Leaving the Heian: A sexual revolution in reverse

What’s wrong with sex?

Nothing; it’s wonderful: “The younger women melt men’s hearts with rouge and powder and songs and smiles… Ah! … a tryst in a boat on the waves equals a lifetime of delightful encounters.”

Thus the courtier-poet Oe Yukitoki (955-1010) celebrated the asobi (women of pleasure) of his day. Their boats plied the rivers of the port towns, and poets paid them homage.

“Their voices halt the clouds floating through the valleys,” wrote Oe Masafusa (1041-1111), another enraptured court poet. Historian Janet Goodwin brings the traffic to life in “Selling Songs and Smiles: The Sex Trade in Heian and Kamakura Japan” (2007).

Asobi were singers, dancers and sexual artists of the highest attainment, accorded the highest praise by society’s highest arbiters of taste and public morals. “Her vigor in soliciting lovers,” observed courtier Fujiwara Akihira (989-1066) of a fictional, but presumably true-to-life, asobi, “her knowledge of all the sexual positions … her mastery of the dragon’s flutter and tiger’s tread techniques — all are her endowments.”

Heian pleasures: A scene from the chapter "Takekawa" on an illustrated handscroll of "Tale of Genji" made in about 1130 and stored in Tokugawa Museum, Nagoya. | PUBLIC DOMAIN

Many men — women, too — down the stern, glowering centuries of war and strained peace that separate us from those ancient songs and smiles must have wished themselves born in that freakishly blessed little warp in historical space-time known as the Heian Period (794-1185). Soft were its ways, gentle its manners, many and varied its pleasures — only for the numerically miniscule courtly nobility, true; the lowborn 99 percent of the population were deemed scarcely human — but for the very favored very few, life was, or at least could be, good, perhaps never better.

What’s wrong with sex? Nothing, and yet Heian permissiveness is a historical aberration. By and large, individuals love sex but societies frown on it. The ancient Hebrews gave it its due, but only for reproduction. We were to “be fruitful and multiply.” Sex for pleasure — “fornication” — was criminal, often capitally so.

The early Christians feared sex, despised it. They anticipated its extinction in the kingdom of heaven. Here on Earth, said Saint Paul, “I would that all men were even as I myself” — celibate. Impossible, as he knew — and so, “If they cannot contain, let them marry; for it is better to marry than to burn.” Marriage was a faute de mieux.

Confucius, envisioning no kingdom of heaven, was more tolerant of earthly passion — venturing, however, this mild admonition: “I have yet to meet the man who is as fond of virtue as he is of beauty in women.” Oe Yukitoki, the pleasure-loving courtier cited above, paraphrases the master as though in self-reproach: “Why don’t we take our hearts that are so fond of making love and embark upon the road to loving wisdom?”

Heian nobles married — which is to say they acknowledged some limits to sexual freedom — but Heian marriage was such a vague, formless arrangement that virtues like fidelity, and vices like infidelity, seem hardly definable. “Elite society,” notes Goodwin, “tolerated a wide range of sexual relationships and behavior. Male-male relations, male promiscuity and female premarital relationships were well within the bounds of acceptable behavior.”

Women could inherit and bequeath property — another historical aberration. Moreover, “Neither making their bodies publicly available nor accepting compensation in exchange for sexual services automatically stigmatized women in the sex trade … There was no sharp contrast between ‘whore’ and ‘honest woman’ as one might have found in contemporary Christian European societies.”

How did old Japan escape the straitjacket that bound so many other civilizations? Its mythological birth was propitious. Japan was born free — born of sexual congress, sexual joy, sexual innocence, innocent fun. The primeval deities Izanami and Izanagi are like two shy teenagers, bewildered by an onrush of first love. How to express it? They don’t know what to do. Like all of us, they learn. Their initial awkwardness irons itself out. Izanagi begets, and Izanami bears, the Japanese islands and myriad gods and goddesses. Sex was more than fun, it was sacred. Asobi were more likely to be revered as shamans than damned as whores.

It couldn’t last — or could it have? It did last a very long time — 400 years. Inevitably or not, courtier-like ease gave way, when push came to shove, to the armed camp. For centuries the samurai warriors had lived apart, despised as rustic boors. They bided their time. Their time came. They seized it. Heian crumbled. On its ruins rose the Kamakura Period (1185-1333). The love song died, the war cry sounded.

It was a sexual revolution in reverse — from freedom to constraint, from relative equality for women to stifling oppression. A warrior society is patriarchal almost by definition. Sexuality was no longer a merely private matter. The 13th-century chronicle “Azuma Kagami,” in a very few words quoted by Goodwin, shows us why: “Around dusk, a young wife suddenly entered Kiminari’s gate. One must say that, faintly visible in the moonlight, she was perilously beautiful. For some unknown reason (perhaps because she was perilously beautiful?) she aroused Kiminari’s desire. In any case, they have already spent some nights together. This is a motive for murder.”

Murder begets murder, which begets war, which begets chaos when driven by sex instead of the cardinal samurai virtue that justifies war and everything else — loyalty. Heian permissiveness was no longer sustainable. Laws evolved to root it out. “Those who have sexual relations with another man’s wife,” stipulates one, “shall have half their property confiscated” — a distant echo of Biblical injunctions against fornication. It dampened passion, at least erotic passion, which yielded over time to the passionate quest for a good samurai death.

A “motive for murder”? Not for the Heian courtier. Not for Genji, eponymous hero of the 11th-century court novel “The Tale of Genji.” 

Cuckolded as he had cuckolded others, including his father, the reigning emperor, Genji is hurt but understanding: “It was all very distasteful. But he would say nothing. He wondered if his own father had long ago known what was happening and said nothing.”

(Source: JT)

What little kids need to know about sex

I live in the Bay Area, where, according to my very unscientific estimate, approximately 8 out of 10 parents self-identify as enlightened. These are the moms and dads who broach thorny topics like race, poverty and sexism with their young children, undeterred by their complexity and high stakes.

Still, not all topics receive such a sensitive and nimble treatment. When it comes to talking about sexuality with young children, the majority of these otherwise open-minded parents become skittish and tongue-tied, wholly uncertain of what to say and how to say it. Private part exploration may be common and developmentally appropriate in little kids, but many of the grown-ups in charge of them would really rather not acknowledge it.

This, child development experts are increasingly realizing, is a mistake. Adults need to speak with their children about bodies and relationships openly and honestly, and from an early age. Doing so helps kids navigate their current sexuality-related curiosities and increases the odds that they will one day find themselves in satisfying and respectful sexual relationships.

More than just STDs and intercourse
For decades, school-based sex-education in the United States focused on preventing unwanted pregnancy and STDs, and it was only for teenagers. The big takeaway was how to avoid something bad, albeit with a massive blind spot toward sexual assault.

Today, curricula have begun to expand beyond the worst-case scenarios, explained Jennifer Driver, state policy director of the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States.

More and more programs have begun to address relationships, sexual identity, biology, gender, boundaries and pleasure. As the scope has widened, so has the intended audience. Many experts now believe that preschool and early-elementary age kids should be learning about these topics as well, and a small but growing number of American school districts have begun to teach them in the classroom.

Even with all this progress, the United States still lags far behind the Netherlands. There, "comprehensive sexuality education" for young children in schools has been taught for decades. Preschool-age kids receive lessons about anatomy, with the help of dolls, and learn about the differences between male and female bodies and how bodies change over time.

The curriculum also includes lessons on friendship, love and how to communicate boundaries and desires. How do we touch one another? When is it appropriate to touch another? And when is it OK to be touched by another?

"It's easier to start with young people, because once they get older, they still giggle but are already used to it," said Elsbeth Reitzema, project leader for primary education at Rutgers WPF, a Dutch institute for sexual and reproductive health and rights.

"Also, it's important to tell children everything before they go through puberty, because you want them to understand the way their bodies will change and understand sex before they are getting into sexual relationships."

Research suggests that this approach works. A 2010 evaluation found that Dutch 10- to 12-year-olds who were exposed to sexual education from an early age were more knowledgeable about their bodies, more accepting of homosexuality and more assertive when it came to setting boundaries and expressing preferences around physical intimacy than those who weren't.

Teachers in the Netherlands report an increased openness toward sex and relationship talk among their students overall, as well as an increased willingness to call someone out for behaving inappropriately. Also, all that early sex talk did not turn the nation's teenagers into Caligula. Dutch teens have a high contraception use rate and a low teen pregnancy rate and don't have sex any earlier than those in other European countries.

How to talk about 'playing doctor' and more
Unfortunately, most American parents can't expect the words "penis" and "vagina" to be used in their local kindergarten classroom anytime soon. Until then, we're all home-schoolers when it comes to teaching our children about their bodies and relationships.

Books can help, but only to a point. Unfortunately, most of the age-appropriate literature focuses on how babies are made, leaving out everything else that the average little person is interested in. Their curiosities tend to drift south, to their anatomy and its mechanics. One part of their body feels different from the others and looks different than that of half the people they know. What's going on?

"Children are very curious about their bodies ... and curious about the other sex," Reitzema said.

"They want to look at other bodies, touch other bodies, and they want to explore the difference between boys and girls. It is all very innocent and part of the normal sexual development of children.

They don't have the same mindset as we do. They are just curious."

When body part exploration begins to happen -- and it is probably going to happen -- Reitzema encourages parents to begin with the positive. Teach them the correct name for their body parts, and tell them that it is OK if they find touching their penis or vagina pleasurable. Then get into the qualifiers. Explain that exploring these body parts should happen in private, and when it is done with friends, it is very important to make sure everyone is OK with it.

"You are teaching them about boundaries and that they can say no, that their penis and vagina is theirs, and they are in charge of who is touching it and seeing it," Reitzema said. They also learn about how to check in with their friends and vocalize concern.

Overall, a lot of early sexual education isn't really about bodies but relationships. We can teach kids how to express themselves and respect others. We can also teach them that there are lots of different types of relationships, some boy-boy, some girl-girl and some boy-girl, and that's OK.

"You have to lay the foundation early and show them how to communicate their likes and dislikes so when they get to high school and are in a sexual relationship, they are prepared," Driver said. "In kindergarten, this can mean talking about what it means to be a good friend and how to ask for a pencil or pen in a respectful way. It can be very basic and still teach them what consent looks like."

These conversations will probably be awkward but -- and here's the catch -- only for the parents. We are the ones for whom masturbation is taboo; we are the ones whose minds rush to the worst-case scenario when discussing consent. Many of us were raised during an era when sexual education came by the way of a condom on a banana in a health class and someone's dad's stack of Penthouse magazines. We are working without precedent.

The good news is that our little kids are likely to be pretty cool with it. They're soft puddles of clay, malleable, impressionable and clueless about the way sexuality has been blanketed by secrecy and shame. We're their first and most influential guides on the subject. If we present pleasure as something natural and boundaries as something everyone should voice and observe, the odds are that they will grow up to see them that way as well.

(Source: CNN)

'Prostitution is seen as a leisure activity here': Tackling Spain's sex traffickers

It’s staggeringly big business in Spain, where demand is being met by traffickers. Can a groundbreaking team turn the tide?

On a sunny morning in Madrid, two young women duck down a side street, into a residential block and up to an apartment front door. Then they start knocking. Marcella and Maria spend a lot of time banging on doors and yelling through letterboxes all over the city. Most of the time, these doors never open. When they do, the two women could find themselves in trouble. Their job on the frontline of Spain’s fight against sex trafficking is a dangerous one; both have been assaulted and threatened. Yet they keep on knocking, because they have been on the other side of those doors, forced to sell their bodies for a handful of euros, dozens of times a day, seven days a week.

To say that prostitution is big business in Spain would be a gross understatement. The country has become known as the brothel of Europe, after a 2011 United Nations report cited Spain as the third biggest capital of prostitution in the world, behind Thailand and Puerto Rico. Although the Spanish Socialist party, which two weeks ago won another term in government, has promised to make it illegal to pay for sex, prostitution has boomed since it was decriminalised here in 1995. Recent estimates put revenue from Spain’s domestic sex trade at $26.5bn a year, with hundreds of licensed brothels and an estimated workforce of 300,000.

Anti-trafficking police officers speak to a woman in Colonia Marconi, Madrid. All photographs: Ofelia de Pablo and Javier Zurita/The Guardian

Supporters of decriminalisation claim it has brought benefits to those working in the trade, including making life safer for women. Yet this vastly profitable and largely unregulated market has also become infested with criminality, turning Spain into a global hub for human trafficking and sexual slavery.

Prostitution becomes sex trafficking when one person moves, detains or transports someone else for the purpose of profiting from their prostitution using fraud, force or coercion. In the UK, thousands of women are thought to be trapped in sexual servitude, but the scale of the problem in Spain is staggering. Until 2010, the law didn’t even recognise human trafficking as a crime. Now the Spanish government estimates that up to 90% of women working in prostitution could be victims of trafficking or under the control of a third party – such as a pimp – who is profiting from them. Between 2012-2016, security forces in Spain rescued 5,695 people from slavery but acknowledge that thousands more remain under the control of criminals.

Since it passed its first anti-trafficking laws in 2010, the government has been scrambling to get on top of this crisis, spending millions of euros on an emergency plan to target the individuals and gangs operating with impunity. In 2015, it went further and created formal alliances between security forces, prosecutors, judges and NGOs, to rescue victims and prosecute the perpetrators. Survivors such as Maria and Marcella now find themselves playing a crucial part in bringing the battle to the criminals who once sold and exploited them. But can Spain’s new alliance of defenders really turn the tide against the traffickers?

***

I meet Maria and Marcella, both in their mid-20s, in the offices of Apramp, an organisation set up to protect, reintegrate and assist women in prostitution. Apramp helped them escape their traffickers, and they are now among its outreach workers. Their day job is to identify potential trafficking victims and try to offer them a way out. They find women they think might need help on the streets, in hostess clubs, and in some of the 400 residences they say are operating as informal brothels in Madrid.

Both shrug off the suggestion that they are brave. “When I’m wearing the Apramp vest at those apartments or on the streets, I don’t feel scared,” Marcella says. “We know from our own experience they’re doing much worse things to the girls and women inside. So it only makes us more determined.”

The two poised and eloquent young women, dressed like students in jeans and trainers, have lived through terrible things. Maria, petite and softly spoken, her brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, was brought to Spain from Romania by someone she trusted: she thought she was going on holiday with her new boyfriend. Instead, he drove her over the border using their EU residency cards and within 24 hours she was on the streets.

“It just happens so fast,” she says. “It’s difficult to describe how much you can be broken in such a short time. The shock and the trauma makes you go into survival mode. You don’t have time to realise what has happened to you.” She spent eight months being prostituted on street corners, in brothels and in strange apartments. “You’re alive but you’re not really existing,” she says. “Not one of the men who paid to sleep with me asked me if I was there out of choice, or whether I wanted to be doing this. They didn’t care either way.”

 You can’t just stop a random person on the street and ask for help, because someone you love could get killed
She was told by her pimp that she would have to pay off a debt of €20,000 before she could go home. “With Romanian women, the traffickers threaten to kill your mother or your sister or your children if you don’t pay off your debt,” she says. “People always ask, ‘Why didn’t you just run away or go to the police?’ but they don’t know what they’re talking about. You can’t just stop a random person on the street and ask for help, because someone you love could get killed. The police in Romania are often corrupt. You think, why should it be different here?”

The promise of freedom in return for paying off the debt almost always turns out to be a lie. Maria says that, throughout her time under the control of the traffickers, she was hit with hundreds of tiny charges: she’d have to pay for clothes, rent for the corner she worked, for condoms and sanitary towels. If she didn’t bring back enough money, she wouldn’t eat or she’d be beaten.

“Debt is invisible,” Maria says. “It’s not a physical chain but it works the same way.” She says some traffickers force women to get breast implants and even though the operation costs around €3,000, tell them they have to pay back €10,000. Marcella nods in agreement. She was trafficked from her native Brazil after applying to do a master’s in Spain, a university course that turned out to be bogus. She was forced into prostitution immediately after she was collected from the airport. “If Apramp hadn’t found me, I think I’d be dead by now,” she says.

The fact that she not only survived but is now able to help others in the same situation has been an essential part of her recovery. “The mafia take you and destroy your whole identity. Even now, you’re recovering but you can never forget your past,” she says. “Doing this work really helps.”

From left: José Nieto, Spain’s leading anti-trafficking law enforcement officer, Rocío Mora, director of Apramp, which helps trafficked women, and prosecutor Beatriz Sánchez.

Between them, Maria and Marcella have helped dozens of women and girls escape their traffickers. It’s a process that takes months, sometimes years. Afterwards, Apramp finds the women somewhere safe to live, offers counselling and legal support, and helps them find work. “We have to show them that their lives are worth living again,” Marcella says.

Rocío Mora, Apramp’s co-founder and director, sweeps into the room and embraces Maria and Marcella, who are about to start their afternoon shift. “The only ones who really understand what we are facing are the survivors,” she says. Tall and immaculately groomed, Mora is one of Spain’s best-known anti-trafficking advocates; her rage at what she sees happening on the streets is raw and visceral. What Spain is facing, she says, is a huge violation of the fundamental rights of women and girls; anyone labouring under the impression that the majority of women working in prostitution in Spain are doing so by choice is deluding themselves. “The sex industry profits from the sale of women who are being controlled and exploited through debt, violence or psychological manipulation,” she says. “Our mobile unit has contact with 280 women a day and almost 100% are victims of exploitation and trafficking.”

 A generation of young men believe they have the right to do anything to a woman’s body if they have paid for it
There are many reasons why Spain has become a hotspot, but for Mora, the biggest single factor is cultural. Spain’s sex trafficking epidemic is, she says, just the most extreme manifestation of the country’s problematic attitudes to women and sex. “There is huge demand for prostitution here. It’s become so normalised that it’s just seen like any other leisure activity.”

One survey in 2008 found that 78% of Spanish people consider prostitution an inevitability in modern society. And demand is huge: another survey, conducted in 2006, found that nearly 40% of Spanish men over the age of 18 had paid for sex at least once in their life. Mora has recently seen a radical change in the kind of men buying sex. Before, it was largely older men sneaking away from their families. Now, both the women on the streets and the sex buyers themselves are getting younger. “The social stigma isn’t the same as it was when I started out,” she says. “We have a generation of young men growing up believing they have the right to do anything to a woman’s body if they have paid for it, and they don’t have to worry about the consequences.”

As a young girl, Mora watched her mother (also called Rocío) start Apramp from their kitchen table. At 18, Mora was studying by day and driving a mobile health unit through Madrid’s red-light district by night.

 A club in a high-end neighbourhood of Madrid.

“When my mother started this work, it was mainly getting health services to Spanish women who were engaged in prostitution to feed their families or a drug addiction,” she says. Two decades ago, criminal gangs started to take hold. “And it really was a radical change. There was suddenly a lot of violence and coercion – men on the streets watching the women and taking their money.”

Now, she says, most women in prostitution in Spain are foreigners: Apramp works with women of 53 different nationalities. “And the gangs are more sophisticated and more ruthless. They no longer need men on the street, because they are controlling the women through debt, fear and psychological control. This is what makes it much harder to fight, because many don’t see that they have a way out.”

***

On Calle Montera, one of Madrid’s busiest shopping streets, eastern European or South American women stand alone or in small groups. Maria and Marcella point out that many of the women they help don’t look like trafficking victims: it is easy for people to walk past them and not realise. Maria says many are also acting as human signposts, indicating that there are houses filled with other women nearby. When we get back to our car that evening, flyers have been stuck under our windscreen wipers offering a two-for-one deal on women for the special price of €30.

A short walk from Calle Montera is the HQ of the Centre of Intelligence and Risk Analysis, run by Spain’s national police. José Nieto is its chief inspector and Spain’s leading anti-trafficking law enforcement officer. As with Mora, anti-trafficking work has become Nieto’s vocation. He has spent more than 20 years trying to develop an effective police response to a human rights catastrophe that, until 2010, wasn’t even included in Spain’s criminal code.

“When I started in 1997, I was part of the brigade that believed all prostitutes did this work because they wanted to,” he says. “But it’s like an illness: at first you feel that something is wrong but you haven’t got a diagnosis. But as soon as you put a name to it, everything changes. You see it for what it really is.”

He explains the myriad reasons why Spain has become such a magnet for sex trafficking networks; “a perfect storm”, he calls it. “First, we are fighting a crime that is socially acceptable, because prostitution is accepted and embraced by many people here.” Second there is geography: “We are at the centre of all major migratory routes. The main victims we are seeing trafficked and forced into prostitution are Romanian, West African and South American. You can cross from Romania to Spain with an ID card. Africa is just 15km from us. We have a historic and a linguistic connection to South America.”

As in many countries, a prosecution is almost impossible without a victim willing to disclose their situation and testify against their exploiters. “There is great fear among victims that if they tell the police, they will be sent back to their countries with their debts unpaid,” Nieto says. “It makes policing very difficult; if the women don’t ask for help, there is a limit to what you can do. Here in Spain, prostitution itself isn’t illegal, running a brothel isn’t illegal, so you have to prove that what is going on is more than meets the eye.”

A sex worker takes a break in Colonia Marconi. ‘There is huge demand for prostitution here. It’s become so normalised.’

That evening, Nieto, the Guardian photographers and I join an undercover police unit conducting inspections of private clubs in Barrio de Salamanca, one of Madrid’s most high-end neighbourhoods. Although the police have all undertaken anti-trafficking training, their main job tonight seems to be restricted to checking ID and carting any woman found to be working illegally off to the police station.

At our first location there is a short period of confusion as our two unmarked cars drive up and down the street trying to find a parking space. By the time we enter, the music is already off and the club deserted – other than four women sitting silently on bar stools clutching their ID cards and a manager conspicuously cleaning glasses behind the bar. None of them is Spanish. The women all appear to be here on student visas, and shake their heads when the police chief asks them if they need help. There is no evidence that these women are victims of trafficking, but it seems ludicrous to expect anyone to disclose anything in this environment.

 We’re making the traffickers understand that the Spanish police are something to fear
At other clubs, a few women who don’t have the right ID are loaded into a van. In one, three very young Chinese women sit silent and apparently terrified in their underwear on a cracked fake leather banquette, while police check the damp and dirty premises. A lone punter, a sweaty Spanish man in his 20s, is ejected from a bedroom at the back; outside another, a “sexy nurse” uniform hangs on a hook. The women keep their eyes fixed on the thickset Chinese man behind the bar as he chats easily to the police and shows them his licence. As we leave, the heavy metal door slams shut with a thud, leaving the women inside. One of the officers runs a hand over his face and exhales. “Dios mío,” he says. My God.

Yet Nieto believes there is hope and says the new strategy of creating formal alliances between police, prosecutors and frontline services is putting more pressure on criminal gangs. In particular, he cites coordination with Apramp’s Mora: “With her help, we’re making connections with survivors, we’re following the money and sending people away. We’re making the traffickers understand that the Spanish police are something to fear.”

 Uniforms in a Chinese brothel. In Spain, prostitution isn’t illegal.

Nieto has been working with prosecutor Beatriz Sánchez for the past decade. Since 2010 the formidable Spanish lawyer has overseen more than 100 trafficking cases; in 2012, she succeeded in sending Ioan Clamparu, the “capo” of the biggest prostitution trafficking ring in Europe, to prison for 30 years. She is upbeat, funny and warm, but steely in her determination. “We’ve made huge advances in prosecuting and convicting human traffickers,” she says. “But many cases get dismissed or don’t go to trial.” Sánchez says only one-tenth of the trafficking cases she takes on make it to court because the burden of proof is high, requiring witness statements and months of police work. “Often cases are organised and transnational, involving the movement of huge amounts of money. They are complex crimes that are difficult to dismantle.” Under Spanish laws, you need proof of the use of extreme violence and intimidation to prosecute cases of pimping and coercion. “All forms of pimping need to be criminally punishable,” she says. “Only then can we effectively stop human trafficking.”

Sánchez says her natural optimism can be blunted by the uphill struggle to get cases to trial. “It would be hard if I was doing this alone, but the good thing is I have Rocío and José – we’re a team,” she says. “So when you are down and feel like things are hopeless, you have a reason to carry on. The others can pick you up and say: ‘Come on! We must keep going!’” Sánchez keeps in touch with all the women she represents. “Seeing them rebuild their lives is as satisfying as seeing their abusers go to prison,” she says.

***

We visit one of Sánchez’s former clients, Helena, at the offices of Proyecto Esperanza (Project Hope), the NGO that has supported her through her court case. Her family is from Ecuador but she was living on the outskirts of Madrid, with a Spanish passport, when she was forced into prostitution in her own neighbourhood five years ago, after falling victim to fraudsters who lent her money. They threatened to kill her small children if she didn’t work as a prostitute to pay it back. “When I was in that situation I didn’t see a way out, and the longer I did it, the more I died inside,” she says.

It took years, but in the end her traffickers were sent to prison and Helena was awarded landmark compensation of €100,000 by the state, €92,000 of which was estimated to be what her traffickers had earned from the sale of her body. She is yet to see any of this money, and her debts to family and neighbours remain unpaid. “I still owe €12,000 to friends and family from that time in my life, and I have no idea how to pay it,” she says. But for now she is surviving. Proyecto Esperanza is helping her find a job and providing counselling. She has a home and is rebuilding her relationship with her children. Despite her experiences, she is trying to teach them that the world can be a good place.

Helena praises Sánchez for giving her the courage to do this. “Beatriz was always so positive and strong at a time when I didn’t believe in myself at all,” she says softly. “Now I am trying to learn to love myself again. And that’s what I want to teach my kids – that no matter what other people do to you, it is important to love yourself and to look ahead. That in every terrible situation there can be a light at the end of the tunnel – a way out of the darkness.”

(Source: The Guardian)

As a fashion model I was humiliated, objectified and forced into debt – here's why I'm exposing the truth

Former model Leanne Maskell shares the dark reality of life when your body is fair game

Like so many of us, I grew up in a world that glamorises modelling. It’s a career that’s often portrayed as a fairytale – a scout “discovers” you as a gawky teenager and turns you into a goddess, gracing catwalks and glossy magazine pages.

But as someone who’s had this exact experience, I can tell you it is all smoke and mirrors. Behind the facade of beauty and luxury, I found myself in a job with no possibility of progression, the feeling of being exploited at every angle and dealing with the mental health issues that arise as a result.

I started modelling at the age of 13, when my mum sent a photograph of me to a local agency. Having been bullied for the way I look for years, it wasn’t something I’d ever considered, but before I knew it I was being told that my photos would be in some of the biggest fashion magazines out there, which kick-started a career that lasted more than a decade.

One of the things no one ever tells you is that often as a model you have little control over your contracts or even experiences at work. Models are often seen as objects to be hired out for the day, in any capacity, and this can lead us to forget that we have rights.

Really, the only power you have as a model is choosing an agency. But there is no real guidance or official quality control system for the industry, making it hard to know whether you’re making the right choice.

In one instance, I actively chose a prestigious agency but quickly found myself being sent on unpaid test shoots that I later found out I was being charged for – some up to £400. I had experience working for big brands so I could stand up for myself, but even so I felt heavily pressured by the agency.

After a week I found myself in almost £1,000 of debt, with no sign of actual paid work on the horizon. It was impacting my mental health so terribly that I was having continuous panic attacks, and when I tried to leave I was threatened with legal action.

I have also often been humiliated at castings and spoken about as an object on the job. One client complained for two hours about the evenness of my eyebrow height.

'I left the agency, as my doctor advised me to for my mental health' (Gabi Mulder)

The majority of models I know have also been pressured to lose weight. I was scouted by an agency who told me to lose three inches (7.6cm) from my hips. When I refused, they dropped the request to 3cm. Months followed of me having weekly measurements taken at the agency after being invited in for a “quick chat”. It was humiliating and degrading to be continuously told off for not being thin enough, and I felt pathetic and worthless as a result.

Everyone around me seemed to think it should be easy. When I finally lost the weight they asked me to lose another 2cm. At this point I finally realised nothing would ever be enough.

As models, people often assume that our bodies are fair game. This created a complex relationship with my body – I suffered eating disorders as a result and still have severe body dysmorphia. But it also leaves us vulnerable to sexual harassment and exploitation.

'I started modelling at 13'

It is completely normal for castings and shoots to be held in hotel rooms, which can put us in uncomfortable positions. At one casting I was alone in a hotel room for with a male client who asked me to get undressed. I did not feel comfortable and when I refused, I was told that I could do escort trips in Dubai, earning thousands of pounds for one day. I am not a sex worker and the implication that I may as well have been in this man’s eyes made me feel incredibly unsafe.

On another test shoot, I had to leave half way through as I felt incredibly pressured into having a drink and posing nude in a stranger’s bedroom.

I recall a shoot where I was asked to spank another model’s backside with a ping pong bat, and told to "cover my face with my hair" by a photographer when I refused and was visibly upset. I ended up being maneuvered into a sexual position by the team as I cried from humiliation. I didn't feel like I could just walk out for fear of seeming unprofessional – and I wasn’t even being paid.

While agencies presumably don’t want their models to have negative experiences, the industry is largely unregulated, making it hard for them to know whether the photographer they’re sending us to is legit, or just a creepy amateur. The stress of being consistently sexualised while doing your job inevitably takes a toll.

I feel strongly that if models are aware of their rights we can ensure that these situations do not happen to other vulnerable people – that’s why I’ve written a book sharing my experience. I hope that this starts the much needed global conversation of how to improve the modelling industry.

(Source: Independent)

Gay hunters: How criminal gangs lure men on dating apps before extorting cash and beating them

Institutional homophobia has made the victims easy prey, say activists, with a spate of attacks in the last month, writes Oliver Carroll in the Independent. Read on: 

It was supposed to be a harmless liaison, starting as it sometimes did: an attractive profile on a gay site, a few messages about nothing much at all, an exchange of photos, and an agreement to meet.

Sergei, 38, surname withheld, says he felt something wasn’t quite right about his date when they met in Shabolovka in Moscow’s southeastern suburbs. But it was only when the pair came home, entered the flat, and two assailants jumped out from behind the curtains that he started to realise how badly wrong things had gone.

The men announced to Sergei that his date was, in fact, a minor – even though his profile and appearance suggested he was at least 20. The attackers gave their victim a frightening ultimatum: “20,000 rubles (£250) or be outed as a poof and reported as a paedophile.”

Alamy

Sergei was lucky that a 20-year army career meant he could stand up to the men physically. After an hour, he managed to persuade them to go outside so he could try to get money from a cashpoint. From there, he ran.

His story is one of several crimes committed against gay men in Moscow over the last month.

The Independent was able to speak to three of the targeted men. They suggested that gangs operating in the capital had identified gay men as easy – and silent – victims.

The mechanism is almost always the same. Handsome young men entrap unwitting victims on dating apps and other gay sites. They lure victims to an apartment, where several other gang members are waiting. The assailants film their victim, extort money and threaten them with outing or worse. Usually, the victims pay up for a quiet life. On the occasions that they don’t, things can end brutally.

While an unwelcome reminder of the difficulties of being gay in Russia, these incidents are not an entirely new phenomenon — or even the worst examples of homophobia.

Chechnya aside, the peak of anti-gay violence in Russia came about four years ago, when groups led by the nationalist Maxim Martsinkevich (aka “The Hatchet”) entrapped, beat and humiliated dozens of gay men on camera. Martsinkevich and his “Occupy Pedophilia” gang operated on the heels of the Kremlin’s 2013 infamous anti-gay law.

But Martsinkevich and his crew were always less concerned with money than with serving a warped ideology.

Activists say the vast majority of the more recent attacks have been economic in their aims.

When it’s clear homophobic crimes are at play, the state does everything to avoid prosecution
Igor Kochetkov, Russian LGBT Network
That does not mean there have not been victims of violence. On several occasions, young men have been found in pools of blood following apparent robbery attempts, and without obvious signs of forced entry.

But today’s gangs do tend to be less violent, and instead use the taboo of homosexuality in society to keep the crimes as hidden as possible.

It’s an effective enough strategy, says Igor Kochetkov, the head of the Russian LGBT Network, a prominent advocacy group.

“People are reluctant to go to the police because they don’t want to reveal their orientation,” he says. “And the regular homophobic statements from officials don’t exactly encourage them.”

The Russian court system is not set up to help them, the activist says. When the odd case does reach court, it is usually processed as hooliganism or robbery; the hate element is never included as an aggravating factor. When Martsinkevich was finally arrested and jailed in late 2014, for example, it was for a racist video. No mention was made of the anti-gay aspects of his extremism.

“When it’s clear homophobic crimes are at play, such as what happened in Chechnya, the state does everything to avoid prosecution,” says Kochetkov.

According to Andrei Petrov, programme director of the LGBT+ advocacy group Stimulus, a lack of successful prosecutions is allowing the problem of date extortion to become more widespread.

In a survey conducted by his organisation in 2018, one in five members of the LGBT+ community reported that they had been victims of such hate crimes. Only a similar percentage report the crimes to police, and even fewer are properly investigated.

Given the lack of progress in Russian courts, Stimulus has decided to try their luck with the European Court of Human Rights.

Their test case, which dates from 2017, follows the familiar pattern. The victim, Yevgeny, 39, surname withheld, answered a profile on a love.mail.ru, a well-known dating site. He sent his picture; the other party sent his, and the pair agreed to meet by a block of flats in Moscow’s suburbs. Again, there were warning signs. The date said his name was Dima in messages, but introduced himself as Danila. But regardless, Yevgeny agreed to go upstairs to the flat.

There, a gang of eight men were waiting. They made sure Yevgeny’s quick date instead ended in a heavy beating, a request for money, and a threat to call the police for “paedophilia”.

Eventually, Yevgeny plucked up the courage to report the crime to the police. But since then, two years have passed without progress, with investigators refusing to open a criminal investigation.

“I believe the police were covering them up,” Yevgeny says. “I’ve no doubt the guys think they are completely untouchable.”

Activists and victims allege the Russian government’s own “homophobia” has fuelled the extortion business.

“The reason why these guys are getting away with it is because they are on the same side,” says Sergei. “One thing gives birth to another. They know they are doing the state’s work.”

Did Henry VI have a sex coach in his marriage bed?

The medieval monarch and his queen, Margaret of Anjou, were not alone at night, historian Lauren Johnson reveals

For more than eight years, Henry VI and his queen struggled to produce an heir. Now it has emerged that the couple were not alone in their endeavours in the royal bedchamber.

The historian Lauren Johnson has unearthed evidence showing that when Margaret of Anjou visited her husband’s bedroom for marital relations, they were sometimes joined by trusted courtiers.

Johnson told the Observer this was very unusual, adding: “Was it because the famously chaste Henry – who was a virgin until he married – didn’t know what he was doing? I think it’s entirely possible that it had reached a certain point where it perhaps became necessary to make clear to him what he should be doing.

“That couldn’t be done in a public way at all. The king’s chamber is the most private place [where] you could be having this conversation or, indeed, checking what was going on.”

Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou as depicted in the Talbot Shrewsbury
book of 1445. Photograph: World History Archive/Alamy

Royal marriages were once consummated with “bedding ceremonies”, in which newlyweds were put into the marital bed by their guests on their marriage night. The earliest English record dates back to Henry V in the 1420s, when ceremonies involved “the wine cup and the blessing of the bed”.

Johnson said: “While royal ceremonies could involve public blessings and perhaps processions to the bedchamber on the wedding night, after that point no one was in the royal bedchamber when the king and queen were having their marital relations.” She added that what Henry VI and Margaret experienced was different: “This was not just their wedding night. It’s an ongoing thing.”

Johnson found documentary evidence in the National Archives and royal household accounts, among other sources. The Ryalle Boke of court protocol, for example, records that once the king was in bed, “the king’s chamberlain or a squire for the body [should] come for the queen, and with her two gentlewomen and an usher”. Another witness, describing when “the Kinge and the Quene lie together”, noted his chamberlain lay “in the same chamber”. Johnson suggests that it may have been the Duke of Suffolk, chamberlain of England, or Ralph Botiller, chamberlain of the household.

Johnson observes: “The Ryalle Boke does not make it clear at what point they left, leaving open the intriguing suggestion that they remained to make sure the marriage bed was being properly used.”

She recalled that, in reading the documentary evidence, her “eyes and ears pricked up”: “The evidence that there are people staying in the king’s bedroom potentially some years after he is married… is very odd.”

This is among discoveries that will feature in her book, Shadow King: The Life and Death of Henry VI, to be published by Head of Zeus next month. Johnson writes: “The reign of Henry VI is rightly remembered as a nadir in national history – and the king’s shadow fell across his realms for years after he was deposed. This was the age of England’s defeat in the hundred years war and the Wars of the Roses. Conflict was to be Henry’s principal legacy. Yet Henry himself, the child king who became a martyred holy man, was no tyrant. He loved peace before war. He treated his wife and child with affectionate respect.”

Henry VI’s enemies smeared him as weak for taking so long to produce an heir, and spread rumours that the couple’s eventual only child, Edward, was a changeling or bastard. Johnson’s research has also led her to believe that, part of the reason Margaret and Henry took so long to conceive was that the queen had an eating disorder.

She points to a 1467 document that records Margaret “fasting four or five times a week” during her marriage and enduring weak health – “ironically, probably to fulfil religious vows in the hope of getting pregnant,” Johnson suggests.

She writes that lack of an heir led to concern over the succession: “As the first duty of a queen was to bear children, this had a serious impact on her popularity. Infertility was usually blamed on women, but complaints about royal sterility undermined Henry’s masculinity and his authority.”

(Source: The Guardian)

Constant cravings: Is addiction on the rise?

From sex to sugar to social media, people are in the grip of a wider range of compulsive behaviours. But what is driving them – and what can be done?

Addiction was once viewed as an unsavoury fringe disease, tethered to substances with killer withdrawal symptoms, such as alcohol and opium. But now the scope of what humans can be addicted to seems to have snowballed, from sugar to shopping to social media. The UK’s first NHS internet-addiction clinic is opening this year; the World Health Organization (WHO) has included gaming disorder in its official addictions diagnosis guidelines.

The first glimmer of this shift was in 1992, when tabloids reported that Michael Douglas – Hollywood royalty, fresh from starring in the erotic thriller Basic Instinct – was holed up in an Arizonan rehab facility with sex addiction. No matter that, to this day, Douglas stringently denies ever suffering from the condition – the way we perceive addiction had begun to unfurl.

The range of things people are getting addicted to has increased, including gambling,
shopping and internet addiction. Composite: None/Getty

Back then, the broadening of the term was often viewed in medical circles as lazy appropriation; however, neuroscience has now largely accepted that it is the same brain chemical, dopamine, driving these irrepressible cravings. What’s more, our 21st-century world is so heavily baited with cues and stimuli – from stealthy marketing to junk food, not to mention the nagging lure of online life – that it appears to be rigging our dopamine systems to become “hypersensitised”.

“The range of what people are getting addicted to has increased,” confirms Michael Lynskey, a professor of addiction at King’s College London. “For my parents’ generation, the only options were tobacco and alcohol. Now there are more drugs, including synthetics, along with commercialisation and ways – especially online – of encouraging prolonged use of different things.”

Many of these emerging conditions are seen as behavioural rather than physical, substance-related addictions – but the consequences can be as grave. Gambling is the longest established behavioural addiction, having been medically recognised since 2013. Suicide rates, along with the likelihood of substance addiction, are higher among compulsive gamblers. “I see gambling students who drop out of university because they can’t stop,” says Henrietta Bowden-Jones, the consultant psychiatrist behind the forthcoming NHS internet-addiction clinic. “I see people with shopping compulsions who are in so much debt because they couldn’t stop themselves from buying three dresses in different sizes, that in the end their businesses and families suffer.”

Sometimes, she says, compulsions flit between different vices – for example, a young man seeking refuge from family problems might toggle between gaming and porn. “I saw [a gaming disorder patient] yesterday,” she adds, “who then went on to spending money on objects and clothes. You can somehow shift the behaviour but it’s an illness we don’t yet know enough about.”

It is hard to overlook, however, the fact that many of these thrills are available at the touch of a screen. When the addiction charity Addaction commissioned a YouGov survey in October 2018, it found that parents are twice as worried about their teenage children being addicted to social media as they are about drugs, and a similar ratio when comparing worries about gaming and drugs. Also in October, the EU announced it would fund the European Problematic Use of the Internet Research Network to investigate the public health implications.

A man uses a fixed odds roulette machine – gambling is the longest established behavioural addiction.
Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Not everyone agrees with defining these new disorders as addictions – after all, you can’t overdose on them. Gambling and gaming are the only ones to have made it on to the WHO list of addictions. However, a paradigm shift in understanding addiction is in motion.

Take sex addiction. Seeking treatment for this controversial condition has, in cases such as that of the golfer Tiger Woods, been criticised as a cynical shortcut to redemption for philanderers. On the other hand, neuroscientists who have been able to study the brains of people with debilitatingly compulsive obsessions with sex witness similar responses to those they have observed in drug addiction cases.

Most of the standard criteria for addiction diagnosis do apply to these disorders, says Lynskey: “Tolerance, neglect of responsibilities, inability to stop, withdrawal.” Withdrawal is the obvious sticking point, although sugar withdrawal symptoms have been induced in lab rats – sweats, shakes, changes in body temperature, anxiety, the whole kaboodle. “If a teenager becomes irritable when a gaming session is cut short, there’s some discussion as to whether that’s a sort of mild withdrawal,” says Lynskey.

Terry Robinson, an esteemed professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan – together with his colleague, Kent Berridge – identified dopamine as the neurochemical responsible for craving. He thinks debating the semantics of addiction is unhelpful. “Whether it’s drugs, sex, gambling or whatever, you’re looking at impulse-control disorders where people have difficulty refraining from maladaptive use. There are certainly similarities in terms of the psychological and neurobiological mechanisms involved.”

Once Robinson and Berridge had identified dopamine as “wanting” and pleasurable brain opiates as “liking” – two distinct phenomena – they discovered that you don’t have to like something in order to want it: a key finding about addiction. In addicts’ brains, the craving is unbearable even when they no longer like the object of their desire. Berridge once told me that the “massive”, “robust” wanting systems in the brain can be turned on with or without pleasure, whereas pleasure “has a much smaller and more fragile brain basis … That’s why life’s intense pleasures are less frequent and less sustained than life’s intense desires”. It also explains, perhaps, why humans are so easily herded into wanting new stuff and instant gratification, even when these things don’t make us happy.

“What’s happening in these addictions,” says Robinson, “is that the dopamine system is becoming hypersensitised, leading to these pathological motivational states.” He has identified three factors that could help explain why “there seems to be a wider variety of problematic things [to get addicted to]”. (He does caution, however, that “getting into social factors is very difficult in terms of proving cause and effect”.)

The first factor is that our modern environment is stuffed with craving-inducing stimuli. “People don’t appreciate the power of cues that have been associated with rewards, be it a drug or sex or food, in generating motivational states.” In fact, addicts can start liking the cues more than the end goal, such as the rigmarole of scoring drugs and so on. “The amount of cues associated with highly palatable foods are everywhere now,” he says. “Drugs, sex and gambling as well, and that has changed quite a bit over the years and could be leading to more problematic use.”

Lynskey agrees, adding “some of the marketing and design of gambling machines is a step ahead of all of us academics in devising ways to attract users and boost dopamine and retain them”. The “like” button, quantifying approval and igniting a compulsion to check social media, is a similar example. Introducing a report into the effects of social media on young people in early 2018, the UK’s children’s commissioner Anne Longfield wrote that “some children are becoming almost addicted to ‘likes’ as a form of social validation”.

Parents are twice as worried about their teenage children being addicted to social media
as they are about drugs. Photograph: golero/Getty Images

Robinson’s second consideration is dosage. Our liking of sweet tastes suited us when we were hunter-gatherers, helping us choose ripe energy sources. Now, we have high-fructose corn syrup, which blows our minds with unnatural levels of glucose. Similarly with drugs, he points out: “Chewing coca leaves in the Andes is not the same as smoking crack cocaine. The pharmacology is different and this can also increase propensity to addiction.”

His final factor is simply access. “Food, sex, gambling and drugs – availability these days is much greater than it was in the past.” (Sex addiction can include consuming porn, sexting, compulsive masturbation, exhibitionism and chemsex.)

All these factors, Robinson continues, “combine in complex ways – and I’m sure we don’t understand them all – to increase the probability of problematic use in a variety of things”. Does this mean that more people are at risk in this era of throbbing dopamine excitation? Major risk factors for addiction, such as deprivation and childhood trauma, are still important predictors for how easily your dopamine system can be hijacked, says Robinson – “but you have laden on top of that ubiquitous cues, more potent formulations and increased availability”.

Another theory about what is driving the diversification of addictive behaviours stems from a series of experiments conducted in Canada in the late 1970s known as Rat Park. The psychologist Bruce Alexander found that lab rats, while isolated in empty cages with the option of drinking either plain or drugged water, easily became addicted to heroin; if you put rats in a vast, toy-filled enclosure with other male and female rats for company, the heroin couldn’t compete. The context was driving addiction, rather than the drug itself. The resulting study made minimal waves when it was published – yet today, Alexander is being flown all over the world to share his take on addiction, which he calls the dislocation theory.

“The modern world breaks down all kinds of community, all kinds of tradition and religions and stuff that has made life integral and full for people in the past,” he says. “You can’t just say: ‘OK, now I’m going to give you back what modernity took away.’ We have to reinvent society, as we perpetually do, with an eye on making sure there are enough connections for human beings with each other in a traditional way, so that people can grow up and be content enough so they don’t need to find substitutes in addiction for life.”

Organisations such as Addaction in the UK, he says, “are finding ways to get [addicts] together into groups and planting these groups in communities and getting the community to support people in these groups, not to give up their addictions but to have a meaningful life”. Steve Moffatt, policy manager at Addaction, says that like all such services, “we’re just starting to try to understand the level of issues that are out there. For this generation coming through, social media is a big thing and online activities generally, but we still don’t know the extent.”

Despite the increase in the range of addictions, says Lynskey, there are still probably fewer addicted people than there were 30 years ago because the level of nicotine dependency – the most deadly one – has dropped from 50% to less than 20% in the UK. However, updates to diagnosis guidelines mean that people who sit lower on the addictive spectrum can now be seen as having problematic dependencies. The influential American Psychiatric Association, he says, “used to distinguish between ‘abuse’ and ‘dependence’, whereas now they are in a single category of drug-use disorders. Perhaps as many as one in four males would meet the criteria for alcohol dependency, and a lower, but still substantial, number of females.” And yet these people are at no risk of seizures or death if they go into withdrawal. “There is a spectrum,” he says, “whether it’s alcohol or drug dependence or shopping addiction and people have become a bit happier with placing the point at which behaviour becomes problematic at a lower level of use.”

Bowden-Jones says the best evidence for treating behavioural addictions is using cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to help avoid cues (for example, taking a different route home so you don’t pass the bookmaker), rewarding good behaviour and reaffirming what people have to lose with constant reminders, such as on wristbands.

Shopping compulsions can lead to debt.
Photograph: Caiaimage/Paul Bradbury/Getty Images/Caiaimage

Assistance can also come in the form of stimulus-control tools. “There are fantastic blocks to put in place that can stop you from watching porn, gambling and indeed anything to do with the behaviour you have an issue with, except for gaming,” says Bowden-Jones. “We need to get to a position where, in the cold reality of your day, you can say: ‘I don’t need to spend more than two hours a day doing this, so I will block myself after two hours [of play].’” This responsibility, she says, lies with the gaming industry.

Mindfulness meditation has also helped to reduce substance abuse. In fact, it was found to be more effective than the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step programme and CBT in 2014 research led by Sarah Bowden, an assistant professor of clinical psychology at Pacific University in Portland, Oregon; the previous year, Bowden, Berridge and other neuroscientific luminaries met to discuss addiction with the Dalai Lama. After all, Buddhists caught on to this craving problem thousands of years ago, using meditation to overcome the very urges that they identified as the linchpin of human suffering, long before these dopamine-fuelled times.

A modern challenge is the ubiquity, and the necessity: gone are the days when recovering behavioural addicts can be told to avoid the ever-necessary internet, for example. “Younger generations will be socially cut off,” says Bowden-Jones, “and what our patients say is when they feel they’re missing out, it pushes them more toward the virtual life that they already have a problem with rather than engaging properly in their face-to-face lives.” As Moffat says, “that’s where they get their validation”.

Many of us would plot our internet habits on the lower end of this spectrum: slaves to our phones, wasting hours that we will never get back stuck down internet rabbit holes, compulsively checking for likes. “There’s a great distinction,” says Bowden-Jones “between functional use and use that is not necessary. It’s like eating too much cake, which makes you feel bad. People who are on social media too much, it’s not a positive experience, although it may have started off as such.” There goes the dopamine without the pleasure, again.

(Source: The Guardian)

Lipstick… Should it have made it to the screens at all?

Do filmmakers like Alankrita Shrivastava have the maturity to decide what their audiences will watch as Shabana Azmi contends, asks Manjulaa on The Hoot. Read on: 

Shabana Azmi says that the American system of censorship is preferable to the current British system that our Central Board of Film Certification follows. According to recent news reports, “It’s so wrong to call CBFC the Censor Board in the first place,” says Azmi. “It is here to certify films; censoring any scene is not its prerogative. Instead we should adopt the American system, whereby filmmakers themselves yield and decide that they don't want a single cut but they realise that age appropriate behaviour is important.” She has been saying so for several years but no one seems to be listening. Just as well because if indeed they did, we’d be in a lot of trouble vis avis the kind of cinema that we get to watch.

Take the case of the recently released Lipstick under my Burkha. The CBFC had denied it certification for its “continuous sexual scenes, abusive words, audio pornography and a bit sensitive touch about one particular section of society”, but then the FCAT overruled CBFC allowing the film an ‘A’ certificate after “voluntary and some additional cuts and deletions”. Alankrita Shrivastava’s second film is a difficult film to sit through. Not because it is particularly esoteric or exceptionally brilliant cinema which transports you to higher realm of thought processes, but because it has been over-hyped and when it fails to deliver, you come home trying to make sense of the disappointment.

Lipstick… is a film that brings to fore four women who in different stages of their lives want to live life on their terms and do so in the manner and fashion only they know how but by the end, their boundaries are set for them – ironically enough, by men!

So Ratna Pathak Shah is this 55-year old Usha Buaji, a stern matriarch who publicly commands those around her but leads a secret private life, fearing social ridicule in case someone finds out that she longs for sexual fulfillment - a craving she satiates initially by reading Mills & Boons and later by having phone sex with her swimming coach; College going kid Rihanna Abidi (played by Plabita Borthakur) habitually steals things like lipsticks, shoes and other personal items from showrooms in malls, apparently justified in her actions because her strict Muslim parents will not allow her any freedom to live the way she wants. So it is the burkha for her and the claustrophobic life that it defines. She lives a double life, sneakily stitching sexy party wear and college casuals while helping stitch burkhas as part of the family income and using her creations to party late nights and wearing a different persona in college.

Then there is the scheming and two timing beautician Leela (a feisty Aahana Kumra) who makes out with her boyfriend and films the act, on the night of her engagement to another man. Nothing morally wrong with that (our filmmaker will have you believe) because she sees her boyfriend as a ticket to freedom to a bigger city and better life rather than the drudgery and stability that a possible husband might provide in the small town she lives. Finally there is a nearly 30, Shireen Aslam (Konkona Sen Sharma) the breadwinner for her family comprising a Saudi-returned jobless, philanderer and chauvinistic husband and three young boys. Subjected to marital rape every night Shireen prefers to take morning after pills to avoid more pregnancies, rather than resist and get beaten up. She leads a double life too by secretly stepping out to earn bread as a sales girl in a company but is unable to tell her husband about it. All of them rebel in their own small ways and thus far the going seems good.

Sexual overtones and reinforcing patriarchal thought
The chinks appear when you realize that all there is - by way of ‘expression’ or ‘suppression’, is sexual in tone. There is Rihanna who loves all things forbidden and who finds herself a casual boyfriend and is open to sharing the night with him after a party, returning home surreptitiously at dawn. Usha ends up having phone sex with her coach while pretending to be ‘Rosie’- the 20-something heroine of her fictitious story. Then there is Leela who is openly aggressive when it comes to casual sex – so much so that one night she steals into her boyfriend’s crowded family quarters demanding to have sex with him in his bathroom whereupon he snubs her saying, ‘Sex, sex sex.. All you want is sex. There are four others outside. Should I call them in?’

"Surely there is more to life than finding expression only through sexual satiation – either of the mind or body"

The film’s feminist thread starts coming apart when Usha’s boyfriend not only ditches her but does so without according her dignity,  and by humiliating her in front of her folks when he finds out who she is, saying, ‘Tum kabhi Rosie ho hi nahi sakti’ (You can never be Rosie) and her family throws out her stuff while abusing her – as though it’s a crime that a 55-year old is fantasising. Also when Leela decides to make peace with her fiancé after realizing that her boyfriend is using her even though he makes a half-hearted attempt to make her stay by offering to elope; and when Rihanna is handed over to cops for her illegal activities and later meekly goes home with her father, after being duly chastised. Shireen is physically suppressed by a bigoted man who when he finds out she has got a promotion screws her happiness (literally and figuratively that night) telling her to quit her job and stay at home. “Aurat ho… shauhar banne ki koshish mat karo.” (You are a woman. Don’t try and be a husband). One is not sure if Shireen returns to her job.

As a woman I fully appreciate the context Shrivastava builds and the small town India in which the film’s story is placed – Bhopal in this case. And why just small town India, fact remains that sexual repression in our society is rampant. That women can be sexually aggressive and openly expressive is not a thought that men  from the best of financial and social strata even acknowledge, let alone allow.

But Lipstick… would have turned out to be a different film if the women’s lives had changed or even moved towards that end. Even if it were left open-ended, it would have been brave but it closes on a note that reinforces patriarchal thought. The last shot of the film sees the four seated in a room, sharing a cigarette while reading Rosie’s story and laughing about the fantasy they all are a part of. It doesn’t give me the feeling of being liberated - merely the thought that men have yet again been allowed to get away with it.

Visual Treatment
Another aspect is that, cinema is not always about explicit minutiae, it also lies in subtleties. The issue here is not that the women are feisty and determined to live their lives. But why must the expression of that liberation be showcased in sexual overtones? Don’t get me wrong. I have no issues with sexual candidness and graphic scenes which celebrate a woman’s desires. But surely there is more to life than finding expression only through sexual satiation – either of the mind or body.

Indian audiences not ready
While the critics may laud the efforts of the filmmakers, the fact remains that the audience it is meant for, is just not ready to accept the crudity with which the sensitive matter has been highlighted. Women being sexually aggressive in the privacy of homes maybe a reality in our country but putting it up there on 35 mm screens is still not our society’s idea of public entertainment. Also, despite an ‘A’ rating, exhibitors have set aside ‘Women Only’ shows for the film. When was the last time you remember film shows being segregated based on gender? This is because families and even middle-aged married couples are finding it difficult to watch the film together! I know of families who went with their adult daughters to watch Lipstick… and ended up squirming before walking out halfway.

"In a society battling rape and molestation cases is it right to take away imagination completely and replace it with in-your-face visuals?"

Males members of the audience smirked and laughed when Leela went to her boyfriend’s house and said, ‘sex toh kar le’ (at least have sex with me) and he rebuffs her with a crude remark of bringing in some more men. That she slaps him for it and is slapped back didn’t help matters. ‘She deserves it’, was a remark I overheard. Forget other women, I wanted to wipe that smirk off with a slap of my own. Are our men ready for this? Doesn’t look like it. The larger picture is more dangerous. In a society battling rape and molestation cases (with statistics quoting one case in every 4 minutes in Delhi) is it right to take away imagination completely and replace it with in-your-face visuals? Sexual repression maybe the most obvious form of subjugation in a male dominated society but the onus of making it aesthetically presentable and yet communicating your point lies squarely with the director.

International audiences are different
As a festival film coming from India, Shrivastava’s hard work will no doubt be considered a very brave effort. But garnering acclaim in international film festivals is a different ball game since those audiences are exposed to a different kind of cinema. For instance, semi-nude women masturbating while having phone sex is acceptable behaviour (on and off screen) and it will not raise eyebrows. But here, it will likely send out the wrong signals.

Why Aesthetics is Important
As an example of aesthetic excellence while showcasing nudity, all you need to do is watch the French filmmaker Jean-Jacques Annaud’s The Lover (1992). Set in Indochina of 1929, the film details an illicit affair between a teenage French girl and a much older, rich Chinese man. Featuring Jane March as the  teenager and Tony Leung as her lover, the film is a fluid, compelling montage of what a relationship can be. Though it has frontal male and female nudity apart from several love-making scenes, the physical proximity of the protagonists and its expression in cinematic prose can only be described as sheer poetry in motion.

"Sexual repression maybe the most obvious form of subjugation in a male dominated society but the onus of making it aesthetically presentable and yet communicating your point lies squarely with the director."

Closer home, take the case of Sridevi’s Mom, which deals with gang rape and the trauma it can lead to. Visuals of a large black car moving silently across empty city roads in the middle of the night, after a young girl is kidnapped, are menacing and haunt you long after. As audience you imagine the worst as the camera follows the car and gasp when the girl is thrown out into a ditch, half dead. It reminds you of a December night not so long ago right in the heart of Delhi which left the nation numb and outraged simultaneously. The power of cinema can never be undermined even when it is suggestive.

Some may argue that the context in Lipstick… demands a different treatment but my contention is aesthetics - the purpose of which is to invite you to relate to the protagonists and their travails, not shun them because of overt vulgarity. It’s not about taking a prudish stand in this day and age of internet penetration and exposure. It’s about whether you are mature enough to know whether your society is ready for it yet.

Box-Office Collection
But don’t take my word for it. The proof that Lipstick… may not be going down well with audiences lies at the box-office. Made on a budget of INR 12 crore it has barely recovered about 10 crores on day eight of its release. In these days of social media and quick word-of-mouth, where films break even and go beyond on day one, Lipstick… is inching towards a break even. If Ms Azmi’s suggestion were to be taken seriously, does a Shrivastava have the maturity to decide how prepared her audience is? Apparently not.