Abeer Shrivastava, Week 10

Jo Doezema urges the readers to reformulate their opinion about sex work and those involved in it. The general perspective os limited to two lenses, i.e., women are either forced into prostitution or they voluntarily choose to indulge in it. The author points out that a sex worker entering the industry voluntarily faces inferiority because of a feeling of pity that the public views them with as if they are victims or need help, a similar notion to that of those forced or trafficked into the profession. On that note, the practice is not viewed as a profession but instead as an obligation that women are forced to fulfil to obtain a source of income. The fact that force or poverty is looked first by NGOs when demanding their well deserved human rights, indicates that no regular female citizen would ever become a prostitute. Anagha Tambe points out that the legal system puts prostitutes on the same pedestal as that of the Devadasis. The society’s reaction to these women is uninviting even if the foundation of such practices is religious. Devadasis are viewed in a degrading light and are often expected to be sexually available since they belong to a lower caste and are expendable to ‘impurity’. In Indian society, a woman is considered pure only when she has had only one sexual partner her entire life. The concept of purity and impurity, in my opinion, has its roots in the traditionalist system of the ‘Ghar’, the spiritual sphere and the ‘Bahir’, the materialistic sphere, as described in the works of Partha Chatterjee. Just like any other institution governed by orthodox Brahman males, the Devdasi system too has hierarchies, respective to their chastity and caste.