ER AUSCHWITZ ?
feminazis . Male entitlement speaks out of fear — of loss of pervasive , silent privilege .
like many who supported the LoSHA , he und er s t ands that it is not just institutions or cognisable breaches of the law which are at stake , but sexual cultures as such . These are cultures in which notions he extols —‘ romance ’, ‘ flirtation ’, ‘ mutuality ’, ‘ inn oc ence ’, ‘ intimacy ’, ‘ joy , ‘ desire ’ and ‘ beauty ’— play out . But these are obviously not neutral concepts : they are shaped by society and , at the present time , by cultural formations which heavily advantage heteros exual men , particularly when such men also wield institutional authority . To make this claim is not to ‘ essentialise ’ but precisely to historicise . It is astonishing to me that any cultural critic could overlook this or possibly imagine that ‘ the nor m ative ’ is a zone free of
Illustrations by SAJITH KUMAR
One symptom of patriarchal arrogance is that it can legitimise itself through a string of grand assertions . power . Yet , the pretence that it is so inflects a cringe-worthy lament for a time when the ‘ manwoman relationship ’ ( unap petising phrase , meaning , presumably , heterosexual coupledom ) ‘ had a sense of celebration , of tolerance and humour ’.
This is an old plaint : that women who seek to hold men accountable for their abusive and predatory behaviours are in danger of destroying joy and beauty . Aesthetics is victimised by politics . This is a standard accusation faced by those who have supported the # MeToo movement in the West — where women , and some men — have gone public about a range of abusive sexual behaviours by powerful men . Charged with sexual misconduct with a less than fully willing student in J . M . Coetzee ’ s famous novel Disgrace , the defiant protagonist , David Lurie , makes only one assertion : ‘ Suffice it to say that Eros entered .’ This assertion , it seems , suffices for Visvanathan too as he charges younger feminists with peddling ‘ packaged discourse ’ and ideologies ; his own ostensibly more evolved preference is for a ‘ laboratory ’ of ‘ man-woman relationships ’ which allows for ambivalences . Sounds lovely . Surely only ‘ puritanical ’ killjoys are against experimentation and ‘ utopian romanticism ’.
It turns out that anyone who asks questions about the protocols used in the laboratory of romance and reciprocity — who suffers when ‘ experiments ’ go wrong , for instance ?— is not just a killjoy but an active totalitarian . A symptom of patriarchal arrogance is that it need not offer an argument but can legi timise itself through a string of grand assertions . Visvanathan does not leave one overblown or lazy metaphor unused in making his histrionic main claim — that ‘ political correctness ’ victimises men . Gulags , kangaroo courts , Stalinism , Naxalbari , ‘ Pavlovian worlds ’, ‘ voyeuristic lynch mobs ’, panopticons , misandry or hatred for males — only the Holocaust is absent from this list of oppressions infli cted by young feminists ( feminazis ?) on male inno cence . For one Google document ( the LoSHA ), that is a truly impressive acco mplishment .
Here is the divide in a nutshell , familiar from the arguments around # MeToo as well . Visvanathan represents those who wish to retain a cultural status quo where there is great latitude for straight male
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