By Namit Arora

On how caste patriarchy in urban India hijacks and distorts the reality of gender violence.

Delhi now lives in infamy as India’s ‘rape capital’. In December 2012, the gruesome and fatal gang rape of a young woman, named Nirbhaya (‘fearless’) by the media, unleashed intense media and public outrage across India. Angry middle-class men and women, breaking some of their taboos and silences around sexual crimes, marched in Delhi shouting ‘Death to Rapists!’ The parliament scrambled to enact tough new anti-rape laws.

Many Delhiites have since grown fearful of their city’s public spaces. Spotting an emotionally charged issue, opposition politicians promised to make Delhi safe for women. Campaigning for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2013, Narendra Modi told Delhiites, ‘When you go out to vote, keep in mind “Nirbhaya” who became a victim of rape.’ The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) convenor, Arvind Kejriwal, even promised private security guards with ‘commando training’ in every neighborhood. All this might suggest that a rape epidemic has broken out in Delhi’s streets, alleys, and buses. Mainstream media outlets in India and abroad seem to agree.

Anyone trying to analyze the issue must at least ask three questions: who are the rapists, where do they rape, and how common is rape in Delhi? The 2014 Delhi Police data on rape is a great place to start, not the least because it challenges the conventional wisdom of Delhiites and their media and politicians. It shows that, as in other countries and consistent with previous years in Delhi, men known to the victims commit the vast majority of rapes—96 percent in Delhi. These men include friends, neighbours, ‘relatives such as brother-in-law, uncle, husband or ex-husband and even father.’ More than 80 percent of them rape inside the victim’s home or their own. Strangers commit only 4 percent of rapes, which are also likelier to be reported. Yet so many people fixate on this latter scenario and take it as proof that Delhi is unsafe for women to go out by themselves.

The hard truth is that sexual predators are not so much ‘out there’ in the faceless crowd as among the familiar ones. ‘Statistically speaking’, journalist Cordelia Jenkins wrote in August 2013, ‘the problem [of rape in Delhi] is not on the streets at all, but in the home; the greatest threat to most women is not from strangers but from their own families, neighbours and friends.’ According to Ranjana Kumari, director of the Center for Social Research, a women’s rights organisation in Delhi, ‘This data compels us to look at what is happening in and around our homes and workplaces.’ In other words, we ought to worry about rape less when women enter public spaces on their own, and more when they return home or hang out with friends. Why do so few Indians—men and women, including policy makers and public figures—seem to realize this? Some feminists have argued that this blend of pious concern with plain denial is the modus operandi of patriarchy itself.

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Poet Builds a House

all that we are arises with our thoughts,
the Dhammapada says,
with our thoughts we make the world

…….thing one: tour the foundation,
…….scrape down its roughness
…….with the edge of a hammer head,
…….dis the mason who left behind a lumpy job,
…….who forgot what a trowel is for,
…….who was halfway home already when he bent into his forms
…….smoothing like a dilettante, fatigue calling the shots,
…….the day’s dregs, the ache in his legs

with our thoughts we make the world

…….two: eyeball the foundation top
…….to get a handle on what you’re up against
…….noting bulges humps and dips, or not—
…….with luck you've been left the work of a perfectionist
…….a Michelangelic cement mechanic
…….doing god’s work as he smoothed loose Portland
…….to a chalk line while in the background
…….the symphonic smell of oil-soaked wood
…….played to a concrete vibrator’s percussive drill
…….driving trapped air from aggregate,
…….time and chemistry turning wet concrete to stone
…….upon which a carpenter will set a sill

all that we are arises through our thoughts

…….three: set sill straight to lines struck on the top of the wall
…….parallel and square and fix with bolts

the world is made with thought

…….four: make cycles to the lumber pile grabbing two at a time
…….whip to shoulder and carry over sun-baked soil raising dust
…….until the need for sweat and beams has been fulfilled
…….and the house is framed by god’s good must

all that we are by thought arises, says the Dhammapada.
we make the world with thoughts

…….thus a house, conceived and brought about
…….by hammer blows in the skull of a carpenter
…….driving nails through a sawyer’s vision of cut joists
…….its walls and roof arranged in geometric imagination, arises

…….because, as the Dhammapada says,
…….the world is brought about by thought

with our thoughts the world arises

…….when you think about it (as the verse apprises
…….and Buddha taught)
…….our home —our world, is built by thought
.

by Jim Culleny
8/16/13

Dhammapada

by Leanne Ogasawara

“…..all the charming and beautiful things, from the Song of Songs, to bouillabaisse, and from the nine Beethoven symphonies to the Martini cocktail, have been given to humanity by men who, when the hour came, turned from tap water to something with color in it, and more in it than mere oxygen and hydrogen.”

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by Bill Benzon

Talcott Parsons

I am going to continue the psycho-cultural argument I introduced in my previous 3DQ post, American Craziness: Where it Came from and Why It Won’t Work Anymore. The core of my argument somes from an old article in which Talcott Parsons, one of the Grand Old Men of 20th century sociology, argues that life in Western nations generates a lot of aggressive impulses that cannot, however, be satisfied in any direct way. Rather those impulses must be redirected. Parsons was interested in how nationalist sentiment directed those impulses against external enemies, such as the Soviet Union, the Chinese, the North Vietnamese, Iraqi and the Taliban. But Parsons also recognized the existence of internal enemies, such as African-Americans from slavery up through and including the present day.

In that post I pointed out that the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s foreced Americans to redirect the aggressive impulses that had been absorbed in the Cold War. I argued that those impulses were focused, once again, on African Americans. Since then I’ve been reading danah boyd’s recent study of cyberculture, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (Yale UP 2014). I was struck by her argument that teens spend so much time online because they’re physical lives are restricted in way that mine had not been.

That prompted me to write Escaping on a Raft in Cyberspace, in which I agued, in effect, that some of the aggressive impulses that had been directed toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War have now become directed at our own young, with the Internet serving as the “trigger” for that redirection. I reprise that argument in the first section of this post. I go through Parsons’ argument in the second section, this time a bit more carefully. I wrap up that section by arguing that the logic of our response to teens in cyberspace is the same as our response to the bombing of the world trade center. In both cases anxiety caused by a real danger is amplified by repressed aggression resulting in actions that are inappropriate to their ostensible cause. In the final section I ask how can we, as a society, better distinguish between real danger and projected fantasies.

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by Eric Byrd

A few years ago I found a copy of the 1990 English translation of Guido Ceronetti's The Silence of the Body: Materials for the Study of Medicine in a used bookstore's Humor section. Those are usually dead zones of joke books, cartoon compilations and political jesters, over which the eye skims. I had never before heard of Ceronetti, who on reading turned out to be my favorite kind of writer, an “admirable monster” like Baudelaire and Cioran, an anatomist who finds cheer in perfection of phrase, monstrous because he so elegantly exposes our monstrosities, and I have idly wondered, when drawn to my copy, hunting after a half-recalled aphorism, why the book had been put where it was, how this unclassifiable thing was so classified (a librarian, I think this way); and then, this week, while Googling for a cover image to insert into this column, I noticed that the dust jacket says, “Translated by Michael Moore.” Michael F. Moore is a prize-winning translator from the Italian, of Manzoni, Moravia, Levi and Eco. Sub-sub-Borgesian mystery solved.

“Admirable monster” – by contemporary lights, sure, but by others, simply a humanist. In the world Ceronetti evokes, and to which he truly belongs, painters slice and study cadavers and the philosopher reads by Caravaggian candlelight, a skull at his elbow; the comedian is a poet of venereal and urologic affliction, and the tragedian devises serial slaughters and eulogistic pomp; and all who are literate transcribe remedies. It is a tradition increasingly macabre, marginal, and self-conscious as a society begins to believe in perfectibility, to conceal or euphemize bodily horrors, becomes accustomed to surgery as a polite profession and adopts the taboo of mortuary secrecy. As we suffer less visibly and live longer and hope more and more to defeat death, “the curse of dragging about a corpse” – what Cioran identified as the “very theme” of The Silence of the Body – recedes as a mainstay of literature.

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by Josh Yarden

Translation has its limitations

how do you say…

we stumble, severely at times

We do not realize when we do not realize

understanding stands down

misunderstanding stands in

The translator pretends to be Superman

disguised as a reporter for the Daily Planet

able to leap tall constructs in a single bound

Translators transcend boundaries

across time and place

we have all sorts of advantages

Just one mysterious weakness

we are vulnerable to the substance of our planet

Kryptonite is a cryptic message

Once free of the burden of place

eternal outsiders are never stuck at home

odd ducks can swim in any lake or just fly away

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by Matt McKenna

Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman is a gorgeous and wry dramedy about a 90s-era movie star attempting to regain relevancy in a media landscape to which he can no longer relate. This description may make the film out to be yet another highfalutin take on upper-class midlife crises in the 21st century, and perhaps to some extent that is true. However, as tempting as it is to read Birdman as a trite story about a rich guy having a tough go at it, the film is best understood as a metaphor for Hillary Clinton's rise to fame as the wife of President Bill Clinton and her subsequent struggle to realize her political potential in the subsequent years.

In Birdman, Michael Keaton plays Riggin Thompson, a Hollywood actor who may have some talent but has hitherto squandered it by performing in mass-market drivel, particularly in his career-defining role as a superhero wearing a bird costume. (The parallels to Keaton's own career-defining role as a superhero in Tim Burton's 1990s Batman films is an interesting footnote, however coincidental and irrelevant to the discussion at hand.) While apparently lucrative for Riggin, the fictional Birdman franchise typecasts him as an action movie buffoon rather than the impassioned, serious actor he sees himself as. To prove to his fans (and dare I say–himself?) that he is indeed a real actor with real creative talent, Riggin stages a Broadway rendition of Raymond Carver's short story, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Riggin hopes that the intellectual nature of the story and the nuanced performances its stage adaptation requires will finally help him escape from behind the long shadow cast by the Birdman films.

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Until 25th January, 2015

by Sue Hubbard

Some years ago I was commissioned by the Royal Academy magazine to write ‘a feminist appraisal' of Allen Jones' work. As an RA, Jones had the privilege of reading the piece before it went to press. Although he's referred to himself as a feminist on a number of occasions he seemed uncomfortable with this perspective. He vetoed the article and it was never published. I decided, therefore, to take the opportunity to revisit the work of this 77 year old pop artist to see if my response was any different a number of years on.

As I walked through the Royal Academy I remembered how the Viennese painter, Oscar Kokoschka, returned from the First World War to find that his lover Alma Mahler had married the founder of the Bauhaus school, Walter Gropius. To deal with his unrequited passion Kokoschka ordered the doll-maker Hermine Moos to make an exact, life-size replica of his ex. When the mannequin finally arrived, Kokoschka was horrified to find that, far from being life-like, it had furry limbs. Yet despite the doll's hirsute appearance they made trips to the opera, took long carriage rides and, it was said, had intimate rendezvous. Eventually Kokoschka threw a champagne party and afterwards wrote: “When dawn broke – I was quite drunk, as was everyone else – I beheaded it out in the garden and broke a bottle of red wine over its head.”

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