Double shame for us when the 'liberal male' turns out to be a sexual harasser

"If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen."

This happens to be one of the most commonly used lines regurgitated to newbies in just about any professional setting, government or corporate, academic or entrepreneurial. This is the line that "mentors", "well-wishers", "senior friendly colleagues" repeat ad nauseam so that you shape up better, attain minds of steel to sustain and survive the "rat race", the "heat", the "competition".

If you're a woman, this "pulling your chin up" often amounts to not just casually putting up with, but in fact actively encouraging, the "feel-good flirtations" and endearments and the general cockiness of alpha males (and ageing former top guns of the wolf pack, now happily ensconced in mammoth, well-cushioned revolving armchairs, with taller and broader headrests to indicate the upper echelon, in glass-cubicles that need access cards and special appointments to get in).

This, we are told, and often so, is the real office setting. A setting where you can count all your female bosses in a nanosecond, while the bosses are aplenty, without the unnecessary prefix of course. Most of these bosses, and there is a pecking order, are in the business of change-making: through opinions, hard-hitting journalism, policy impacts, crunching numbers, evaluating stocks, performing delicate surgeries, pushing the global agenda of climate change, environmentalism, transparency, mind-altering research, ideology chiseling, and so much more. These are the bosses you "look up to", or did.

The thing is, these bosses, more often than not, are the "liberal males": modern, university-educated and perhaps with a string of fancy degrees and affiliations in their pockets, well groomed in the arts and sciences of ushering India into the 21st century. These bosses hobnob with (or scaldingly look down upon) the crème de la crème of the nation's mind. Indeed, they are the upper crust, or are attached to it with an umbilical cord that you see as a wormhole to that magical incantation: "career growth".

The whole business of "unreading" happens when you enter the workforce. And stay on for a while. You see, as you prepare that "brilliant" report on some urgent aspect of climate change at that organisation headed by a Nobel laureate, that just the report isn't enough. You have to endure, in fact fruitfully understand the intricacies of, the offer of a "head massage" from the prize-winning, internationally renowned supervisor of yours. You may squirm within when you hear others sing praises sine die for the very man who had a few days back sent you an obscene email, or had solicited sex via text. You remember the old lessons of "consensual sex", confident sexuality and sexual harassment laws that were drilled into you during your salad days of education. From men (and women) who adored your global icon of a supervisor.

You are asked to write a scathing piece on the "scumbags of Hollywood", the paedophiles, the sugar daddies with a trail of disgusted, exploited women behind them. You pen a passionate article. The editor loves it. You're in the ninth cloud. [That he's "dashing" makes the kudos feel bigger!] But then, he quietly gets up, says he'd discuss finer points over coffee. More than okay, you think, positively encouraged. Then you get in the elevator.

"You got in the elevator together? You were asking for it!"

Your flesh crawls (they say the law says it's a digital penetration, by definition "rape" in this newly bolstered-up legal universe, but who cares) when whether "you were asking for it" replaces every other conversation topic in your known world. You see opinion pieces penned by intellectual flatworms decrying how the "liberal male is essentially a sexist pig", and that how the Hindu/Muslim/Christian tradition, "way of life", rightfully proscribes such free-wheeling licentiousness, the intermixing, caste-class-religion-centrifuging sexual miscegenation that you, and your editor, deeply, deeply support with every fibre of your being.

Consensual, you were told. Consensual, you were expecting.

No, it's not his age. You have liked older men, yes, "old enough to be your father". You have liked them. Sexually, too.

But "consensual" the word filled up your galaxies of radiant sexed-up intellect and intellectualised sex.

This was coercion.

There was no consent. No, not even the "implied one".

You were raped. Technically. You don't believe it.

TV shows you dismissed condescendingly are running shouting marathons on the "degradation of the work atmosphere", whether pheromones flying off in a professional environment is a good thing or bad thing. Older women, super successful, having "broken the glass-ceiling", are castigating the "old boys club", that self-perpetuating bastion of "institutional sexism". You wonder if secretly they have tch-tch'ed at their friends' (also female, also having had broken the aforementioned glass-ceiling) mind-numbing cowardice of not standing up for a sexual harassment complainant, another one, and reinstating with befuddling silence the very specimen of the sexist pigs they so loathe on TV channels so as to perfectly preserve the entitlements in the odious formaldehyde of status quo.

Elsewhere, someone complained, on that other case. "Just sexual harassment? You mean there was no, you know, touching involved? You mean to say you're exasperated at being verbally unclothed only? Just unsolicited "sexts", just intimidation at workplace? What horseshit! Just airhead stuff, victim mentality! Pansy-ass!"

Liberal men, liberal women. You look at everyone afresh. That one spoke on "journalism of courage". The one, in the centre, surrounded by a bevy of fawning nymphets, he is a "transparency crusader". You know that bespectacled wonder with that plum Oxbridge accent: he's the ecowarrier-in-chief, still holding fort against the invaders high on fossil fuel. You are swallowed up by a cannibalising blackhole of change-makers.

Theirs is the "liberal project": you infinitely admire that. You live every second to be a part of that - that arrow, or cycle, of impacting lives, of mental, socio-political, civic, legal, sexual (of course, sexual) widening of horizons.

Yet you see the constrictions, the distortions, the restrictions, the backward steps, the regressions ushered in, left behind, reinserted by these very change-makers. Is enough to call it the "hypocrisy circuit"? Can you, can the world at large, do without the audacity of imagination and active enabling of possibilities, that these men, and women, have made a reality?

No, you can't.

Real change has happened. Is happening. Everyday.

Yet, how, just how do you reconcile the political and ideological largesse with the pettiness of the infringing finger that scarred you? Just how do you learn to appreciate once again the stellar, the superlative cause with the hand that that pressed send to dispatch that vomit-inducing email, even after that you clearly said "No!" To overtures, advances, out-of-place "compliments" on your feminine morphology, your freaking body.

Is this irony, you wonder?

Is this the "kitchen heat", that your friends, well-wishers, mentors, held out a placard for to draw your attention to?

You think, you say that the most logical thing is to regulate the heat, or dismantle the darned kitchen.

You tweet. Your friend tweets.

But who will dismantle the darned kitchen?

Who will change its architecture without imperiling the "liberal project"?  Without succumbing to the mollusks of medievalism who want to turn back time to an antediluvian idiocy of imagined innocence?

Who will feminise the kitchen without wondering if it's too pansy-ass now for alpha chefs to rekindle the hearth fire?

Who?