tacitly, through ‘signals’ or circumstances that may be interpreted as ‘preamble’, willingness or invitation. Many a slip is possible in such a situation: shyness may be taken as coyness, eye contact as flirtation, physical contact as enticement.
If the editor shares a risque joke via BBN Messenger with a young colleague and she sends a wink icon back, is that consent by emoticon? Is flirtation a green light for everything else? Is one bored night’s sexting necessarily a preamble to the real thing? Can consent once given never be taken back?
The fact is we usually cannot ask the question that is actually on our minds – will you have sex with me? So we read between the lines, often selectively filtering content to only see what we are hoping for. And the seemingly simple edict, No means No fails us miserably because we have been culturally taught that No just means Later. So we just “manufacture consent” writes Bakshi interpreting “certain thresholds of comfort as prelude, certain kinds of conversation as foreplay, certain situations as ‘atmosphere’ because it suits us.” (Read Bakshi's entire essay here.)
This might happen in an elevator in an actual act of physicality. Or it might be more innocuously staged in a hotel room where a former Supreme Court judge tries to ply an intern with wine.
What the Tarun Tejpal scandal exposed was something we prefer not to think about. As Ruchir Joshi points out in an insightful essay for The Telegraph :
In our self-nosing, lefty liberal world, the unspoken assumption is that ‘attacking and raping women is what the other guys do’, the zamindar, the cop, the working-class men driven insane by oppressive factors, the lower middle-class daughter-defilers, the power-crazed politician, executive or tycoon, and, not least, the slimy, religious charlatans. We, of the Left-liberal world, are ‘new’ men, each and every Haridaspal of us.
But Joshi points out while many of us feel sanctimonious because we have never “forced” ourselves on someone, “too many of us, far too unthinkingly participate in a milieu where the kind of thing Tarun Tejpal is accused of is all too common.” The great social outrage over Tejpal and the nonstop furore on television shows was also an almost over-eager protestation of innocence on the part of everyone else as if to separate themselves from him, to deny, writes Bakshi “that what he really is is an ordinary man whose garden-variety disregard for consent caused him to take a grave liberty and respond to an accusation of assault with predictable disbelief and defensiveness.”
This spurt of high profile harassment and molestation cases has led to a lot of paranoia these days. Men will now have to police themselves, it is alleged, because every act of flirtation, every stray compliment will become punishable. "I am scared to talk to a woman these days. I don't even want to keep a woman secretary. Who knows, I might end up in jail because of a complaint. No, I am not blaming the girls, I am blaming society," said Farooq Abdullah.
Abdullah was rightfully lambasted. But it is challenging to try and frame the many confusing shades of human interaction inside a far more restrictive, yes-or-no legal framework.
Consent is not a traffic light clearly demarcated in red, amber and green. Nor is it as some have feared a legal document, a sort of contract that must be signed and notarized by both parties, as they proceed from base 1 to base 2 to base 3. And it is mutual. It’s not a one-way street as Bollywood films frequently depict it – women give, men take. Gay relationships also have to navigate the same terrain with even fewer cultural assigned roles of who gives consent and who takes it.
The key writes Bakshi is to understand that consent does not have to be “arranged lopsidedly around unwillingness”, to treat willingess as an active thing instead of something passive. Consent is not about proceed until stopped.
We are not going to get it right. We are human. But if we learn how to ask “Do you want” rather than think “I assume you want this because you didn’t say otherwise” we’d be a going a long way towards understanding the meaning of consent. But for that we’d also have to learn to treat our desires as something other than shameful.
But the point of the story is that consent - as in permission to proceed – is murky business whether it’s on a balcony in Kolkata or an elevator in Goa.
The stories of rape, molestation and sexual harassment have finally brought the issue of consent to our front pages. Even as A K Ganguly, the former Supreme Court judge resigned from the West Bengal Human Rights Commission dogged by charges of sexual harassment, another intern has leveled similar charges against another judge, Swatanter Kumar. It however does not mean it’s made it any easier to figure it out because consent sounds like it should be a Yes/No binary but it’s really a spectrum of nods, winks, smiles, maybes, maybe nots. Rape comes from the Latin word raptus - to seize, abduct or carry off. That's clearly understandable. But consent is far murkier.
In a fine essay about the minefield of consent for Open Magazine, Devika Bakshi explains just how tricky it can get.
Trouble is, our sexual culture revolves around subterfuge, around guesswork and hint-dropping, liberty-taking and going-along. Consensual sex does happen. But consent is for the most part given and taken tacitly, through ‘signals’ or circumstances that may be interpreted as ‘preamble’, willingness or invitation. Many a slip is possible in such a situation: shyness may be taken as coyness, eye contact as flirtation, physical contact as enticement.
Is flirtation a green light for everything else? AFP
The fact is we usually cannot ask the question that is actually on our minds – will you have sex with me? So we read between the lines, often selectively filtering content to only see what we are hoping for. And the seemingly simple edict, No means No fails us miserably because we have been culturally taught that No just means Later. So we just “manufacture consent” writes Bakshi interpreting “certain thresholds of comfort as prelude, certain kinds of conversation as foreplay, certain situations as ‘atmosphere’ because it suits us.” (Read Bakshi's entire essay here.)
This might happen in an elevator in an actual act of physicality. Or it might be more innocuously staged in a hotel room where a former Supreme Court judge tries to ply an intern with wine.
What the Tarun Tejpal scandal exposed was something we prefer not to think about. As Ruchir Joshi points out in an insightful essay for The Telegraph :
In our self-nosing, lefty liberal world, the unspoken assumption is that ‘attacking and raping women is what the other guys do’, the zamindar, the cop, the working-class men driven insane by oppressive factors, the lower middle-class daughter-defilers, the power-crazed politician, executive or tycoon, and, not least, the slimy, religious charlatans. We, of the Left-liberal world, are ‘new’ men, each and every Haridaspal of us.
But Joshi points out while many of us feel sanctimonious because we have never “forced” ourselves on someone, “too many of us, far too unthinkingly participate in a milieu where the kind of thing Tarun Tejpal is accused of is all too common.” The great social outrage over Tejpal and the nonstop furore on television shows was also an almost over-eager protestation of innocence on the part of everyone else as if to separate themselves from him, to deny, writes Bakshi “that what he really is is an ordinary man whose garden-variety disregard for consent caused him to take a grave liberty and respond to an accusation of assault with predictable disbelief and defensiveness.”
This spurt of high profile harassment and molestation cases has led to a lot of paranoia these days. Men will now have to police themselves, it is alleged, because every act of flirtation, every stray compliment will become punishable. "I am scared to talk to a woman these days. I don't even want to keep a woman secretary. Who knows, I might end up in jail because of a complaint. No, I am not blaming the girls, I am blaming society," said Farooq Abdullah.
Abdullah was rightfully lambasted. But it is challenging to try and frame the many confusing shades of human interaction inside a far more restrictive, yes-or-no legal framework.
Consent is not a traffic light clearly demarcated in red, amber and green. Nor is it as some have feared a legal document, a sort of contract that must be signed and notarized by both parties, as they proceed from base 1 to base 2 to base 3. And it is mutual. It’s not a one-way street as Bollywood films frequently depict it – women give, men take. Gay relationships also have to navigate the same terrain with even fewer cultural assigned roles of who gives consent and who takes it.
The key writes Bakshi is to understand that consent does not have to be “arranged lopsidedly around unwillingness”, to treat willingess as an active thing instead of something passive. Consent is not about proceed until stopped.
We are not going to get it right. We are human. But if we learn how to ask “Do you want” rather than think “I assume you want this because you didn’t say otherwise” we’d be a going a long way towards understanding the meaning of consent. But for that we’d also have to learn to treat our desires as something other than shameful.
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