Can Power Feminism talk to Power Machismo?

When India Today sent me the invitation to speak at this distinguished gathering, I was thrilled. Then I saw the title. "Can power feminism talk to power machismo?"
"Which one am I supposed to be?" I wrote back.
I don't know where the editors of India Today got the idea that I'm supposed to be the emblem of power machismo. I'm Gujarati, for god's sake. My sisters haven't stopped laughing for weeks. It's true that I eat raw habanero chilies, but that's about the extent of my machismo.
"What would you do if there was a war between India and America? Who would you fight for?" an Indian in England once asked me.
"He would hide under the bed," my then partner replied.

Perhaps someone got the idea, after reading my book, 'Maximum City', that I'm a tough guy because I hung out with the tough guys in Bombay - the tough cops, the gangsters, the political thugs. Well, the toughest people I met in Bombay weren't men. They were the dance bar girls, the bindass Bombabes who took the world and its sleazy and lovesick men on with confidence, with good humor, and survived. In Bombay, the bar girls used to dance fully clothed, on a stage to Hindi film music, while men came to throw money at them and fall in love.

There was no touching allowed in the bars. The men came to the bars not so much for lust as for love; in the big anonymous city, the bar girls' most favored body part was their ear. They earned the men's love by listening: to their problems with their wives, their bosses; to the small and epic adventures of their metropolitan lives.
The dance girls, and the other women of the shadows, can only earn a living in a world where men and women have stopped talking to each other. They're too scared. The men, especially. Exactly how do you make a pass these days at a lady you're fond of? Do you send her a note? Do you try to kiss her? Do your hire a plane to write words of love in the sky? Does your lawyer send a letter to her lawyer? Do you pull her hair? Do you invite yourself back to her room to critique her poems? Or do you expect her to make the first move?

She might well make the first move. In cities like New York - and increasingly, in Bombay and Delhi - there are huge imbalances of single women to single men. The chances of a single woman in her thirties finding a husband are, according to Newsweek, lower than her chances of being hit by lightning or being killed by a terrorist. The statistic has since been discredited, but when it came out, it threw women in a panic - and not just in America. I remember a woman in Bombay telling me about that study, in explanation for why she had married a much older man, one who often shouted at her in public. "At least I'm not out there scoping every night." There is a kernel of truth to the study; cities like New York, or Bombay, attract a disproportionate amount of young women, who come to work in industries like media and advertising. Their parents aren't there to introduce them to eligible young men. They have to find one themselves.

But post-feminist men are in an uneasy position. We can't look to our fathers for guides to how we interact with women today. We're not sole providers anymore; it's equally likely that a woman will put food on the table, and expect her man to chop and cook it. We're expected to have an equal share in parenting, but the courts are stacked against men in most custody disputes. There's an epidemic in the developed countries, of children growing up without fathers. Even in the conservative Catholic country of Chile, for example, 60% of the babies born last year were born out of wedlock. Somehow the west has convinced itself that fathers are dispensable. This is where the otherwise objectionable Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March, in which he convinced one million black men to make a pledge to be responsible fathers, is a real milestone.

The truth is that when men talk among themselves, it's different from when men talk to women. Just look at the lad's magazines - Maxim, FHM, and their ilk. They cover topics of vital masculine interest, such as how to get your girlfriend to agree to a threesome. And they're all now opening Indian editions. Consider the fact that the porn film industry earns more money every year than Hollywood. Modern men are not kind about women when they are talking with other men.

So how do we bridge the divide?

Much of the world views feminists with suspicion. They see people fighting for women's rights as an extension of Bush's crusade against Islam. When these feminists talk of women in developing countries, they often view them as victims. Well, the fact is that India has twice elected female prime ministers, while the US has yet to elect even a vice president who's a woman. In matters political, at least, India has done something right in the 60 years since independence. In a country which is 82% Hindu, we have a Sikh prime minister, a Muslim president, and an Italian Catholic widow as leader of the governing coalition - and nobody bats an eyelid. 'Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam' now also means 'Vasudhaiva Government'. Not only are the peoples of all nations one family, they are all invited to rule India. So Indians have a right to wonder: who the hell are these Westerners, to preach to us about how we should treat our minorities or women?

But the Westerners are also partly right. Last year, five thousand women were burnt alive because their families couldn't give the dowry their husbands' families demanded. In the last century, fifty million Indian girls were aborted or killed immediately after birth, for the simple crime of being female. More than half of all Indian women are illiterate, compared to a third of Indian men. These are issues where men and women can should not just be talking together but fighting together. You don't have to use the 'f-word' - you don't have to be a feminist to see that a man beating a woman because her father hasn't come through with the dowry, or a woman earning half the wage for the same amount of work as a man, is just wrong. You don't have to be a feminist; you just have to be human. Humanism could replace feminism and whatever its converse is - machoism? Masochism?

Shortly after India Today invited me to represent power machismo, the feminist playwright Eve Ensler invited me to write a monologue for V-Day this June, to fight violence against women. I accepted, because I love women. I came out of one. And because there are truly violent things happening against women in the world today. Under the Taliban, women whose ankles showed under their burkhas were whipped by the religious police. In Pakistan, there's an epidemic of honor killings.Every day, little girls are brought from the hills of Nepal to the brothels of Bombay to be raped for the rest of their working lives. Their numbers swelled considerably when last year, the Maharashtra government passed a colossally stupid law, outlawing the dance bars, and throwing fifty thousand bar girls out of work, without any provision for their rehabilitation. The macho men in the Maharashtra government think of them as criminals, or worse, as victims. They sit smug in their government seats, and decide what's moral and what's not. I have myself seen several of them throwing money in the same dance bars they are now banning. The girls are now out on the street, or in dingy rooms, on their backs, working in another way. "After each earner there are fifty eaters," the bar girls told me. Each one of them supported entire networks of extended families in the villages they had left. The dance bar girls are, in my book, not victims. They're heroines.

What's happening in India today is not the same thing as what happened in America in the '60's and '70s. Indian men and women don't have to follow the American example. We don't have to be that polarized; we don't have to be power feminists or machistas. We have our own understanding of each other, which is complex and subtle, and time-tested. Otherwise there wouldn't be one billion of us. Unlike the advanced countries, Indians have no problems making babies; our population pyramid is very broad at the bottom. We don't have to be the India of the Manusmriti, but we don't need to turn into the America of 'Sex and the City', either.

The modern urban Indian woman doesn't need anybody to fight on her behalf. She's perfectly capable of taking on the world on her own. The middle-class women that I know in Delhi and Bombay are powerful, resolute, and successful. They have the love of extended families, and are far more comfortable with fathers and brothers than most of the women I've seen elsewhere. Indian women like their men. They even love some of them. And if a man expresses interest in them, they know how to handle it; they know how to say no and they know how to say yes. If their boss makes a pass at them, they are perfectly capable of kicking him in the balls; if he then denies them a raise, they know how to sue him, and win.

The new Indian metropolis is a province of unimaginable change, in an unimaginably rapid time. How on earth, for example, is a traditional Brahmin supposed to practice untouchability in a Bombay local train at rush hour? The metropolis erases caste and gender lines, and upends traditions. I have been to beauty contests in the Bombay slums where grandmothers approvingly watch their granddaughters prance around an improvised stage in swimsuits. I know of successful executive men in the same city who've given up the rat race to raise kids while their wives go out and work.

There's a radical difference, of course, between urban Indian women and women in the villages, who are in much more solidly defined sex roles. But we can't just look at the Indian village as a province of superstition, discrimination, and illiteracy. This is the culture that has sustained the world's oldest continuing civilization; there must be something of real value, to both women and men, for it to have lasted so long. I am thinking now of the marriage of my grandparents and parents, both 'arranged' marriages. They are among the happiest marriages I have ever seen, although not quite 'equal' in the western sense. My grandfather ran his jewelry business on the first floor of an old Calcutta building, and my grandmother stayed home on the third floor and cooked and raised six children. As was the custom, not once, in their lifetime, did they say out loud each others' names, but they had no problems talking to each other; shouting, whispering, cajoling, threatening, pleading, singing. They never needed to step out of their roles; they never felt any need to stop becoming man and woman. My grandmother loved my grandfather not in spite, but *because* he was a man, and she liked taking care of him. She knew what he wanted to eat before he even realized he was hungry for it. And my grandfather always loved the pretty girl in my grandmother, the girl he got betrothed to when she was thirteen. Her beauty was no myth for him; he was exalted by it every day. When my grandmother passed away, in her eighties, my grandfather had no more wish to remain on earth. "Your Ba is waiting for me," he kept saying, and followed her in under a year of her passing.

Could such a marriage work in today's India? I doubt it. We have to establish a new paradigm, a new way for men and women not just to be each with each other in a lifetime's union, but just to observe the everyday courtesies. No modern woman has time to serve her man three meals a day, as my grandmother did; she rightfully expects that he will serve her at least one of them.

We will also never understand men and women until we understand the hypnotic power of lust, and its role in furthering the human species. As Walt Whitman wrote, "It is not you alone who know what it is to be evil/ I am he who knew what it was to be evil/ I too knitted the old knot of contrariety/ Blabb'd, blush'd, resented, lied, stole, grudg'd/ had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak… The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me/ The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting." No subject is as fraught with necessary deception as this one. We lie about it all the time; we lie about it to each other and to ourselves.

We seek out different people for different needs: sex, companionship, money, good breeding stock. The difference between men and women is starkly illustrated by the difference between male and female homosexuals. Most gay men are casually and guiltlessly promiscuous; it is a basic serving of sexual need. Lesbians, on the other hand, tend to pair-bond, nest, seek lifetime nurturing relationships with one person. Yes, there is a difference between male and female attitudes to sex and monogamy, and it's about bloody time we were honest about it.

It is the epic hidden story of the good and the great. It is the president of the most powerful country in the world groping a 21 year old intern. It is princes, presidents, dictators unable to come out with their homosexuality or marry the people they really want to be with. It is our search for love, far more confused and ineffective than our search for wealth or security. And here, the real experts aren't not doctors or sociologists or psychologists or self-help gurus or talk-show hosts. They are poets and novelists; this is their core competency. They understand love like nobody else. As Faiz Ahmed Faiz said, "The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved."

The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke has provided what is, to me, the best guide to how men and women can talk to each other, in his immortal book 'Letters to a Young Poet'. He advises young men and women not to throw themselves at each other, not to lose themselves in a love "out of which nothing more can come; nothing but a bit of disgust, disappointment, and poverty, and the escape into one of the many conventions that have been put up in great numbers like public shelters on this most dangerous road…"

Rilke says - this is in the early twentieth century, remember - that "We are only just now beginning to consider the relation of one individual to a second individual objectively and without prejudice, and our attempts to live such relationships have no model before them… Someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being.

This advance (at first very much against the will of the outdistanced men) will transform the love experience, which is now filled with error, will change it from the ground up, and reshape it into a relationship that is meant to be between one human being and another, no longer one that flows from man to woman. And this more human love… will resemble what we are now preparing painfully and with great struggle: the love that consists in this: the two solitudes protect and border and greet each other."

Rilke's ideal hasn't materialized yet, but there are trustworthy signs glimmering and shimmering on the horizon of love. All over the world, there is a giant overthrowing of taboos. There is a giant choosing. Never in the history of the world have so many people chosen their own lovers: older lovers, younger lovers; other sex, same sex; richer, poorer; taller, shorter; lovers for a day or lovers for a lifetime; lovers of all different races, castes, creeds. There is a gigantic experiment underway in the human race, a gigantic cross-pollination.

So, since all other kinds of opposites are attracting and mating, here's my solution to bridging the divide between the toughest of men and women: Power feminists should hook up with power machistas. The resulting explosion of primal passion will create power babies, who will bring new vigor to our tired human species. More power to them.

Thank you….!