CULTURE-SRI LANKA: Repressed Sexuality Flares Up at Movies

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Dec 15 1997 (IPS) - Three Australian women walked into a cinema in the Sri Lankan capital last month to watch ‘Kama Sutra’, a film based on the fourth century Indian sex manual.

Minutes later they were running out of the hall, forced to leave by jeering men in the audience, some of whom had unzipped and were making vulgar gestures.

The uproar led cinema managers to hold three ‘women’s only’ shows of ‘Kama Sutra’, the first time they took such a stand — sparking a controversy about segregation as a cure to the widespread malaise of sexual harassment.

“Why segregation?” asked journalist and film writer Karuna Perera. “Do men and women live in two different worlds?” In her opinion segregation is a “temporary” solution and should not be allowed.

But most feminists are seeing the ‘women’s only’ shows as inevitable in a paternalistic society like Sri Lanka. It is a matter of a women’s right to be in the cinema, they say.

Last year, cinemas in many Indian towns and cities showed the controversial ‘Bandit Queen’ to only female audiences. The film in Hindi on a low-caste woman who raped by upper caste men takes the law into her hands, has some very violent scenes and the male audience reaction had been very similar to that in Colombo.

In Mumbai and in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh state, there were mile-long queues of women who wanted to see the film in the tranquillity of the special shows.

According to Sri Lankan activist Eva Ranaweera of the ‘Voice of Women’ group, the aggressive male audience reaction to even mildly sexually-explicit scenes is part of the larger “societal dilemma” facing South Asian cultures.

Though female and male sexuality was written about in ancient texts, even celebrated on panels in temples, it is talked about behind closed doors today. As a result, women suffer all kinds of repression and abuse — incest, wife battering and rape — in the confines of their home.

In conservative Sri Lanka, men think a woman who ventures alone to the cinema is promiscuous, says Ranaweera.

Till a few years ago, going to the cinema was a family outing, women did not go unaccompanied. With the advent of television and video films, the audiences in movie halls became mostly male, and the films themselves deteriorated in standard to soft-porn.

Professor S.T. Hettige, head of the sociology department at the University of Colombo, says that cinemas, in a bid to survive, began offering erotica to attract viewers, who are mainly from urban shanties and slums, too poor to afford TV sets.

The strategy clicked, and business boomed again for cinemas. “To the young, it was also an avenue to get away from the problems of daily life,” Hettige thinks.

“Sexual, seduction, steamy love scenes”, promises a film running in Colombo this week, that has a kissing couple on the poster. Another billboard advertises the “sexual appetite of one woman who takes on three men in one night”.

“Being sexually inactive, they (males) use the cinema as a way of release,” Hettige asserts, arguing that the raising of the age of marriage to 28 years for men and 26 years for women has also added to pent-up frustrations.

Veena Jayakody, an award-winning Sri Lankan actress, however, has no sympathy with “these perverts”, as she calls jeering male audiences. In her opinion, ‘Kama Sutra’ is an educational film, and women must be able to watch it freely.

“It is shocking that someone’s father, brother or husband should behave in a crude and obscene manner not only at this movie, but also at other ‘adults’ only’ movies,” she adds. “It just goes to show that they are waiting for a chance to reveal their perversions.”

Journalist and film writer Perera says the answer is to beef- up security, “so that men and women could sit side-by-side and view the movie.”

‘Kama Sutra’, named one of the 10 best movies at the 1996 Toronto film festival, is made by India-born Mira Nair. The film has been shown round the world, but not in India where the censors are demanding major cuts in the film, which the director, Nair, director has refused to do.

The film, Perera says, should have focussed equally on male and female sexuality, which might have kept the rowdy male audience quiet.

But Perera is a lone voice in opposing segregated movies. Veteran film and TV actress, Iranganie Serasinghe, says ‘women’s only’ shows are a very good idea, as Asian women would be embarrassed to sit with their menfolk and watch a movie like ‘Kama Sutra’.

“When the need arises, segregation may be necessary,” she asserts. The cinema owners are happy: all three shows of ‘Kama Sutra’ were house full, and there was no trouble at all from the ‘women only’ audience.