Why Mallu male is a perfect sexual aggressor

                                        

By Sangeeth Sebastian

Perhaps, the biggest irony of Kerala’s ‘Kiss of Love’ protest on Sunday, organised by a bunch of youngsters against moral policing, was how the protesters themselves turned out to be a victim of one.

The group had intended to kiss and hug in public as a mark of protest against vandalising a coffee shop in Kozhikode, by members of a right wing Hindu group, who claimed the shop had doubled up as a dating spot.

But even before the proposed demonstration could take off, the police arrested the group and whisked them away to a police station citing possible law and order crisis their 'unusual' mode of agitation could entail.

The campaign which ‘Kiss of Love’ organisers launched through social media sites had received overwhelming response from across the country and abroad (the group’s Facebook page had received 66,774 likes till Sunday).

Though the police had denied permission for the protest, with the Kerala high court refusing to interfere in the event, the feeling was that the protest would take place. Besides, the State government too had assured that action would be taken against the organisers only in the event of any ‘illegal activities.’

Yet, in a State with a history of pathological aversion towards any public mixing of sexes, other than those within the patriarchal institution of marriage, such deceptive assurances should have been taken with more than a table spoon of salt.

After all, this is the very same State where even married couples, at times, have to justify their status to be in public together to rank strangers. (One of the first things my dad advised when I revealed my plan to go on a honeymoon in Kerala was to carry my marriage certificate with me.)

This made what the organisers of ‘Kiss of Love’ did, subversive, as it was a protest that required men and women to share a public space for reasons other than those defined and approved by the State’s patriarchy.

It is this subversive appeal which the campaign generated that drew an overwhelming number of male onlookers to the protest venue on Sunday evening with voyeuristic anticipation.

Not surprising then that the campaign, which received an effusive response from a huge number of women during its online phase saw very little participation on the ground. Which sensible woman would want to be leered at in such a male dominated space even if there is a compelling desire to be a part of the event?

In fact harassment against women in crowded places in Kerala has a lingo of its own: Jackiveyppe. It is a practise by which men position behind women in such a way that their crotch grinds against the arse of an unsuspecting female in front. If I were a woman I would be the first to stay away from a situation like that.

What actually leads to this situation, among many other factors, is the State’s rigorous gender segregation rules, which begin from kindergarten, at least in some schools (the PTA of a government school in Kerala’s Northern district of Malappuram stalled nursery classes after children belonging to the opposite sex were allowed to share the same bench in class) and continues through college and into public life in the form of segregated seats in buses, women-only autorickshaws, separate queues at ticket counters and segregated workout spaces and timings in gyms, all of which have rendered any meaningful interaction with women impossible.

Bharatmata, a college in Kochi, even went to the extent of installing a vertical iron grill (that runs from the floor to the roof) as barrier inside its college bus to keep boys away from girls. Mar Ivanios, another coed college in Thiruvananthapuram had designated campus guards known as “romance killers” to snuff out any stirrings of romantic expressions on campus and also for chasing out couples who wander the campus in search of a private space. Dating, a term synonymous with college campuses in North India is an alien concept to teenagers in Kerala. The only dates they know is of the edible variety. For many, a chance to enter into a relationship or explore their sexuality outside marriage, without fear or social opprobrium exists only when they move out of the state to more liberal and cosmopolitan cities such as Bangalore or Delhi. The unlucky ones who end up in the State, as Jananpith award winning Malayalam writer M.T. Vasudevan Nair says, takes to drinking liquor with a vengeance to drown his libido. (No wonder Kerala has one of the highest per capita consumption rates for booze in the entire country.) All of this makes a Mallu man an ideal candidate for sexually harassing a woman in the street because that is where his only interaction with women takes place.

By denying a bunch of youngsters their democratic right to protest in the name of maintaining law and order on Sunday and allowing a free run to the disrupters (right wing Hindu and Muslim groups that promote a Saudi Arabian strand of Islam in an otherwise secular state), to dare and intimidate the sympathisers of the campaign, the State has only served to tighten the lid on repression further.