Valson Thampu

Vijay P. Nair is either a psychologist, as he claims, or a mental case, as he seems. Whether dabbling in clinical psychology is as dangerous as fiddling with demonology, I do not know. But, there is something this Nair now knows; which, perhaps, he did not know before. He knows that there are consequences, even for misogynists.
Our interest, for the time being, is neither in misogynists nor in feminists. VPN hates certain women, not because they are morally deviant but because they are feminists. It is the same old pattern: what you do becomes offensive because of who you are. It is not the contention of this one-man moral police that men are morally superior to women. Of course, he may not know that gloating over the alleged aberrations of others is as perverse as the aberrations themselves. We can’t blame him; for such things are not taught in psychology text books. It is another matter that even if they were, he would not have known them, given the quality of his education, which is none of our concerns. It is a concern; but it need not be our concern here.
The real issue is this. What is man? What is woman? One cannot be understood without the other. The problem is, if you please, a theological one. For man to understand who man is in himself, is to become, God forbid, a V. P. Nair, one way or another. For woman to re-configure what she is, based on what man is, is to have to live perpetually armed with charcoal oil and clenched fists. We need to be biblical, for a change. Eve was gifted to Adam, to be a ‘proper-help’ to him. So, one thing is obvious. Adam needed help. That is to say, Adam was not what needed to be. He was, shall we say, a halfway home. Almost there; but not quite! The key is this: Adam needed ‘proper’ help; not any kind of help. Given the context, this crisp and crucial marker means only one thing. Adam needed help to be man (not to run a kitchen for him, or to warm his bed). Creationally, Adam was neither male nor female; which is the problem that still plagues men of all description. To be neither male nor female, to be other than what one ought to be, is to be precariously close to being insane. Adam needed to be man; but he was anything but man. In that respect, he needed help. God would not help him. He’d only provide ‘proper help.’ Woman!
Let’s not get this wrong. Eve becomes ‘proper’ only by way of midwifing the man in Adam. Adam needs to be born again. Eve would mother him in that process. Wordsworth got this wrong. ‘Child is father of man’ he said. That’s quite off the point. Man needs not a father, but a mother. That’s the core, by the way, of anthropology too. It’s not father, but mother that matters. That is why monogamy was invented, women’s movement restricted and her purity desperately safeguarded. Purity was never a male requisite. The only certain, assured factor in the life of a human being – especially of men – is mother. Father is an elusive, slippery category. That’s yet another reason why he needs help.
To get a handle on this issue, consider one of the many ‘experiments’ that Gandhi conducted in the Tolstoy Farm in South Africa.
The irony in all this needs to be noted. In the venom and vulgarity of this Nair’s fulminations against feminists, he precipitates the question, ‘Do these words emanate from the mouth of a man?’ ‘What is man?’ One feels sorry for the load of muck he carries within himself. No one can fail to catch the strident overtones of screaming sexual frustrations in his words. Deep down, he holds women responsible for the private hell he carries. Feminists are, in his understanding, wholly responsible for the mounting misery of man. So, he has a right to take it out on them. Not even a blind and deaf person can miss this: Nair is punishing women with words, for not being what he wants them to be. In this, he is least bothered about what women should ideally be. He is maniacally obsessed with what some women are, which is not to his liking. He is vomiting gall at them, because they won’t fall in.
Man needs help! The tragedy of our times is that he finds none. In this male chauvinist world there are no men. We only have abortions of what could have been men. Woman have failed, are failing, to birth men. Now male degeneration has reached such a pass that man is beyond the reach even of ‘proper help.’ The result is all too evident. Man-woman relationship – to which the Nair affair is a pointer – is a domain of mutual hacking, sustained by ever-mounting resentment. Some bite their tongues and endure it. Others, unburdened by personal dignity, ‘take it out’ on others. Frankly, it is immaterial as to who this Nair attacks. It is not the object of attack that matters. What matters is his desperate, visceral need to attack. His bowels were full, and he needed to excrete. He simply used the YouTube as a lavatory, as many men and women do these days. Social networking sites are cyber sites for public defecation today.
This one issue stares at us from all this. We, men and women, need to become human! We need help to that end. That help will not come from seers, avatars, or saviours. We have to help each other. For a couple of centuries now, men and women have fought the gender war with growing bitterness. We have, in the process, only regressed as human beings. The time is now to be saner, wiser. We are, today, at the Kairos moment for the birth of a new humanity.
Neither macho men nor catch-up women, by themselves, can birth this new creation. It is a momentous task in which both, male and female, have to be proper-help to each other. Renunciation of power is the sine qua non for this new partnership. It is only when power is renounced that love stands a chance to kindle life and nurture human kindness. The alternative is to have rivers of charcoal oil swell and overrun the gender landscapes of life.