#BAREMINIMUM
Being the designated listener among my friends, I was used to the daily chatter of who breaks up with whom, why the love doesn’t feel like love anymore and the usual “I don’t think he takes me seriously”. Inundated with relationship problems, I was casually texting my friend who feared breaking up with her boyfriend because the guilt was proportionally higher than the freedom that she might feel. She wasn’t being able to develop mutual feelings towards him and yet chickened out every time she tried to speak to him in all honesty. As a passive spectator to their pubescent love, I witnessed best friends turning into lovers and it was all giddy for a while until she grew tired of keeping up with a relationship that implicitly lacked compatibility. I lazily scrolled down her array of texts while scribbling down a few notes as the teacher droned on for the next two hours. And just as I was giving in to the silent call of the sweet classroom sleep, I jerked my eyes open because it struck me that what inherently must be a friendly emotional unburdening for her sounded a lot like victim blaming. She constantly blamed herself for not reciprocating the same feelings towards her partner and was also apprehensive of losing the kind, loving and unconditionally nurturing human that he was. He wasn’t a toxic; I had to give her that. A nineteen year old who did not gaslight young women into sexual and academic favours sounded like the better bargain. He was willing to give her space, not call her on days she didn’t want to talk, secretly slipped her favourite chocolate into her bag during Tiffin breaks; he was for a lack of better word, wholesome. When my friend was wallowing in guilt for even thinking about leaving this seemingly perfect sample of a human being, she missed the part where he wasn’t really being extraordinary but was just doing what well, humans are supposed to do. The expectation from boyfriends are so low that when a boy comes along who doesn’t beat you up or forces you or just treats you as a human, we are predisposed to just raise our hands and praise the lord because what a miracle!
Pursuing gender studies for quite a while made me conscious of the implicit indoctrination of the male archetypes that happens all around us, all the time. What I realised through my fourteen years of schooling is that small cities like mine inherently placed boys into two major archetypes: (a) The virtuous, academically fervent one (b) the diabolical, imprudent one. Women are taught to be vulnerable, fragile beings that would one day seek male validation and serve him in all capacities. This indoctrination is jarringly visible in adolescent young girls who seek the same male attention in an attempt to assimilate into a culture that endures a very unequal power dynamic. Children in the age cohort of 13–18 years are unaware of this socially perpetuated dualism of gendered power and they unconsciously reinforce patriarchal instincts.
Even before I knew what the psychosexual stages of development are, I could notice changes in me and everybody around me. Guys were getting beards and girls started experimenting with fancier bras. Everyone around me started to date and just like that, without any warning, we weren’t kids anymore. But interestingly, I also saw a new change wherein there was a systemic increasing in gas lighting of young girls. I didn’t know what to call this phenomenon back then but I knew my friends and juniors were being manipulated by their boyfriends to the extent that they consciously started to make changes in their personality. Standard 9 to12th was a cesspool of power politics and privilege games that pitted the powerful against the powerless in such blatant, incorrigible manner that I used to squirm at the thought of attending school. Where there is power, there is also the potential abuse of power. Right from the latency stage to the genital stage, children are caught between the realm of academic accomplishment, peer acceptance and sexuality. There is a terrible and painful irony in even realising that the naivety of the young girls striving so hard for inclusivity and representation is used rather conveniently by male peers to self sanction inappropriate ‘friendly hugs’ and to make sexual advances in dingy corridors. These girls are too young to even understand inappropriate sexual advances let alone defend themselves in the face of it. And even if they did understand what was happening, they would continue to conform to it in a dire need for assimilation. Gas lighting them was like shooting goldfish in a barrel.
Gas lighting is an emotional abuse of a person into internalizing their incapacity to hold the right judgements and worldview. The term “gaslighting” actually comes from a 1938 play, “Gas Light” (which was turned into a more widely known movie in 1944, “Gaslight”), where a husband manipulates his wife to make her think she’s actually losing her sense of reality so he can commit her to a mental institution and steal her inheritance. We as high school students were made to live this bald-faced lie of assimilation and the security of friendship hidden in the garb of exploitation and bullying. It’s almost funny how we move out to different cities and find our peace only to reunite with old companions in a sullen little cafe reliving the same toxicity which had by then become anecdotes of our past. It is gut-punchingly tormenting to realise that male ego can be so fragile that the sight of a past lover happily moving on and exploring her sexuality can be so discomforting that he chooses to slut shame her in front of mutual peers; it is tormenting to know that my friend used to get calls from her ‘closest buddies’ at one in the night harassing her for kissing a boy in her junior college. It is tormenting to know that the sight of two consensual adults kissing can be so unsettling for people. I have witnessed toxic boyfriends who dictate their girlfriend’s lives. It is ridiculous how these talented, intelligent women adore these fascist brutes. They decide who their girlfriend can hang out with, they decide if it’s okay for her to engage in any friendly interactions with her male peers, they decide if her dress is too slutty, they decide if she should be talking to certain people on social media.
What most people failed to notice or chose to not see was this toxic culture of sexual exploitation that was being indoctrinated into the male psyche from a very young age. There is a dearth of sexual education in India and there is no scope for any sexual awareness in school or at home. My parents weren’t obstinately orthodox or conservative but the conversations around sexuality were always buried under the carpet. I cannot believe that we still don’t talk about sex, power, gender discrimination, bullying, mental health and such in school because we must talk about them and now more than ever to protect these young girls and boys from exploitation and mental health problems that would inevitably stalk them for years to come.
It’s extremely hard for me to keep writing this article because this is almost like re-living my worst nightmare but I believe one voice is enough to start conversations and I choose to be that voice. Technology has shielded perpetrators and technology has created survivors. I choose to side with the survivors. You and I made it through, doesn’t mean everybody will. Silently letting this happen is endorsing a culture of power politics and emotional abuse. It was time I called out this high school fascism; the toxic masculinity and its generality. We collectively have to do better than this. We collectively have to persist in our struggle for emancipation and about education and personal growth and not moral policing or slut shaming. High schools should be a pilgrimage and not a child’s worst nightmare.
