Soft Brains, Hard On

What makes Mumbai’s municipal corporators demand a ban on scantily clad mannequins

Ever since the Delhi rape of 16 December, life has been a little more difficult for middle- and upper middle-class male chauvinist pigs (MCPs) in cities. An uncle who comments on his niece’s dress suddenly finds himself becoming a Twitter update with a dozen sneering retweets. Politicians like Pranab Mukherjee’s son have become responsible for new contributions— ‘dented-painted’—to the lexicon. Patriarchy has become a word thrown about so much by so many so often that it is on its way from a noun to a not-so-nice adjective. The MCP’s world has become a forest of feminists on the prowl raring to pounce on any little derogatory gesture.

But man will be man. As Sophocles wrote, ‘He hath resource for all; without resource he meets nothing that must come: only against Death shall he call for aid in vain; but from baffling maladies he hath devised escapes.’ And thus you have corporators of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) exposing their primitive convictions in their suggestions on how to prevent crimes against women—but with an ingenious twist.

On Monday, Mumbai Mirror reported that the BMC general body, the assembly of the city’s corporators, had passed a resolution barring inadequately clothed mannequins from public display. This pioneering decision was rationalised on several fronts: that women are embarrassed by such mannequins, that people mistake them for sex toys, that this was urgently needed in the wake of the drastic rise in crimes against women. The mayor of the city, a Shiv Sainik of long standing called Sunil Prabhu, even gloated over what he saw as a revolution of gender justice under his charge. Last month, he had observed that such mannequins attract the attention of men, who, unable to control their surge of lust, then put sex crimes on their to-do list.

The person who moved the resolution was a woman, a BJP corporator, but forgive her, for she is an unwilling, meek and crafty victim of patriarchy. Sheetal Mhatre, another woman corporator and another agent of patriarchy, was quoted as saying that a mannequin that was not fully clothed was an affront to a woman’s self-respect. She also brought in what a professor of Philosophy might call the utilitarian argument—‘No woman buys clothes by seeing such dummies.’

Mainly because it is such an idiotic resolution to pass, and also because there is no National Commission for Mannequins to issue an angry press release on it, reports on its passage have been buried in the inside pages. But it is still worth pondering the mind that cooks up something so fantastic. The immediate cause is obviously the desire of politicians to be seen doing something. Most of them have no real power until they manage to get a government office. Till then, they have to remain relevant. In this particular case, however, there is an added element of imagination. A mannequin is just plastic.

The only thing human about it is its form. Even for their deliberations over the resolution, the corporators would have had to first imagine it as a woman dressed in lingerie. Picture, then, 220 odd corporators inside that hall in various frenzies of lust (and women corporators imagining their husbands and brothers in such frenzies) lamenting the evil they had been possessed by.

The advantage of targeting mannequins is that you can call them ‘dented-painted’ without their complaining. To say that a scantily dressed mannequin is inviting rape is to say a scantily dressed woman is inviting rape, but now you can get away with it. The mannequin is the filter through which you can publicly air your views on all sins being traceable to the female body without being pilloried. Mannequins are far from becoming a vote bank, so that is not a problem either.

These corporators actually don’t realise it, but they might be onto something profound, a new religion itself. Animism, or the infusion of souls into natural objects, has long been a form of worship in tribal societies. This is its opposite—inanimism, the doctrine that inanimate plastic bodies draped in negligees have titillating souls.

About The Author

Madhavankutty Pillai

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