In Which I Am Disappointed

Annie Zaidi has finally lost it. There goes one of the few hopes I had from the feminist side of affairs.

I think that men have a right to 'look' if we happen to be in their line of vision. But they do not have a right to assume that a woman is available (even if she is stark naked), or open to insults, or that she will appreciate their admiration and attention. Unwelcome attention will simply provoke defensive-aggressive behaviour. And every woman has the right to define her own boundaries of (un)acceptable behaviour, and to defend those boundaries as she sees fit.

Indeed. And every man has the right to blow off the head of any other guy who calls him a prick. As also the duty to divine the limits of acceptable behavious for any woman he might see anywhere. There is no need for any kind of consensus on this - on differentiating between name calling, lewd comments and groping. No, it must be absolutely left to each individual. And a man has the right to look only in his "line of vision". Incidentally, all people , at all times, look only in their line of vision. Or is she suggesting that a man's "line of vision" be static?

It had been happening for some time. Ever since the attempts to replicate Arundhati Roy in form and content started happening. One-word paragraphs. Stream-of-consciousness images. I kept reading her - because she knows the heartland, because she writes about things people don't bother about. But this ??

Apologies to the sisters I offended by my opinions earlier. I stand corrected, and wiser.

References to "sisters" should be disallowed unless you're Beyonce in a hot music video. (Lil Kim would do too, it's just that she doesn't make any music worth tolerating even for the video.)

Aman feels this one is a great blogger. I've read her - erudite but far too biased. And, over-reliant on the term "dehumanizing". As well as on caricatures of typical desi grad students who have probably stopped existing outside of low-budget NRI movies. She finds the concept and the activity of strip clubs "dehumanizing". My thought process about this is -

1) Even if one doesn't know the term "dehumanizing", everyone has an instinctive understanding of what counts as "dehumanizing". The fact that strippers prefer stripping to some other profession they could have gone into says something(I am not talking about those who are being forced to do anything against their wishes - that is coercion and is a crime under every legal system in the world).

2) A stripper may then choose stripping to one or more of the following reasons - a) she enjoys that b) it makes her good money, or c) it makes her a moderate amount of money but she doesn't have the skills to make better money elsewhere. Case a is a no-brainer. Case b and c imply that the stripper chooses the option of getting touched by unknown men over choosing poverty. Which is to say that in her value system, poverty is more dehumanizing than random male contact. Why should anyone call a strip-club dehumanizing then?

Random plugging - Aman has begun writing. Have you checked him out yet? Crisp style, intelligent humour, tangy opinions. I likes.