The gender-neutral school and the implicit Madonna-Whore complex- Draft 1

Elaborating on my previous post on the problem of a gender-neutral school policy, I want to explore here how gender inequality can exist in such spaces too.

Many maintain that prejudice against women or gender inequality does not exist in developed or ‘progressive’ societies or communities. Ours is an equal community, people say. Women and men are given equal opportunities: both get to work, both get to use the same resources etc. and thus we don’t need feminism. But prejudice, in these cases, operates in more implicit and invisible ways. Women are invisibly divided into the Madonna/whore complex. It is not only about equal resources and equal treatment by the authority, but also equal treatment within the peers themselves.

This is the case of the gender-neutral school. Though the authority claim to be gender neutral and gender-less, since they allot the same resources and treatment to both boys and girls, the gender-neutral policy in itself does not do away with a certain idea of inherent misogyny. Merely having a policy about equal access to resources does not make any space gender-neutral or even gender-less, or equal. The socialisation of students among themselves betrays a deep seated sense about pre-conceived ideas about women. It does not change a boy’s mind’s dichotomy of the Madonna-whore complex. Let me give an instance.

When I turned 21, in my final year in college, I was gifted my first mobile phone. It was very basic and only allowed me to make and receive calls and messages among a few other basic functions like the calculator, alarm clock etc. Some of my friends too had a mobile, and as young people in the first decade of the 21^st century, we gladly exchanged jokes via the medium of messages. One such kind of jokes which was circulating among my friends and me during that time, let me specify here: mostly female friend, and a select few male ones, were ‘non-veg jokes’ or jokes with a certain degree of sexual content. One day I sent one such joke, a witty one at that, to a female friend. When she received my message, she was intercepted by a male friend who on reading the message, immediately exclaimed with much shock along the following lines “what a dirty joke, oh my god, she sends these kinds of jokes!” And the news spread. Before I knew, everyone knew that I sent and received non-veg jokes via sms. I was immediately told by some friends that the jokes that I sent to a male friend in the hostel was read by all the boys there. Boys started telling me that I sent dirty jokes, and that they would not communicate with me through sms. It came to the point where boys refused to have my mobile number because I sent ‘dirty jokes’!

At that time I was amused at the whole incident. It did not really strike me as basically problematic. But now I am reminded about it as I read Rebecca Watson’s post on sexism among sceptics, and I can read the complexities of the whole ‘harmless little’ incident.

The reaction to the message came from the male quarter. And suddenly the very men who would watch porn slyly on the side, became scandalised by a woman exchanging a witty joke with sexual material with another woman. It was almost as if, for the men in question, the woman who was worth keeping in touch with or considering part of one’s social circle was someone who was devoid of any interest in sexuality or sexual material.It was as I said earlier, the Madonna-Whore complex, played out so very subtly and complexly that one could have almost missed out the dichotomy inherent in the whole incident.

And this took place in a context which prided itself on being ‘equal’ to men and women, which thought that gender identity was not imposed on any of its students. But I’m sure if you ask the women, they would tell of many more such incidents. What then happens in such places is that because of the gender neutral policy, the space to talk meaningfully about prejudices is missing. And this is something that needs to be uncovered and challenged.