Ranjona Banerji | Feel The Pinch? Don’t Ya Dare Whine About LPG

I received one of those asinine social media forwards the other day about the current cooking gas shortage in India. It postulated that people were “whining like whores” over the shortage and what could the poor government do anyway. Apart from the content of the forward, the only purpose of which was to save the government from criticism, the phrase “whining like whores” really got my goat.

For one, what does it mean? As my sister, who has worked closely with commercial sex workers — a silent exploited group if there ever was one — asked, when do whores ever whine? And then, that usual patriarchal misogyny implicit in the phrase. Women, they’re the ones who usually cook in homes. So, they must be the ones whining. Like “whores”.

And then there are those geniuses who jump straight into the “in my day we had no piped or cylinder gas” stories. Yes, and in your day it was your poor mother or wife or aunt who had to collect firewood and then cook in a cramped airless room. Or use coal. Or use kerosene. And often get lung disease from the fumes. But who cares about whores, right, even if that might be your grandmother or mother.

Fake or exploitative nostalgia stories to prop up an incompetent government is one thing. Double standards are the other. In your “day” there was no internet either. But you’re now using it to spread your nonsense. So why wouldn’t a whore want the convenience of cooking gas?

As teenager, the famous Rubens painting, The Rape of Sabine Women, distressed me. I could not understand the celebration of the word “rape” in the title. And this is in spite of being disturbed by “rape as entertainment” in just about every Hindi film of the time. The semi-erotic nature of the painting, where distressed women were also being sexualised however explains the abiding notion of likening women to “whining whores”.

There is discussion in the western world, and in some in the rest of the world as well, over the “manosphere”. Where young impressionable boys are seduced into a macho internet space where older men tell them that they are useless and women will reject them because women don’t want useless men. The narrative, as the jargon puts it, somehow makes women responsible for the problems teenagers might have with approaching girls.

How do women feel about this? Who knows or cares. As the internet masculinity gurus explain, it doesn’t really matter what women think or want. A new documentary by British journalist Louis Theroux dives into this world of men. World of angry frustrated men, from what I can understand. I have not seen this documentary. But it is not an unfamiliar world to any woman. It might be the sort of man who divides women in whining whores and their mummy who made hot chapatis for her darling beta while breathing in fumes from a kerosene stove.

You see the manosphere everywhere on social media. Where any woman who speaks up against injustice or for against convention will get mocked, threatened with rape and death. Women do not make such threats with as much frequency. And often, sadly, those who do threaten violence are those deep in the shackles of patriarchy.

The celebration of women as an inferior species has not been as stark as with the current response to the revelations of the Epstein files, by the US Department of Justice. Even with the redaction of names, it is clear that the world’s most powerful men, and unfortunately a few women, were part of what appears to be a giant sex trafficking ring of paedophiles and rapists. And while they abused women and children, they also decided on world policies. Some of the effects of which we see around us in the current unnecessary wars.

Men from politicians and industrialists, lawyers and bankers, were part of this ring. But also, men of the arts and of science, from Nobel prize winners to celebrated film directors. These are men who are looked up to and respected. Men who cavorted with and communicated freely with the late Jeffrey Epstein, even after he was convicted for soliciting sex with a minor in 2008.

Epstein died in jail in 2019, awaiting trial for sex trafficking of minors; some say his death was under mysterious circumstances. The only person serving time currently is a woman, Ghislain Maxwell, his partner in crime and lead procurer of young women and children. Since the files were released, there have been minor ripples across the world. But not the sort of outrage you might have expected. Not from the world’s media, not from the general do-gooders who run our moral voices and not even from women’s groups. You will find louder voices advocating for fewer avocadoes to be eaten to save the planet than you will for more convictions and investigations into the names mentioned in the files.

It demonstrates, to me at least, how unimportant the continued exploitation of women is, especially when the scale is so large and the main culprits appear to be important and wealthy people, as in men. Gisele Pelicot, who was drugged by her husband and then raped for years by unknown men, refused anonymity when her husband was arrested on other charges in 2020 and the police found evidence of the rapes. For this, she is seen as a feminist icon; because she refused to be shamed for abuse done to her. And that is what it takes to be an icon — for the world to know that you have been abused because you insist the shame is borne by the perpetrator.

The women and children exploited by Epstein and his large band of powerful friends, most of them are silenced victims. Of the few who spoke out, Virgina Giuffre found that her life was ruined by her search for justice and she finally took her own life, aged 41.

They are the whining whores, the women who do not matter. Because powerful men will be powerful men. And boys will be boys.