Recently a man was properly (and rightly) humiliated in a video that went viral when he tried to cop a feel on a flight. Kudos to the brave woman who found the courage to meet out a fit punishment. I hope it serves as a lesson to men everywhere in India (read: Delhi) and also as a primer for women everywhere as to how to tackle such situations. If nothing, I hope it cures the sorry man of his affliction to feel up strangers in public.
Sadly, it isn’t always possible to make such a tacit point. Most often the harassment is slight and almost passes unsuspected and instead of the dodgy men who make such passes, it is the women who end up feeling awkward about raising their voices. Their silence, sadly, only fuels the fire in these lascivious men. For if there is one quality that men of all shapes and sizes possess it is relentlessness, even in cases of self-consuming all-destroying redundant and inutile pursuits. Come to think of it, that doesn’t sound like much of a virtue. So let’s just call it a trait, one that all men are innately endowed with: the stubbornness of not giving up.
But, before we write it off completely, pigheadedness as a trait does provide some redemption; it has helped not just men but mankind advance a lot. In the field of science, Albert Einstein is famous for having said that even if you can only manage to come up with 99 bad ideas, if the 100th one is worth any good, then people immediately forget the hitherto failure. In the field of sports, many an achiever has borne testimony to how not giving up in the face of all odds helped them make it to their goal.
Unfortunately, the idea of not giving up in men doesn’t come equipped with the auxiliary sense of when to deploy this skill and consequently, it leads to some very unhealthy situations. The most common one, as mentioned above, is when a man refuses to take ‘no’ for an answer from a woman. Whether courting a girl out of amour true and lasting or just trying to score at the club, men can be persistent. In Greek mythology, the examples abound of how Gods sacrificed all, for a love denied. Even the wise King of Ceylon Ravana succumbed to his hard-as-a-rock yet fragile-like-glass ego and paid for it with his life, kingdom, reputation, et al. Mortals are then definitely more prone to such errors.
Women can work men like clockwork even when they are broken: the right keys turned, the buttons pushed. If somehow they can figure out the vector diagram to direct this putty-play in a manner that protects them from the unrelenting lewdness that is men, the world would be a safer, saner place. So the advice of the day is when a man pursues relentlessly and to the point when it stops being cute and ego-boosting and just turns into borderline stalker-like, it is time to deploy a strategic yet sugar-coated deflect. A callously spewed ‘No’ results in damage to a man’s ego which the next woman might have to suffer. Of course, she will refuse him too, but the disregard with which said turn-down is handed over pretty much paves the path for a raving, trigger-happy psychopath with a masochistic death wish.
Dear women, learn to let us men down gently. If all the men in the world took the Turing test, the result would resonate clear: we are all horrible creatures that civilisation overlooked. Being persuasive is a boon that is still left in us. If only we could grow a sense to know how to use it, we’d be a lot more useful to women and that is the biggest gold star that any guy expects to receive from his lady-master.
The writer is a lover of wine, song and everything fine
