MeToo and its small sacrifices

Aradhika Sharma

We’d ordered a celebratory lunch the other day just for fun. The condition was that before digging into the chop suey, sesame-chilly noodles and vegetables in hot-garlic sauce, everyone had to state their personal reason to celebrate the day.

Sabrina: I’m celebrating the festival season.

Shobha: I’m celebrating my new car.

Mandy: I’m celebrating that Section 377 has finally been decriminalised.

Me: I’m celebrating the success of the MeToo movement.

We helped ourselves and after the initial demands of the clamorous taste-buds had been sated, the talk began.

Sabrina: Vaise, they’re now saying that this MeToo business is going to have a severe backlash.

Me: Who is “they” and what do you mean a “backlash?”

Sabrina: Basically, there are conversations that men are being targeted about small misdemeanors and shamed for something that wasn’t even meant to be a transgression.

Me: Hmm… actually I find that a dangerous trend.

Shobha: Why? (Pass the soy sauce please!)

Mandy: It works on the premise that the woman must be the unreliable one here. So, the ploy is to discredit her testimony, claiming she never understood that she’s being harassed or ‘not’.

Me: What’s to misunderstand when a guy is making gross gestures or sending you lewd texts or cracking double-meaning jokes?

Sabrina: They’re also saying that the man- woman interactions are going to be completely sanitised and there can’t even be any fun flirtation between the sexes.

Me: The debate is, where does the ‘fun flirtation’ end and harassment begin? Is getting your butt slapped in good humour or being shown a supposedly funny sexual video ‘fun’?

Shobha: Well, we all do love to be complimented. What if women take offense to nice compliments and men stop giving them? Horrible thought.

Mandy: As if a woman can’t take a joke or tell the difference between a small miscalculation of touch by a man and that he’s a bloody predator.

Sabrina: All men aren’t predators. Many are fathers who’ve witnessed abuse in the workplace. They have loathed it.

Mandy: Just as all women aren’t victims.

Sabrina: True. The aim of the movement should be to shift the conversation from protecting the ‘poor, innocent guy’ to defending the actual victim.

Me: Men must realise that the power equation must be equalised, and everything must be done under the strictest consent of the woman, even his wife.

Mandy: And women must stop vying for male attention in a competitive way.

Shobha: (mournfully): If things carry on like this, no guys are going to flirt with us.

Sabrina: Yes! No man will sit next to us on planes.

Shobha: What it they prefer to change their sexuality?

Me: Oh! Don’t worry about that.

Mandy: Why?

Me: They’ll be too scared of the Kevin Spaceys of the world. No ifs and ‘butts’ about that!