Skip to main content

Vanishing Point

Excellent essay on Lolita and much more. The author very rightly points out:

The housewife who married for money and then fakes orgasms, the single mother who has sex with a man she doesn’t really like because he’s offering her some respite: where are the delineations between consent and exploitation, sex and duty? The first time I traded sex for material gain, I had some choices, but they were limited. I chose to be exploited by the man with the resources I needed, choosing his house over homelessness. Lolita was a child, and she was exploited, but she was also conscious of the function of her body in a patriarchal economy. Philosophically speaking, most of us do indeed consent to our own exploitation.

Even if not a housewife,a woman has to fake their interest in their husband in intimate and non-intimate ways to keep his self-worth up; to ensure he has enough motivation to do this part for the marriage and the family they have built together. It is the cost of doing business in marriage. In similar vein, the man may need to pretend his wife has the most impeccable taste, is great at her job, the most charming host and a wonderful mother to their kids. He needs to do these things if he wishes to keep the peace and derive the value from his wife. It would ill-serve both to be too blunt and stop pretending.

Is that an exploitative situation just for the wife or for both? Maybe the man is dying to tell his wife, the dress she wore to the most recent dinner party resembled a colorful canvas sack, she is woefully out of shape, does not at all inspire him in bed or out of it, that her high pitched voice grates his nerves and the kids are mostly embarrassed by her. This is as much of a "hardship" as the wife needing to laugh at the infinite repeat of his same stupid jokes, his bombast about his work successes, his thoroughly unimaginative love-making, his lack of attention to the emotional needs of their teen-aged kids and much more. 

Everything within reason and balance is fine, once that is exceeded one or both could feel like that they consented to their own exploitation. The trick is to keep things just shy of that point.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...