Let There Be Light 💡

It is difficult to know how to properly manage our resources, these days. It’s hard to see clearly, in the gathering dark. And the air is filled with smoke from wood fires, as it was in the days of our ancestors.

It’s hard to fact check, with the rush and swirl of incoming and often contradictory information and bulletins and opinions. But earlier today I thought I saw flickering on my intermittent screen display a piece of incomprehensible news: it is proposed that the country save electricity by switching off the street lights that illuminate the streets on which our citizens walk.

I have attempted to digest a lot of hard to chew data lately, with pandemic statistics and beauty queen dramas and the ill timed opening of pleasure domes, the creative redistribution of portfolios and accounts and accountabilities - but this really takes the last piece of love cake.

I will check this fact, but it seems to me that the installation of street lights in urbanized areas was one of the great benefits of industrialization. Citizens could feel safe and protected, as they went about their business, returning from work and essential grocery shopping after dark. This was particularly so for women, always more vulnerable to predators, thugs, and other lawless elements of society.

Sri Lanka is noticeably nineteenth century in many ways, particularly where its legal processes and social mores are concerned, but this removal even temporarily of the citizens’ right to illumination and safe conduct after dark in their own streets sets us back into an era before the harnessing of electricity.

In a socialist democracy, the citizens surely have a right to expect safety and protection, and they are entitled to consider that their elected rulers should place their welfare in a position of priority. How can we see what is happening, in our streets, lanes, suburbs and precincts, when there is no light? How can CCTV cameras show any footage without street lights to reveal the identity of robbers and thieves, who attempt to scale the perimeter walls?

It seems as if those rights - far from being inalienable - have been cumulatively eroded; and ideals which were considered foundational structures of the country have been whiteanted away over time, leaving only a facade which can easily be overturned by a breath of ill wind.

What a colossal waste.

What a crying shame.

That a once resplendent land, which its citizens were proud to inhabit, is currently so shadowed that our future path, let alone our progress, is impossible to foresee.

Birds Of Paradise

Being a woman in Sri Lanka in 2022 is a challenging experience. Gender in a patriarchal society whose hetero normative values are entrenched is intensely complicated by the complex fragility of South Asian men, in a triple colonized country. I suggest that the extreme and multi-faceted misogyny experienced by girls and women in Sri Lankan society has at its core the compulsive need that colonised men have to subjugate the women they claim to desire, love and need, but in fact frequently seek to control and dominate.

Young women in Sri Lanka experience harassment and interference on many levels: from body shaming in their teens and twenties, to workplace harassment, to gender discrimination in the employment and workplacement process, to inequitable maternity arrangements, to catcalling and street harassment to and from the workplace on public transport, and to domestic violence and intimate partner violence in the home. If they seek relief from a toxic domestic environment via divorce, they are often terrorized, shamed or targeted by their ex, who cannot tolerate what he perceives as any kind of rejection. Their professional reputations are often the target of sustained defamatory abuse.

One day a year, highflying women in Sri Lanka are recognised for their inspiring achievements - usually women who are in the public eye or in the corporate world. The rest of the year sees the rest of the female citizenry of the country effectively erased, marginalized, dismissed and downtrodden.

This state of things, like many debilitating factors which degrade the society in which we live and work, has become normalized, to the extent of many women also internalizing misogynistic values, and participating in harassment and bullying of other women online and in the workplace, instead of supporting or encouraging them to stand their ground.

Diminishing of the status of women is a loss to the whole society, and categorizing this as a minority issue is a misrepresentation. It is not only statistically untrue to call women a minority group, but a failure to recognise their contribution, their capacities, their dignity and their worth.

So many men in Sri Lanka have abused their positions as leaders, by harassing and intimidating their female staff members and colleagues, unrealistically expecting respect in exchange for the profound disrespect they themselves offer. The #MeToo movement in this country has not exposed any major players, and it is easy to see why. Women are systemically outgunned, and outnumbered in public office. It is too easy to dismiss their opinions as overwrought, emotional or hysterical.

Yet anger is an emotion: and one of the most destructive of all. And it is often shown by male bosses, fathers, husbands, boyfriends, brothers and other authority figures, specifically to frighten and enforce the compliance of those whom they perceive to be lesser than them in status, and who need to be ‘shown their place’. Anger management is something that violent people need to learn, because a person who cannot control themselves and their frustrations should not have authority or influence over others.

Members of the younger generation of activists are speaking up, now, and openly calling for gender parity on panels and boards (via such initiatives as #balancethepanel) and critiquing the messages disseminated by sexist and belittling advertising in mainstream media. Predatory behaviour of all kinds is being called out, via social media. Unprofessional conduct in many professional arenas is no longer always escaping the blind eye that has traditionally been turned towards such behaviour.

Any non-normative venture in Sri Lanka which seeks to expand the visibility of women and expand the definitions of what a woman is, faces compulsive trolling, knee jerk mansplaining, ridicule, outrage and misunderstanding. The need to keep girls and women in their designated ineffectual ‘place’ is obviously very much part of the cultural identity of the people in Sri Lankan society. Toxic rather than divine masculinity has dominated the discourse for decades.

Gender violence in contemporary Sri Lanka should be seen as part of the violence inherent in the fractured society as a whole. People who perceive themselves to be second class citizens in a hierarchy imposed on them unjustly, have very little capacity for empathy towards those even more vulnerable in real terms than they themselves feel they are.

The weight of oppression: a fusion of gender, race, ethnicity, religion and caste, can paralyze a person who is confined by these suffocating categorizations. The silencing of people who have the capacity to question and challenge the conformity which keeps us less than we could be as a society is both a vicious trend and a red flag. And the description of a country where this routinely occurs as a ‘Paradise’ is now unfortunately ironic, where people are concerned. The landscape is still idyllic, but the people are being subjected to outmoded inequities and indignities.

A new generation of leadership is currently being trained, with an eye to the future. A key aspect of that training is knowledge of diversity, inclusiveness, gender respect and ethical behaviour. In the meantime, it is a daily ordeal for many of our citizens, who in addition to lacking power in terms of petrol, litro gas, and diesel fuel, lack power in more intrinsically relational and personal ways, as a result of their gender status.

The good thing is, that unlike fossil fuels, the powers of self belief, self awareness and self worth are always renewable, and are not dependent on external sources or authorities. Caged birds have the capacity to fly, as well as sing.

Parasitology

We live in a tropical country, and it is a fertile environment for parasites. The landscape around us could be said to be pulsating with these repellant creatures, locking horns with each other and compulsively latching onto targeted hosts and leeching energy, nutrients and vitality for their own survival from them.

We see parasites in the plant and animal world, visibly hanging off the bigger and healthier entity on which they are feeding. Invisible to the human eye, parasites which cause disease propagate in air, water, and within our human systems.

This week, I witnessed some remarkable occurrences of parasitism in the online sphere.

We are all familiar these days with the phrase ‘content creation’. And creation of fresh, original, relevant content both verbal and visual is what drives the growth of online platforms on Facebook and Instagram.

Social media strategists suggest that when an organisation starts to build its platform, and stake its place in the online sphere, it should create interesting posts using compelling and attractive visuals, and utilize catchy hashtags, to attract reader traffic. These words and images should be posted regularly, and even digitally scheduled, to ensure continuous growth and recognition of the relevant page.

It’s often exciting when we begin to use online tools and start to become more adept in using them, learning to connect interactively to our target audience, and build and grow our brand, whether we are a lone blogger or a community organisation.

Successful online organizations will tell you that it takes time and effort, trial and error, and quite a long period of diligent experimenting before they start to see results in terms of growth of audience engagement measurable in increased numbers of likes, follows and emojis.

A quick and lazy way to cut through this effortful process is for a person to create a whole blog or an entire YouTube channel dedicated to ‘critiquing’ one particular Netflix show or the website or publications of a particular company or organisation. They grow their audience from the disaffected or curious viewers of the original broadcast. The phenomenon of false equivalence created by the internet means a blogger with 5 followers can swell fat by trashing a programme with 5 million followers.

The ‘critiques’ are often thinly disguised attacks, sometimes on specific individuals, and the elasticity of freedom of speech seems to cover a lot of ground in terms of what can be said on public platforms. The parasitic bloggers and commenters flourish and profit in the short term by deriving their own material directly from the original content first broadcast by their host.

We see this happening with the new season of ‘Sex And The City’, for example. A person wholly unknown to me is videotaping herself each week, commenting step by step and scene by scene on everything she hates about the new season of the phenomenally successful TV show, the recent iteration of which is titled ‘And Just Like That’.

‘Sex And The City’ was viewed as the ‘It’ Show of its time, when the leading ladies were young and perceived as physically attractive. Now, those sweet young things are nearly 60, and a lot of the criticism of them is centered on how much - and how gracelessly and awkwardly - they have aged, and how much the writers have strayed from the vibrant premises of the original show, with its focus on female friendship and sexual pleasure.

The unknown YouTuber is feeding off the prevalent negativity in a repellant way, enriching herself through the direct correlation and conflation of the content. It’s a form of mimesis, and also a form of stalking. At its most sinister, it’s a form of silencing. If a person had mud thrown at them every day when they left their home, they would possibly one day wake up and decide not to go out of their own front door. Whose freedom of expression is being affected adversely, now?

Today, we know more about how the human mind works, and marketers and social media strategists are aware that sensationalist headlines, clickbait and controversial material are big draw cards, particularly for a viewing audience who have suffered enforced stasis - courtesy of the pandemic - for two and a half years.

It’s a rapid surge of adrenaline, seratonin and dopamine to see the kind of contemporary bear baiting that is created by online contestation of this kind. ‘What has happened now? What scene did the YouTuber attack this time? Who got knifed in today’s episode?’

It can be (and is, often) argued that any publicity is good publicity, but I think that is a crude truism.

Parasitic content ‘creators’ have a ready made excuse: ‘The original organisation is so defensive, and easily offended. They should buckle up and be prepared to face public opinion, if their organisation wants public acclaim and recognition’.

It’s the ‘They are so sensitive!’ denial of wrongdoing justification we are all so familiar with, when some posturing renegade wants to avoid accountability for their cheap tricks and substandard conduct.

But the rapid hormonal spikes and fabricated controversies generated by parasitic content creators do not last long. The very same short attention span and low boredom thresholds that initially create interest on the part of viewers in this low grade infotainment are also their undoing.

True to their parasitic nature, they drop off, dry up and wither, while the original material maintains its substantial and often classic status over a far longer term.

Cue the Circle Of Life!