Entitlement is in our blood. We feel entitled to choose, to speak, to know, to listen when need be. This city has continually reminded me that these most basic forms of freedom are hardly possessed by everyone. This very day I was entitled to my opinion in regards to a woman that I had met two months prior. She is a professional beggar. She asks and receives for a living. Unlike the last time we met, she no longer had an infant in her arms. She sadly explained to me that her child had passed away. In that moment, I felt entitled to choose if I should listen, to believe her words or not, to respond to them or to kindly bow out. I am able to go about life in such a way that this world displays the thoughts and opinions I’ve projected upon it, my actions hinging upon all my preconceived notions. I decided whether this woman’s words were true or false. In this way, entitlement is power.
Recently, in conversation with an Indian friend, I spoke openly about Sari Bari’s vision and hope, he did so about the red-light areas. Bluntly he said, “without the existence of such areas, the good women in our society would be put in danger.” He was not defending his own actions, a young man who has not and who will most likely never visit such an area, but expressing an opinion I’ve read and heard a good number of times now. This opinion he was entitled to shielded his eyes, as well as much of society’s from considering the reality of how a woman has become “good” or “bad,” how a girl has come to find herself working in a brothel. His later explanations of karma spoke into the “bad” woman’s conceived fate. I cringed inside as I listened, as I have many times sitting and listening from a church pew. There is power in expressing one’s opinion. And in my own thought processes, as well as the words of others, I’ve come to consider that a sense of entitlement, believing it one’s right to think or act a certain way, can become something of a disease, one that easily blinds us of everything outside our own point of view.
Today I passed a man on the sidewalk, his screen printed t-shirt read “one drop of ink can make a million people think.” The shirt reminded me of something I had recently read, another double standard to add to the list of others. In a law commission report written here in 1992, regarding prostitution laws, it was stated that:
“the professional prostitute, being a social outcast, may periodically be punished without disturbing the usual course of society… the man, however, is something more than a partner in an immoral act; he discharges important social and business relations, is a father or brother responsible for the maintenance of others, has commercial or industrial duties to meet. He cannot be imprisoned without damaging society.”
And so it appears a man is neither good nor bad. He is simply a man, who can only control so much of himself, entitled to think and act as he wishes. He is of course the backbone of society. And the young girl trafficked into brothel, her body is but an object for the entitled man to project his opinion upon. She is there by choice or however he imagines it, she is making a living and could not do so otherwise. His money provides for her, it entitles him to do with her what he pleases, it justifies and fulfills his cravings for lust and power. He is free to consider her circumstances however he wishes. To him and society, she is simply a protector of the “good” woman, knowing she will never be one herself.