In Kerala, women still need permission to compete

                                                 

                                                           

By Sangeeth Sebastian

Kerala takes a lot of pride in its progressive ways. The State’s upper-caste Hindu community, the Nairs, are matrilineal, meaning they bequeath their family home
to women, not men. Even as early as 1920s the State’s erstwhile royal family
of Travancore rewarded women who went to college with an invitation for tea at the palace. The State has one of the highest female literacy rates (92 per cent) in the entire country (only two-thirds of women can read and write in India).

Yet, all this empowerment has failed to bring about any change in the State’s patriarchal mindset which continues to regulate how a woman should conduct herself in public even now. Surprisingly, the proponents of the latest patriarchal drivel are not men, but a women’s magazine called Vanita dubbed as “India’s largest selling publication” for women.

                                                            

‘Photo Queen,’ a competition which the magazine runs for its young women readers insists on written parental permission complete with signatures as a pre-condition to participate in the contest from its adult contestants in the age group of 18 to 25 years. The winner will get her photograph featured, no not on the cover, but as a headshot in one of the opening pages of the magazine along with a brief description of the candidate’s interests and hobbies.
 “It’s a shame that a women’s magazine is spreading such a regressive attitude in this day and age,” says Pravathi Nair who works with an IT firm in Technopark, Thiruvananthapuram. “There is nothing wrong in informing your parents about participating in a competition, but asking adult women to get written permission first is like insulting their abilities to take independent decisions,” says Nair. “What if a woman is married? Will she have to get a written permission from her husband? ” asks Nair.

The moral policing mentality of Kerala’s media is nothing new. The recent “Kiss
of Love” protest which swept across the country was sparked by a State-based television channel after it aired what it claimed as exclusive footage of “immoral activity” (read dating) at a café in Kozhikode. The café was subsequently vandalised by right-wing Hindu groups.

Sahitya Akademi award winning writer Paul Zacharia blames this mentality on the “wrong religious doctrines and educational system” which the state has been following for ages. “It is the (religious) doctrines of Christians and Muslims that paved the way for moral policing culture in the State. Now, the Hindus, whose doctrines were more liberal, too have started sharing the ideas of Christians and Muslims,” he says.

By insisting on a written permission along with a participant’s bio-data as a mandatory criterion for the photo competition, the magazine ensures that its women contestants confirm to the State’s regressive patriarchal norms.

It may be well within the right of a magazine to decide how and on what basis it should allow women participants to take part in a competition which it conducts, but for a publication that advertises itself as a “friend and a guide” to women, the guidance Vanita offers to its readers is hardly a progressive one.

Women who like porn

                                                  

By Sangeeth Sebastian

It’s hard to imagine a subject with fewer intellectual or literary pretensions than porn. So why would women with such highbrow pedigree like Celin Shimizu, Constance Penley and Mireille Miller-Young, all of them professors at the University of California, U.S., take on something quiet so… unseemly?

The answer they offer through The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (The Feminist Press), jointly edited with Tristan Taormino, a feminist porn producer, is this: the sensational success of EL James’s mega-selling erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey (which will make its Hollywood debut next month) shows there is great demand among women for explicit sexual representations.

The book is meant as tribute to women who create and perform in porn but whose XXX fantasies are supposedly left out from the chauvinistic world of mainstream porn. The book contains personal accounts of reigning and yesteryear porn stars who have knowingly entered the industry to make women like them more visible (especially lesbians and people with disabilities) only to lament about its misogynistic and sexist ways and crave for an alternative narrative (not necessarily softer porn as women too like dirty stuff) that caters sensitively to the needs and desires of horny women.

Yes, it is a tricky attempt to segregate porn as something that can be liberating and empowering for women, if made the right way but downright degrading, if the recommended rules of production are ignored.

So what are the rules? (1) A woman had a hand in the production, writing, direction etc, of the work (2) It depicts genuine female pleasure and or (3) It expands the boundaries of sexual representation on film and challenges stereotypes that are often found in mainstream porn (or in other words devoid of the de rigueur money shot where a male partner ejaculates on the face of his female partner in the throes of ecstasy). The ground rules are borrowed from Feminist Porn Awards, an annual event held in Canada since 2006 to honour adult stars. For anti-porn activists, this delineation can seem as specious as Pakistan’s distinction between “good” Taliban and “bad” Taliban.

That’s because, writes Candida Royalle, a popular adult film star who pioneered the genre of erotic movies by and for women in the 1980’s “our society still can’t conceive that a relatively sane young woman would choose to go into sex work for any reason other than desperation.” Continues Royalle “sitting down to an interview, inevitably the first thing I’m asked is how I got into porn. I often get the sense that what they’d really like to ask me is “What a nice girl like you…?” she writes.

The attitude remains the same despite the crossover success of former porn stars including Sasha Grey and Sunny Leone. It is this perception of vulnerability and exploitation which Royalle and her fellow feminist porn enthusiasts aim to upend through their works termed as “ethical porn.”

The core philosophy of ethical porn is collaboration, according to Taormino, the porn producer. “Performers set their own pay rates and know up front what I am hiring them to do; there is absolute, explicit consent and no coercion of any kind,” she writes.

Yet for all its sex positive aphorisms and attempts to build a sub culture, the book doesn't offer much to critics who argue that the system itself is flawed or question whether the porn enthusiasts would willingly let their children pursue a career in porn.  Though India doesn't have an official porn industry to boast off, being a country that avidly consumes smut, I would have liked to see these issues addressed more in depth. May be that’s not the purpose of this book.