So, this is going to be a hard thing to write about. Not because it is a hard thing to understand, but because it is a hard thing to make sense of.
Okay, but wait. Why should anyone care about what I have to say about consent? I am a cis-gendered, heterosexual man. I have been married for five years and have been in a committed relationship for 15!
But maybe that's exactly why I must think out loud about this. Not because I'm the right man to introspect about consent, but because every man should introspect about consent.
It's been a few years since the #MeToo revolution, a hundred years since women were given equal rights in India, and thousands of years since civilization began. And yet, consent is still contentious.
It's not that men don't 'get' consent: try taking away even a piece of paper from a man without asking, and he will tell you exactly what consent is. But when it comes to sexual consent, where should one begin the conversation?
Should the starting point be the latest Bollywood film, where the 'hero' stalks the 'heroine' after she repeatedly says 'no', in the garb of 'love'?
Or should it be those who publish private pictures of others online? Or the daily court cases that argue about whether it can be called 'rape' if it happens in the garb of 'marriage'?
Or the anecdotal pain of a friend who tells you about another friend, who assumed that 'it was just a kiss'? Or about the many times our loved one was 'accidentally touched' in public? Or should I spend this entire piece on writing about why no woman wants an unsolicited pic?
Agency: An Origin Story of Consent
Breach of consent happens in so many ways, every single day, that every one of them requires serious contemplation, conversation, and consequence.
Yes, consent is breached across all genders, but it is disproportionate and alarming when it comes to women and people of marginalised genders.
Look at any data points around sexual violence or intimate partner violence.
The National Family Health Survey-5 shows that women face violence in the relationship/marriage is often normalized by society and you'll have the terrifying realisation that:
It's not just that men don't understand ''no' means 'no'', it would seem that most of us believe 'nothing being said means “yes''.
There is a case to make about every one of the external factors that leads to this. Growing up as an Indian millennial, I remember the pressure of being seen as a (cis-hetero) 'man' as being synonymous with being able to claim that you have ‘hooked up’ with a woman.
Where every young woman who had sex was shamed as a 'sl*t', every young man who had sex was lauded as a 'player'.
Most pop songs, almost every Indian film, and enough Indian ads celebrated the 'boys will be boys' culture as being cool, casual, and comfy with your lust for 'hot' women.
There was never a healthy way to think of or talk about women, and the case to be made about our own homes is even stronger.
In most of our patriarchal homes, there was never such a thing as 'agency' for anyone outside of our fathers (before boys benefitted from patriarchy, even though they are victims of it), but it was specifically not a luxury accorded to women.
For centuries, every boy in India has been conditioned to think that a girl in India is born a 'daughter' and 'sister', after which she lives as a 'wife', and eventually, dies as a 'mother'. The uncomfortable truth is that a woman's agencies are first taken away in our homes before any other man disrespects it outside; because as a 'woman', she is rarely seen as a 'person', as being a person is a privilege afforded to those with power, or patriarchy, on their side.
In between all these societal roles, she isn't even a person, but an 'object'.
She isn't a person at home when she is asked to keep herself covered in front of relatives. She isn't a person in school when she is told that she should wear longer skirts, because her 'knees are showing'. She isn't a person in public when she is constantly eve-teased and chased, stalked and harassed.
The tragedy is that when women are reduced to being 'objects' in the minds of men, we begin to see them as 'conquests' for sexual gratification. And so much of the violence perpetrated by men can be traced to women further being seen as 'rewards' owed to us by society.. for being men.
When I look back at my own life, I can't claim to have always thought of women beyond what I was conditioned to see them as. I can't claim that growing up, I always removed myself from conversations where boys objectified women.
It's not easy for me to acknowledge that I can't claim to have been a boy who knew better, but this is a necessary discomfort I must grapple with for my journey to be a man who does better.
Because it doesn't matter if you have mostly done the right thing as a man, it matters that if, for the one time you didn't, you need to know about it, confront it, acknowledge it, and then do better.
Listen, Learn & (Un)learn
Gen Z is already doing so much better than the previous generations in starting difficult conversations about consent. According to a recent survey by Tinder-YouGov close to 7 in 10 young adults believe that consent should be discussed more openly with partners and even taught formally in schools and colleges, and almost 65 percent have taken steps to personally understand the concept of consent.
The reason they do so is that they speak up and speak out, and they recognise that discomfort is actually the starting point for change. As men, to acknowledge consent in a romantic setting, we must first acknowledge the agency of women in any setting, and in every setting.
Then, we must listen, even if it makes us uncomfortable (and often, especially if it does). Listem to what our partner's boundaries are, to what they think about consent, to what consent means to them, to any time their consent was breached, and to how we can create safer - and sexier - spaces, with mutual consent.
And for those of us who don't have partners, we must put in the work, to learn and to unlearn.
To do that, we need to recognise that it is not the duty of anyone else to teach us, but our responsibility to teach ourselves. Because we can either be the men who complain 'not all men misunderstand consent', or we can be the men who do better by our partners, in doing our best to understand consent. And that may be a hard thing to write about, but an easy thing to do.
(Nikhil Taneja is the CEO and Co-Founder of Yuvaa, a youth organization researching and creating conversations around mental health and gender. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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