What is the common thread joining the Bangalore car crash claiming five lives, Blake Lively’s sexual harassment complaint against her It Ends With Us co-star Justin Baldoni, and France’s Giséle Pelicot rape trial? The tenuousness of the thread of safety we hang by. It can snap in a snap. It doesn’t matter how solid your car, career, or conjugality is; it may not necessarily keep you safe. Then, what is even the point of doing anything? If the basic need to be safe, both physiologically and emotionally, is too much of an ask, how can anyone stay motivated to achieve anything at either individual or communal level?
Abraham Maslow surmised at least 80 years ago that safety is one of the five fundamental needs of human beings. According to Maslow’s A Theory of Human Motivation, the hierarchy of human needs is as follows: physiological, safety, love/belonging, esteem, and self-actualisation. Safety, however, needs to be seen as an overarching holdall category. What is anything worth if nothing is safeguarding it?
What is a long, stable marriage worth if the husband had been inviting strangers to rape the sedated wife?
What is a sturdy car, facilitated by a hefty pay packet, worth if the roads are unsafe?
What are an illustrious career and fame worth if they don’t ensure a safe work environment?
Women And Vulnerability
According to Maslow’s theory, the satisfaction of lower-level needs facilitates satisfying the next higher-level need. Sans safety, no need is ever fully met. The need for safety is also to be understood from a gendered perspective. Are women ever capable of reaching the top of the pyramid and meeting their self-actualisation goals if they have to be constantly watching over their shoulders? Or, have women trained themselves differently to see safety as an elusive, unattainable concept, and they are carrying on regardless? Have women, in other words, self-actualised as essentially vulnerable human beings? Perhaps so. Because this is the only way they are allowed to operate. Accepting their vulnerability and putting up their fences is what they have been getting good at.
It involves a process of becoming a less-than-human entity. A focus on women’s bodies leads to “women to be perceived, and to behave, more like object and less like a human,” psychologists Nathan A. Heflick and Jamie L. Goldenberg concluded in their study of literal objectification. The most damning indictment of the gender status quo of our world comes as follows: “Women themselves also behave more like objects (by, e.g., speaking less) when they are aware of this focus by others”.
When The ‘Code’ Is Broken
Women’s need for safety has been marginalised, unless it is fetishised, for so long that anyone asserting it makes the headlines. It is seen as something radical and, ironically, destructive. Women’s need for safety hurts men’s need to always be in control. By not continuing to be objects, women break the code.
During the historical Giséle Pelicot rape trial, Dominique Pelicot stated that the trial had ruined his life and family. Coming from a man pronounced guilty of programming an elaborate rape-my-drugged-wife activity for almost a decade, the sentiment is dark and sinister.
Similarly, in the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni case, the demand for a safe workplace environment was touted as a problem that needed to be addressed only by destroying Lively’s reputation. Women are not supposed to ask for safeguards, even from men who claim to be safeguarding women—Baldoni received the Voices of Solidarity Award on 9 December from the Vital Voices Global Partnership for his commitment to women’s empowerment. What does it tell us about the dispensability of women’s equal rights when even an ‘ally’ finds it difficult to stop being a garden variety workplace harasser?
Sometimes, it feels that only women are not allowed to feel safe. It’s as if almost everyone, including many women, has accepted it, too. When an accident happens on the road, a process of accountability assignation kickstarts. Who’s at fault may come later, but at least there is no quest for the perfect victim. Women’s lives are shattered by multiple metaphorical car crashes, and they mostly go unnoticed. If women demand safety, they are labelled as destructive, difficult, delusional or deranged, depending on what the flavour of the month is.
It does not make sense anymore.
(Nishtha Gautam is a Delhi-based author and academic.)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
