Re #boislockerroom: It was in grade VI when I got pulled into a gamble around genitals. ”If you buy me ice-cream, I will show you what’s under my pants”, the boy sitting next to me said. It came as an abrupt invitation. No-one had quite put it like that before; going nude for icecream? He was the class’ blue-eyed boy, and I had only just joined in. To get to sit with him was a matter of early-teen prestige which I wasn’t willing to throw away easily. To keep him, and my seat, I conceded. He dropped his pencil, and when I bent down to pick it up, he grabbed the end of his shorts, snuck in his hand, pulled his underwear away, seized my head and made me look all the way up his thigh. It seemed that neither one of us knew how long this moment should last, but it felt like I was down there till my neck hurt. I came back up unsteady, and struggled to shed from my vision what I had just seen. His genitals were glued to my face now. No matter how hard I struggled, I just could not cast them away. They stayed on, as if pinned to my forehead, for the entire class, then the one after, and another. Teachers came and left, but I couldn’t tell what went on the blackboard. His dangly bits refused to leave my face till hours after we got to lunch, to the canteen, when he made me buy him his icecream. It was only then when I finally understood why he did what he did. He sat licking his prize narrating how he had won it, bragging to friends around. He managed to make me the butt of his jokes. The class spent the entire lunch admiring his ‘dare’ and laughing at me, and it was probably for the first time I felt shame. I didn't know where to look, I didn't know what to say. This was my welcome to adolescence; a brief, sudden, unwanted peep show. It felt dirty, so filthy and so ugly.
Two decades, and several experiences later (a large portion of which was spent listening to horrid stories of unspeakable sexual abuse that my female friends had suffered, survived, and had grown up to talk about), I read the play UGLY by the award winning author Christos Tsiolkas. It is a sketch of frustration through the lens of a high-school drop out who commits a seemingly senseless act of violence under the headiness of masculine toxicity. I read this play along with SLUT, written by the acclaimed playwright & novelist Patricia Cornelius, which takes its cue from a horrific real-life teen shooting spree incident. She generates a fictionalised history of the killer’s ‘lover’, dubbing her ‘Lolita’, and speculates on what kind of personal story might lie behind the tabloid label of a ‘party girl’.
In a special note to me, Patricia wrote how she went to various schools (in Australia) to talk to young people about gender, and how she learnt that some things don’t ever change - “When a girl is overtly sexual, she is diminished, disregarded, sneered upon. Her best friend will drop her, boys will think of her as “an easy lay”, the world will have no sympathy for her no matter what happens to her - she would have brought it upon herself, she would have deserved it, and she would be the cause of it.” Adolescence and sex is a minefield.
Interweaving the two scripts, I created the play Tenderness (2012). The intention was to unpack issues of race, class, sexual-preference and the role of social media. Along with the student-actors, we brought to rehearsals several teenage testimonies of committing crimes that are assessed as cases that are ‘deviant’ or ‘individual’. Contrary to perception, the teenage world is often disturbing and macabre, where notions of gender, sexuality, love, aspirations and hate create a world of disorder and chaos. In the play, the characters performed an intensely contested ‘body’ between locations of childhood and adulthood. How teenagers navigate this journey shapes the kind of adults they become at the end of it. Does being a teenager necessarily mean to be 'volatile’? Is it to be read alongside normative notions of childhood development where we go from being child, teenager to adult in some kind of ahistorical vacuum?
Bearing its content in mind, the play was given an ‘adults only’ rating. This was ironic, because the play was about teenagers, for teenagers. Who can watch and who cannot is a funny business in India, and I am rarely able to point towards the maturity behind these judgements. On the day of the third show, a mother arrived to watch the play with her two teenage daughters. She admitted that she was aware about its explicit nature (her husband had watched the play a day before), and had decided that it was relevant for their daughters to watch it. This was a play with scenes in which teenage characters spoke about things any Indian parent would scowl at them for. The mother persisted at the door and eventually fought her way in. She sat sandwiched between her daughters. She kept talking to them throughout the play; they laughed, they were aghast, they shared silences together. The mother hunted me down after the show, shook my hand, and said “I couldn’t have had this conversation with my girls at home.”
How we talk to young boys and girls about these issues also shows what kind of adults we are ourselves. The play ended with these memorable lines, which somehow capture the slippery turf that is adolescence.
“We were trying to get to this place—it was me and you, I think, and some other people—and it was a little like my house … Although, well, it was my house, but it didn’t look like my house, somehow. And we were trying not to be seen.”
