On Monsters and Men

Privilege, as defined by the Cambridge Dictionary, is “an advantage that only one person or group of people has, usually because of their position or because they are rich”.

One of the most common privileges on earth, second only to the one which manifests our existence as the dominant species on the planet, is that of being a man. As a cis male, this privilege has manifested itself in some way or the other everyday. It also allowed me to spend Rs 5,00,000 of my father’s hard-earned money (despite me dropping a year and switching courses multiple times through school and college) to attend the Asian College of Journalism (ACJ), a widely respected institution known for churning out impassioned and responsible journalists. It was a great year.

But as numerous accounts of sexual assault and harassment flooded Twitter accusing various men (all ACJ alumni, including my faux-friend and Quint reporter Meghnad Bose, and Business Standard journalist Siddhant Mishra), my ‘great year’ was placed in a very different context. A friend, on an all-male primarily gaming group, lamented, “Is this what the best 10 months of my life have been reduced to? All [incidents] should’ve been on those fucking lawns of ACJ, and not on Twitter. And we should’ve confronted the fuck out of each other.”

His comment came from a place of fear, sadness, even complicity. Because most of the men in our college had always suspected: Some of our batchmates operated in the grey, some in the darkest black, and they had been allowed to get away with it. And as we discovered over the last few days, women from other batches had experienced the same.

“Confrontation is difficult,” says Neha Aggarwal, who started the thread on Siddhant Mishra from the 2013-14 batch over email, when I asked her why people didn’t call each other out on campus. “There's a looming sense of not being socially acceptable if one goes against the status quo.” But Aggarwal’s move against the status quo triggered more threads on social media about Mehra harassing women, touching them inappropriately without consent.

Numerous men from ACJ, who I tried to speak with, threw around the word “context”. One said, “If it’s a book, then I’m on board. Don’t think any article will even come close to doing it (the context) justice.” That context, is this: Every year, approximately 130-140 liberal, and some of the brightest wannabe journalists, are cocooned in a co-ed hostel in Chennai. The lifestyle is a soup of academic debates, heightened hormones, locally-brewed alcohol, and bad-quality weed. Aspiring writers, armed with egos, ideas and experimental tendencies, end up in all kinds of relationships. Some turn out well, like a couple from our batch who recently got married. Some not so much, like when a guy was rushed to the hospital for a bite on this ankle. Turns out it was a human bite that happened during sex on campus.

This desire to rely on context and to seek refuge in it internalises the bad shit people did, especially those that you had formed an emotional connection with. You excuse their behaviour. Leadership ethicist Craig Johnson explains, “…People believe we are more moral than we actually are, but the process of moral disengagement leads us to act immorally, and justify our bad behavior.” Now combine this with the internalised moral fibre of these young student journalists ranting on their first night of college about how much Modi fucked India in 2002, with the arrogance of youth where they feel they alone can change the world, and an unnecessary glamourisation of the profession—and you have what most of us perceived as the fucked-up moral compass of a vast number of ACJ students.

In addition, the privilege on campus is staggering—most Indians can’t afford this five-lakhs-a-year course. Amongst the few who can, most are graduates from top universities in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. “There is no diversity on campus, so kids at ACJ have no idea how privileged they were. Diversity teaches humility and civility,” says journalist and alumnus Arka Bhattacharya (2014-2015), currently with Scroll. The combination of class+an imagined intellectual superiority+gender+caste creates a unique bubble of privilege that is potentially blinding in its ability to enable bad behaviour. ‘Woke campuses’ everywhere are struggling with this behaviour.

“There are rocket scientists who don’t talk as much about themselves as these up-and-coming journalists, who, after glamourising [their profession] forget that it’s like any other. With teachers preferring certain students publicly, who are inadvertently the loud ones, it culminates into a culture of pushing forward [this] privilege,” Bhattacharya added. This culture then walks into newsrooms all over India, all swagger and privilege and dick in tow, which with time and needless HR patience, becomes the accepted cultural norm and creates the men who are being called out today.

According to Sweta Narayanan, a Chennai-based psychologist, women struggle to come out with their stories against men with social clout. “Victims feel that he’s going to find a way out anyway. Because he has that power and influence.” With male privilege at its max on certain campuses, expecting women to come out and share stories is understandably difficult. “In many cases, women feel that even if they haven’t done anything wrong, the blame will come onto them. When these cases come to light, lots of characteristics about the victim come out, who then gets blamed,” Narayanan told VICE. “Like, she smokes, she hangs out with guys, she probably asked for it. To avoid all of this, many just don’t come forward, because even if you’re not in the wrong, there will be consequences.”

But then why don’t the men, enjoying the same arrogant privilege, call out these men? I’ve been thinking about this one for a while. Many of my friends and acquaintances have come out with stories of trauma. I was aware of a few, not of all. Why didn’t I, and many others, do anything?

The most commonly used defence here is that the victims didn’t speak out. In hindsight, that’s bullshit. The problem is that we weren’t sensitised enough—to friends, colleagues, and fellow human beings—to understand how to navigate this shithole and be empathetic. “We didn’t create safe spaces for women to share their stories,” Bhattacharya tells me. “We should’ve been able to create platforms for people to come and share their stories, where he (Bose) wasn’t the dominating voice.”

The aforementioned leadership ethicist Johnson spoke of another way men justify bad behaviour of other men, in a phenomenon called “advantageous comparisons”, where we downplay our own bad behaviour by comparing it to the even worse behaviour of others. I remembered this when my defence of complicity came crashing down, when placed next to those indulging in assault. I was speaking to a friend who had put out a statement with her name about her own incident, which got hundreds of retweets. She broke down crying, running out of words to say, disconnecting the call mid-way.

It didn’t matter that some men weren’t directly responsible for her crying. The incident she described is now two years old, and her reaction is still uncontrollable, involuntary sobs. The blame rests with a collective failure on the ‘bois’ who wouldn’t confront their mates, of letting another human being feel this way, leaving their personhood be so devastated by the actions of another.

Follow Parthshri Arora on Twitter.