The myth of ‘we’

Yesterday Times of India had an interesting article about prostitution where women were married to deities and sent off to temples; they would serve the temple with sweat and sex; and later end up in one of the brothels. They were called devdasis. Amazing! This Hindi word means ‘servant of the god’; instead they would serve the mortals on earth; and the puritanical society would deify them to the extent that many families willingly offer their daughters to temples; or say a camouflage of brothel.

If the temples use women for providing sex, how then are they different from, in any way, brothels? How then we, the ‘moral police’ of the society, allow this to happen? This is something that is necessary to study in order to study the physics behind prostitution.

What is prostitution? Dictionary exemplifies it as an immoral activity to offer sexual intercourse for pay. Okay. But who exemplified that selling sex is immoral? We, the people, the ingredients of society…Right? And who made this tradition of devadasi? Again we…eh?

Isn’t it dubious? At one hand, we despise prostitutes; but on the other hand we allow temples, our revered pandits, in the name of god, to sell women on demand? Ah! Where did we find such a janus-faced mask?

It’s obvious that the problem lies not in the profession of prostitution, but in the perception and ways of prostitution. It seems like, until women are subjugated, suppressed, until they hover in their drudgery, until they don’t chide against, until they go along, we are okay with it, we even promote them with the congenialities of temples to be used as a ‘revered brothels’; but as soon as they voice up for their rights, for their recognition, we despise them, we make them third-class citizens, we preach them morality. We enforce them to continue without any expectations. How pious! Even Lords have advocated that ‘karm karo, fal ki chinta mat karo.’ (Toil without any expectation of results.)

Where do these lords go when young girls are brought into sex-slavery in their names? When Draupadi was being molested in front of her husbands, Krishna had come to save her. Why doesn’t he ever come to save these girls? Or has he, himself, made it their destinies? Is it that the concept that ‘all men are equal’ is a plain mockery to gods?

The flaw is in our blind submission, in the name of gods, morality, traditions, and customs. Why do we always need to follow everything every time, without even raising any question, any doubt, any clarification? Don’t we men have any brain left to challenge the obvious, but wrong? Or are we too scared of heavens-and-hells to make any move?

We say that it’s immoral to sell one’s body for money. Immoral! It’s a much used word in the recent years. Clinically speaking, morality is a motivation based upon the idea of right-and-wrong. So, to define morality, we got to define rights and wrongs first. What is right, and what is wrong? Is it that, if we run a survey, or a poll, and what most people would say ‘right’ would become ‘right’? No. Nothing can be absolutely right; neither can they be absolutely wrong. It’s a relative concept. Something might be right to me while wrong to you. We can’t decide using democratic, collective methods to evaluate if something is ‘right’.

It’s not the question of ‘we’; it’s a question of ‘I’. Men are individual elements, complete and content in themselves. ‘We’ can be made only by using the collections of ‘I’. But in the process ‘I’ must not be vanished. Men can trade among themselves at their will. They must not be forced for anything. They are free to reason and, therefore, to choose their course.

The fundamental conspiracy of ‘we’ was to humiliate and perish ‘I’. So, ‘we’ attacked the most revered thing in ‘I’ – it’s connection to the spiritual world, its tendency to love, it’s willingness to make love – to sex. And so, ‘sex’ was made a taboo, a ‘not-to-be-talked-about’ thing. But, since ‘sex’ was a prime necessity, they made families to enjoy sacred sex, and brothels for perverted sex. And they taught that sex was a condemned act. And to exorcise it, they made devdasis. It seems logical – a well drafted plan.

But, that era is bygone now. In modern world, we talk about equality, about freedom. Then let sex be free, a voluntarily chosen profession, why use camouflages, canopies, to pursue it? How different is sex from modeling, or sports? Models sell their bodies; athletes sell their bodies, why can’t prostitutes sell theirs? Instead of making so much of fuss about it, why don’t we simply make it a legal-and-taxable industry?

One fact is certain that prostitution can never be stopped. It is the longest surviving profession in the history of men. And moreover, society needs it. Then why not recognize and legalize it? It is same. Like we work in office, they work in bed. What’s so horrible there? They are serving the fundamental instincts lurking in each-and-every man. What’s so hesitancy about in accepting it?

For men, ‘sex’ is not merely a process of begetting; it’s more like a need. And, if this need is not satiated legally; they would g for illegal options. And then, sexual perversions would surface. Give one what one needs and one would concentrate upon more creative and productive things, than wasting energies over procuring the tools to one’s basic instincts.

It’s as simple as that.