By Deepa Majumdar
She was no more than ten. Given the muggy weather, it was normal that she wore a sleeveless dress. Upstairs, in her grandmother’s home … she was about to step into the front balcony. Her brother stood there in an undervest. Suddenly she faltered … “do not go … your arms are exposed,” her grandmother said. Scared, bewildered … the child retreated hastily. She was overcome with shame … shame for possessing the female body. She did not know of the glory of this same body … a generous body, with the powers of giving birth and feeding a child. She did not know that the ultimate purpose of the body is not procreation, but meditation … that the body is a tabernacle for the ascending soul. She did not know that male and female are ephemeral mental states, to be transcended in the journey of self knowing. For the highest divine universal Self has neither gender, nor age. It is incorporeal.
Young children are innocent in their bodies. They recognize gender differences from the way adults treat gender. They may play at “getting married” … but children are not directly aware of the carnal. If the western child’s over-exposure to the carnal is a problem, then so is the clandestine infusion of the carnal into the minds of children, when little girls are veiled in conservative societies. When I see little girls in Somalia … already veiled … I worry about their self image. I wonder if adult men understand that it is really they who are shamed by this practice. For, a veiled girl tells the world that adult men have dirty eyes … that in an act of cynical pragmatism and twisted morality, the objects of their lusts have been veiled and hidden. To curtail the natural freedom of a young girl, in the name of “modesty,” is a crime against humanity.
But it is not only Muslims who veil their women and girls. So do Hindus and so did Christians. I have heard of young Hindu daughters-in-law veiling their heads to show “respect” to lecherous old fathers-in-law. The problem here is twofold. First, the young women do not always have a choice. Second, the objects of their “respect” are not worthy of anybody’s respect. Therefore the hidebound Hindu family, in its degraded form, needs thorough inspection … all the more in the wake of the horrific rape and death of young “Nirbhaya” in Delhi in December 2012 … and the rash of rapes around the nation … Indian intellectuals have started this introspection. But the enlightened form of the Hindu family is a stable institution, rooted in solid foundations of universal family values. To play with this institution of marriage (in its various forms worldwide), in the name of a misguided liberty, is to play with fire.
Our bodies are sacred vestibules of privacy. They are our own … to be controlled by ourselves. Besides this self- censorship and a culture of wisdom and ascetic norms to educate the individual, nobody … certainly not the government … not society … not even the family or parents can or should police the individual’s body. Nobody should inspect a woman for virginity (the “finger test” in Egypt and other places, including India) … all the more when she reports a rape. Indeed, the masculine carnal politics of “modesty” … a sordid politics of the hymen … have lead to bizarre patriarchal contortions of true chastity. To “preserve” their virginity, women have undergone revirgination surgeries. The politics of virginity, like the politics of the afterlife (as in jihadists’ fantasies of heavens filled with black-eyed virgins, etc.) … can be sugar coated expressions of masculine lust.
The terrible Goliath-David asymmetry between the west and the Islamist world … with the hi-tech war and drone attacks on one side, and religious extremism and terrorism against the west on the other side … may be interpreted, on its underbelly, as the clash between hedonism and puritanism. Abu Ghraib prison symbolized the peak of this clash … when members of the US army and other US governmental agencies tortured and abused Iraqi prisoners in the post-invasion period. Their torture had a ghastly carnal aspect. Indeed, the west showed its most pernicious face at Abu Ghraib. In western society, other problems caused by limitless body consciousness and licentiousness include the alarming frequency of rape, domestic violence, pedophilia … in general, the breakdown of the western family and the death of non-carnal friendship and hospitality. Thus the damages caused by reckless hedonism are obvious. But so are the damages caused by grim puritanism. In 2010, the Taliban stoned to death an Afghan couple accused of having an alleged love affair. To forcibly veil a woman … at that in a polygyny, where women have few marital or property rights … where women rape survivors are held culpable, imprisoned for adultery, flogged … all this reaches well beyond gender to a breach of human rights. Sadly, this extreme hypocrisy, an expression of virulent masculine lust, is usually disguised as “virtue.” There is something very cruel about demanding modesty … at that a warped version … from women in puritanical patriarchal societies. The same is true of cruel forms of homophobia.
In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle speaks of each moral virtue as being an average … flanked by two vices … one, a qualitative excess to the virtue … the other, a qualitative deficit. Thus, the moral virtue of courage is flanked by its two corresponding vices –rashness and cowardice. Reasonable standards of modesty and uncompromising chastity are, I believe, perennial, universal virtues, in both men and women. Applying Aristotle’s schema, the moral virtue of chastity could be flanked by the corresponding vices of hedonism on the excess side, and puritanism on the deficit side. The two extremes are uncannily similar. If corporeal hedonism leads to pornography, then puritanism leads to the reverse pornography entailed in coerced veiling. Both harm women. And yet, of the two, puritanism is perhaps more dangerous … for unlike hedonism, puritanism is usually coerced on women. Moreover, puritanism is inexpedient … it does not remove, but merely conceals carnal lust. Often expressed in sanctimonious, sexist tones … puritanism comes with hidden lusts and virulent hatred towards romantic love. Caused by half baked, inadequate chastity, puritanism is usually accompanied by hatred against the object of lust … sometimes women, sometimes little girls. Hence the old wisdom … half hearted chastity is no chastity. But then … what is true chastity and should it ever be coerced?
True chastity can never come from the exterior veil alone … nor from suffocating forms of incarceration of the female child … nor from the institution of marriage by itself. In fact the relationship between marriage and modesty is mutual. On the one hand, the very fate of marriage depends on the degree of modesty practiced by husband and wife, for no marriage can last if the two are not chaste enough to be faithful. On the other hand, the nuptial vows themselves sublimate, to a degree, the raw carnal sense … so that an ideal marriage becomes a form of celibacy. The appetites in general are bridge-like … in most people, they are to be sated to some extent … they turn virulent, when suppressed … they therefore cannot be overcome through coercion. And yet, no society can be functional unless the appetites are overcome (not bridled). The only way to do so is to sublimate them, by turning them towards something higher. One of the most significant and effective ways of sublimating the carnal is through romance and marriage. The act of falling in love, uplifts the raw carnal impulse, giving it an ethical hue. Marriage, which possesses the potential to achieve this sublimation, in turn, requires as a basic prerequisite, a prior sublimation of the carnal sense. In my youth, young women prepared themselves for marriage and motherhood, through prayers, fasts, etc. In my mother’s generation women defined good men as those with self-control. And yet, all the spiritual practices put together will not sublimate this raw carnal force, if one does not attain through them, or by other means, a sense of social justice. For true chastity expresses itself as a microscopic, subtle sense of justice, attuned to the individual.
It is this aspect of chastity that is, I believe, attained, through the practice of objective, ethical forms of feminism. A feminist quest for justice, when rooted in Truth, confers chastity on the soul. Feminism protects women from the masculine lust hidden in patriarchal prejudices and practices … Thus feminism, which in the west has fought against all subjective forms of essentialism, comes with its own essence … this all defining hallmark being the perennial and highest virtue of true chastity, so caricatured in acts of puritanism.