MeToo.. WhoNext?
My #MeToo, is not about anyone in particular, but if the shoe fits, feel free to lace up! The flavor of the season has been claiming enough pulp from cellulose. While the jury is out and the subject calls for warm and soft handling with kid gloves et al!
There appears to be emerging a loaded perception usurping the dominant logic being in favor of the accuser than the accused.
Arbitrage has been the cornerstone of any activity in the world. Simply put, arbitrage is the science of ‘gives’ and ‘gets’ in a free environment. We are left stoic, if equally curious as to #WhoNext. It is the difference of opinions that makes horse races. The same water that hardens an egg, softens a potato.
If it is normal to lament inflation today, how reasonable is it to summon the vegetable vendor to the witness box today that sold mangoes or lemons or bananas or potatoes that I ate over 10 years ago for which he claimed arbitrage as his profit in a quid pro quo of my need or desire. Let’s look at what this has to do with the price of onions of the street today. So, let us flesh it up.
The phrase "Me too" was tweeted by Milano around noon on October 15, 2017, and was used more than 200,000 times by the end of the day, and tweeted more than 500,000 times by October 16. On Facebook, the hashtag was used by more than 4.7 million people in 12 million posts during the first 24 hours. The platform reported that 45% of users in the United States had a friend who had posted using the term. The movement may have been started by the sexual misconduct allegations against Harvey Weinstein but quickly caught the imagination of the people on the social media. It is a tragedy of our times that a movement against sexual harassment and sexual assault of women, at workplace, is needed to safeguard the ethical and moral values that we profess are our way of living.
A thousand ships on social media have been put to sail. How would, the Greek mythology be interpreted if Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman on the earth were to re-live her abduction or elopement with Prince Paris of Troy in a #MeToo moment of our times in complete disregard to the farmer suicides or prices of onions or petrol.
#MeToo movement, not to be belittled, however, throws up several challenges to the society and may even shake the very foundation on which our Judicial systems are built, disrupting both normative as well as interpretive cardinals unless it is treated objectively and not obsessively.
There are so many myths and facts about rape and sexual abuse - about what consent is, about the kind of people who rape and about who it happens to. An antithesis is if an actress accused an actor of raping her, when literally such a scene was being enacted. Would she ever get justice and how would she prove this? Is this an occupational hazard?
It takes a great amount of conviction and self-belief for a woman to muster the courage to come out, even if after a decade or two and narrate the experiences in great graphic detail on a faceless social media or motivated TV channels. Almost all of them, with an isolated exemption were rather rationalising their discomfiture with what they probably would have lost. That said, does it not point to an arbitrage of the times, when and where the two persons may have both been givers and getters together or whether such an act was endured or enjoyed or exploited or accepted by either.
Having accepted then, that one’s career was paramount to everything else, is it not a little strange that naming and shaming happens a good decade or two later. Naming and shaming must happen. It should actually have happened decades earlier. That would be the true arbitrage by law.
But how should the judicial system respond to bring the perpetrators to book? A system that depends on hard evidence, or even circumstantial in many cases, does not apparently find any. So who does this anger and outburst really serve? The media channels will lap up whatever is coming their way. In an all pervading inane news feeds that they get, this certainly is a TRP multiplier. Some shysters in the garb of investigative journalism and intelligent defense, are ever busy eliciting some spicy details which actually do more harm to the woman, who in the first place has come to seek justice for the horror that she has gone through. If observed dispassionately, are not the anchors of the media equally at fault? Are they really providing solace or are they extracting more spice and gore? Can a media trial really bring about justice? ‘Tark’, ‘Vitark’, and ‘Kutark’ or ‘Reason’, ‘Argument’ and ‘Sophism’ are all good in a Meta-debate, but do they really liberate the souls that are mauled beyond repair?
On the other hand, take the case of an allegation of sexual harassment against Ryan Seacrest of E! News, leveled by a former personal stylist in the aftermath of the #MeToo movement. Outside investigators, after several rounds of interrogation found the charges unsubstantiated with both sides trading charges. Maybe the investigation was rigged. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe she asked for money. Maybe she didn't. Maybe he's guilty. Maybe he's not. So the question now becomes, how we handle men stuck in the gray area, facing compelling accusations with compelling denials, whose guilt cannot be assessed with certitude, but nor can their innocence?
The reaction of the Government to appoint a panel of four retired Judges and lawyers holding public hearings, to investigate #MeToo cases also seems to be a knee-jerk reaction and more like the proverbial brushing under the carpet. Given the painful, long and arduous system of plaintiffs and defendants, if a woman turns up to be a part of a public hearing of her misfortune, will this be not rubbing salt in the wound?
Add to it, the maxim based on Blackstone's ratio, that "It is better, ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer". It was expressed by the English jurist William Blackstone in his seminal work, Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in the 1760s. Historically, the details of the ratio have varied, but the message that governments and the courts must err on the side of innocence has remained constant.
It is equally true that you can muffle the sounds of a drum or loosen the wires of a lyre but who shall tell the skylark not to sing? There is a livelihood to be made today by the billions, shall we stop contributing to this trial and creating Kangaroo courts all around. While some acts cannot certainly be condoned, the quintet mustn’t be disrupted by actors (pun intended).
Many decades back Anand Bakshi penned a few lines that ring true today in the middle of the mayhem in the name of #MeToo on any channel that one may tune into. “Mere dosto, tum karo faisla, khata kiski hai, kisko dein hum sazaa? With a much better-endowed woman populace now, with an ever proactive social media, is it a tall order to name and shame at the first signs of a male misadventure and not reserve it to a decade later? For only then women could seek the redemption they seek.
Everything that we have today was once considered impossible. The impossible today lies behind our backs and some of it still up ahead. Let’s deal with the now, as the now and here, rather than launch a thousand ships in complete disregard of life as it stands.
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