The Skin She Wears

Woman is always on debates about being judged on the skin she wears blurring the line between sensuality and vulgarity. Jahnabi Mitra takes a dive into the issue.

All men are born voyeurs preferring the childish delights of stumbling on a scene of unsuspecting nymphs unclothed rather than stage-managed acts of striptease.

The Act of Seeing with two eyes is also an act of resolving contradictions. It resolves the duelling contradictions of what the eyes see and the effect that the object is creating in its visual space and transforming it into a visual language that the mind sees. Lingerie, corsets, breasts and feathers- they speak the language of intimacy and femininity. Yet this wild language of romance and sexuality, when interacts with the societal mind, transforms it into something more incomprehensible.

Freud wasn’t wrong when he said that, every man is driven by the pleasure principle. This line from Khushwant Singh’s book ‘on WOMEN, SEX, LOVE and LUST’ emphasises the fact that man was born to indulge in pleasurable sensations.

But where does the indulgence of a voyeur meet its extent? What satiates this voyeur? Does he melt the lines of vulgarity and sensuality into one?

Do these lines even exist?

Vulgarisation, on purely etymological grounds, as used in French means popularisation or bringing it closer to people. Speaking from a capitalist viewpoint, any object that needs to be popularised needs to be lower in economic value. Whereas, the term ‘Sensual’ emerges out of anything that appeals to our senses with undertones of sexuality. Sensuality has added notes of mystery and art, which in turn heightens its economic value.

Although both these terms involve a flavour of sexuality in it, it is difficult to compartmentalise them.

When I started working on this story, this blurred line kept coming on my mind. A few days back I asked filmmaker friend of mine to differentiate sensuality and vulgarity, he immediately pointed out towards two women on the passage as the exemplary. “Be more specific about what you’re saying?” I asked him. He butted his last smoke for the evening and said, “Look, if Rakhi Sawant and Kate Moss stands naked in front of you right now, who would be more sensually appealing for you”.

“So it’s about the viewer’s mind, are you telling me that?”

“No, you could say that too but according to me, it’s about the woman herself. It is the quality about the way she carries herself.”

The definitions of vulgarity are time-construed. Take for instance, in pre-independent India, women who wore blouses with saree were labelled ‘vulgar’ as they believed that breasts are very much a part woman’s body and any women who cover them, uses her breasts ‘commercially’. What was vulgar then, is decency now.

Sensuality, however, transcends beyond construes of time and body; clothing and armour. In fact, a woman’s mind could be one of her most sensuous parts. Her body might not intrigue you, but the way she breathes out each word, the way she holds her pen and the way she sips her tea could excite you.

Sensuality is as blatantly blurred with vulgarity as much is Erotica with pornography. The thin line separating both the concepts is the ‘aesthetic appeal’. The latter, always devoid of the ability to titillate the mind, to titillate the senses. Sensuality involves the art of seduction; seduction moving beyond the boundaries of the body.

I was seduced by Marianne Faithfull’s sensual voice in “Trouble in Mind” on a cold December morning. I was seduced by Radhika Apte’s photograph – smoking inconspicuously, looking away to someone on her left and her deep V-necked black dress.

Sensuality in literature is merely a refinement and artistic expression of lustful desires of the young lover in agony…

Women have put themselves under the mental scrutiny of men from the time Eve was born out of Adam’s rib. It’s a lie to say that we dress for ourselves. We live in the realm of the metaphorical male gaze, sometimes for our own needs and desires and sometimes for the merely induced anxiety of being a woman. This turns the whole concepts of sensuality and vulgarity into a Papier Mache’ dough in our heads

There is a difference in the way in which a man appreciates a woman and how we perceive the other sex appreciates beauty. In Peter Brown’s book The Body and Society, he describes male and female as being the division of subjective and objective. He discusses how, in Greek civilisation, women unruliness and wildness is a way for men to place their fears outside of themselves.

What a person considers to be vulgar is purely determined by his intentions and perceptions and his definition is nothing but the sole reflection of his interests and can never satisfy another person. Accommodation, defiance, repression, fragility, strength- these are all armours she wears in her attire; both placed in the context she wears it and placed in the viewer’s mind.