[Reader-list] from shohini ghosh

[Ravi Sundaram]

"shohini" <shohini at giasdl01.vsnl.net.in>
From: "shohini" <shohini at giasdl01.vsnl.net.in>
To: "Ravi S. Vasudevan" <rvasudevan at crosswinds.net>,
"Ravi Sundaram" <ravis at sarai.net>,
"Ravi Sundaram" <rsundar at del2.vsnl.net.in>
Subject: PP's Personal Attacks
Date: Sat, 25 May 2002 09:51:20 +0530
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Ravi & Ravi, please post this for me. For some reason, I am not being able 
to post on the list. Thanks. Sho



Dear Shuddha:

Many of us on the list do not subscribe to the mainstream feminist view 
that sexual explicitness is sexism. Otherwise, we wouldn't enjoy Hothead 
Paisan, On Our Backs and what have you. Sexism may also exist in 
non-sexually explicit speech. (Like that woman in the kitchen example that 
PP once gave.) The problem here is not sexual explicitness but how it has 
been deployed. In this case, it has been deployed to be personally abusive 
to two other people who have also expressed their right to free speech. It 
is one thing to criticise someones politics and quite another to call that 
person a fuckhead because s/he has different politics!

Free speech means that everybody has the right to voice their opinion. 
Asking for certain kinds of speech to be discouraged from one particular 
forum is not asking for the speech to be killed. PP's speech is not fringe 
speech. It's so mainstream that he can take it anywhere and live happily. 
All of us have a right to ask for a forum where certain kinds of speech are 
discouraged. I may want to be part of a LGBT group that allows for sexually 
explicit speech but discourages homophobic speech. I wonder whether we 
would allow communal speech or other kinds of hate speech on this forum. 
Sometimes the communal/hate speech and sexual speech intersect. Look up for 
instance the Hindu Right's attack on M.F. Hussain on the net. Not very 
different from PP's description of Vajpayee lusting for Musharraf's ass!
Even that does not bother me so much as PP's eagerness to make personal 
attacks. To invite people on the list and have their ass kicked is neither 
responsible nor desirable.

Therefore, its up to SARAI to decide what kind of a forum they want to have 
and what kind of speech they want to encourage or discourage. Moreover, to 
argue that if people get intimidated into silence its their fault, is a 
lazy argument. It is very hard to speak up in a space where you feel 
disempowered. For long feminists, at least in Dellhi, would blame lesbians 
for not speaking up little realizing that its hard to speak up 
affirmatively when the space has been vitiated by homophobic and sexphobic 
speech. Therefore, running a list is hard work - it is more than just 
creating space on the web and then letting people run wild.

To end on a note of trivia. Those who speak up against the Hindu Right are 
often inundated with hate mail. (I am sure it has happened to many of us on 
the list and more recently to people like Sumit Sarkar and Seema Mustafa.) 
Barring Hindutva politics the hate mail reads exactly like PP's letter.

Shohini