The soft politics and shadow plays of Sri Lankan misogyny

By Dulcinea Gunatilaka

Recently, a senior academic at Peradeniya University was removed from his position after being found guilty of sexual abuse of a junior colleague. The Supreme Court intervened to ensure that the sexual harassment in this instance was met with legal consequences in the face of the initial failure of the university to act to uphold the rights of the targeted woman.

What is significant about this case was that predatory behaviour in the professional environment, which usually takes place in private settings and which, due to the embarrassment and shame surrounding any victim who complains, is usually never brought into the open, was in this instance named and investigated and that the perpetrator was prosecuted and suffered real consequences for his conduct.

This landmark judgment offers dignity to an individual who has been wronged and also requires that the institutions and organizations in which the perpetrator operates step up into accountability even at the cost of initial public embarrassment. Shame must now start to change sides. For too long in this country, the victims of abuse and unprofessional misconduct have been shamed instead of the perpetrators facing consequences for their actions.

To understand that men and women in Sri Lanka live in different worlds in the same country, one only needs to interview several women in different spheres – business, government, academe, literature and media – about their experiences of harassment in their professional lives.

We can see then how misogyny and classism intersect in various spheres of society: in media, corporations, academia, the law and the professions, in government offices and in the private sector, including the worlds of politics, journalism and literature.

This disproportional experience of harassment and abuse is, of course, not unique to Sri Lanka, but when people say that Sri Lanka is a country like no other, endemic misogyny can be seen as the context in which Sri Lanka has not had a ‘Time’s Up’ or ‘Me Too’ movement. Sri Lanka has its Weinsteins and its Epsteins, but they are not operating on such a high-profile level. All sexual abuse and gender-based harassment cases have certain features in common: in every case, major power imbalances exist between the perpetrator and his target and a form of bartering transaction takes place between a less experienced person, usually a girl or young woman, and a more experienced person who, in most cases, is male, mega-rich, in the public eye and socially powerful.

In every instance, the perpetrator exhibits a sense of false but socially endorsed entitlement, dehumanizes the person they target and objectifies and exploits the person whom they are subjecting to mistreatment as if the people they harass are all generic and interchangeable and not individual human beings. These predators have developed a pattern of identifying the vulnerable and treating them like trophies and toys, devalued and discarded after use and abuse.

The ignorance and lack of sex education, rights and consent in which young women are still being raised in Sri Lanka leave them vulnerable to exploitation and coercion. In their lack of access to direct paths of advancement based on their merit and their social precariousness, they are part of an underclass defined by their gender status as weaker. Many do not even realize that what happens to them qualifies as abuse or is illegal. In the transactional environments of corporations and commerce, they are treated as commodities and expected to barter their beauty and desirability for promotion and advancement in their careers. Their economic vulnerability compounds their victim status. And this gives the perpetrators leverage over them.

There is a long tradition of infantilizing, marginalizing and ornamentalizing women. Women exist, in the minds of misogynistic people, merely to serve men, not as intellectual companions to discuss ideas with or to listen to or learn from. An interesting article arising from the Epstein investigation highlighted the way this belief operates to invalidate women.

Interestingly, what seems like alpha masculinity is performed by perpetrators who actually despise and dislike women as a gender, believing them to be an underclass, not seen as equals. The people they praise and venerate are usually only men. From the most trivial exclusionary memes they share, extolling only the great men of history to the all-male boards and panels and steering committees in corporate and governance culture, women are relegated to non-educative and non-executive roles.

The platforming of predators

Many of the worst offenders exhibit grandiose narcissism and seek public recognition and fame, so they operate in what we may see as a split-screen mode: perceived as respectable and renowned in public and acclaimed and platformed unknowingly by institutions operating in a whole social context that is created to empower them.

Their predatory personal conduct occurs in a hidden realm, and the public only sees these brash young men – articulate, often charming, and often described as a powerhouse or controversial or unapologetic. The worst behaviour usually occurs in their late teens, twenties and thirties. Their talent and loquaciousness enable them to ingratiate themselves with useful seniors in the institutions to which they attach themselves. Their directors and superiors have no idea of the conduct that is going on in the lower tiers of their research centres, foundations and corporations. By the time the perpetrators are in their forties and fifties, they have outlived the excuse of youthful brazenness, but they have by then left those hunting grounds behind them.

All of them have preyed on women, professionally and sexually. And all of them have systematically interfered with women’s professional progress and reputation in their fields. They have flourished in a culture of impunity. This culture is still entrenched, but it is now being exposed.

Given their track records, there is no reason to think that they change their beliefs and personal standards of conduct as they mature, although they age out of bad boy status over the years and many have sought positions of authority in academe. Several continue to ingratiate themselves with recognized people of good character as a form of camouflage. Meanwhile, the women whose career paths they have disrupted and derailed have to overcome the trauma they have experienced in order to progress in their lives.

The old guard are innocents who believe in ethics and moral codes, especially senior leaders and people of the older generation who live by codes of honour and integrity, and have been unknowingly platforming and promoting these questionable characters

This insidious moral corruption has infiltrated every institution in the country.

Based on the extensive anecdotal evidence so far, it is clear that this gross conduct occurs in a sort of parallel shadow realm, away from the blaze of the public eye, in which these predators like to strut and preen. Interfering with women is a sort of pastime for them, a leisure activity, which soothes their bristling egos and brings them temporary relief. The women involved are seen as a renewable resource.

They have thought until now that no one would ever call them out or remember how they have treated all the junior females they treated as prey. The harassment only ceased when the predators moved on in search of fresh supply.

The revelatory antics of Hugh Hefner, Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein, not to mention the fictional Charlie of Charlie’s Angels and actors and movie stars and beauty pageant hosts, have taught us that any man who encircles himself with women and surrounds himself with a harem of girlfriends and who is seen pictured with a bevy of young girls catering to him is viewed as powerful in a primate culture. James Bond is admired as a ladies’ man, but the Bond Girls are almost indistinguishable from the cars and the other expensive luxury toys in his garage and from each other.

Many men identify with these ‘winning’ stereotypes of success and seek to emulate them.

Whisper campaigns and shadow sovereignty

Because Sri Lanka is so small and the spheres in which high-flying aspirants operate is likewise relatively restricted, several names have come up several times in relation to sexually predatory and coercive conduct, bullying, disrespect and harassment. Several of these men have visibly engaged in clean-up activities to burnish their good name in recent years, including participating in community enterprises, archiving offensive blogs which made them controversial and on which they built their own visibility and performing pro-feminist virtue signalling of various kinds.

The Supreme Court in the case of the Peradeniya academic ruled that the members of all the departments at the university had to attend mandatory harassment awareness training. But the perpetrators in the wider community clearly believe they have managed to get away with it, keeping it undercover and refraining from perpetrating harassment against anyone but the most powerless and making it a point to befriend public feminists, presenting themselves as allies to the extent of even, to this day, giving presentations at public festivals on subject areas in which they have supposedly made themselves recognised experts. Certainly, perpetrating abuse makes a person an expert on it, but so does being targeted by it.

Swasthika Arulingam on her FB Page recently stated, “When we speak up, we don’t always get justice. Today morning I saw the face of a sexual predator being paraded as a ‘literary expert’ in an upcoming literary event. That is life.” She does not name the specific individual she has in mind, but there are at least three men who would fit her description.

This should not be what defines life for a Sri Lankan woman.

Men who have built fortunes on catering to the preferences of misogynistic viewers and consumers are now having to pivot. Elon Musk is having to reconsider the use of his X platform to promote deepfake images.

Opportunistic fempowerment is being engaged in by men like this, and it does not seem like atonement but appeasement. These femphobic men, in their daily conduct in their workplaces, have short fuses, are irritable and often contemptuous of women they consider beneath them in the work hierarchy and dismissive and hostile to their juniors, especially if they feel their own authority or pre-eminence is not being respected.

They have caused real damage to the women concerned, and to the country by extension, discouraging people of genuine talent from engaging in their work with full strength and vigour. The homegrown misogyny of our country intersects with the rise of global masculinist incel culture and its inbuilt resentment of the progress women have made in professional spheres.

Like all narcissists, the men who perpetrate harassment in the professional sphere behind closed office doors are very good at presenting an affable public profile and cultivating key people to create a cover of social respectability for themselves. It is a form of strategic camouflage that signals the opportunistic predator.

They do not usually change their conduct without intervention. And their fuelling compulsion is power hunger, not necessarily lust. In fact, misogyny operates to devalue women. One well-known perpetrator tried to actively sabotage a young researcher and journalist just a year and a half ago. She was subjected to verbal and tactile workplace harassment, phone harassment via menacing voice calls that were so sudden and so short that she could not record them, whisper campaigns and defamation of her in the wider community to try to prevent and hobble her – eventually successful – crowdfunding campaign when she was accepted to study at an overseas university.

A known perpetrator of domestic violence has been invited to speak about cyber violence, and another expresses outrage at the terrible violation of a schoolgirl but shares photos of the victim’s face at the death scene on his public blog. Is it to show what violent rape looks like or to further exploit the body and dignity of this young woman to self-servingly amplify his own readership? The pressure of the never-ending need to create content tends to encourage this kind of desensitization.

There are institutions in Sri Lanka that are known as terrible places to work for women. There are men whom young women are specifically warned to avoid. Some offices of various newspaper publications are still known to be spheres where certain journalists considered their offices a hunting ground and the young female journalists as prey. One young journalist said a senior journalist who had positioned himself as a mentor to her had sent her a picture of himself shirtless to her phone. When she did not reply, he texted “sent in error” and deleted the picture. But of course she still had the photo at her end and showed it to her friends and her fiancé.

In the literary sphere, with the advent of the internet, many articulate young people built reputations as opinion writers and bloggers. Some have made it a successful basis for their careers as influencers or travel writers. But in the literary world, we found young men about 10 to 15 years ago often publicly attacking women writers, not only those who were their peers, but older and more established writers who were already occupying cultural space they wanted to enter that they had earned themselves and who had started to win the very few literary prizes available at that time to writers when the men tried year after year and kept failing.

There seemed, under the protection of free speech and public opinion, to be a group of individuals behaving like wild animals in the literary sphere in the 2010s. They even used the term attack-worthy to describe their targets. When asked if they felt any sense of responsibility to uphold standards of ethics and objectivity, at a public forum in 2015, especially in reviewing people’s work, they said that people were taking their humorous and light-hearted statements too seriously.

Their justification for writing attack pieces was that so many reviewers are too afraid and timid to be critical and tend to write friendly reviews to appease their friends. But attacking a writer and critiquing their work are very different activities, with very different intentions. One of these men tried via a vilification campaign to have a senior writer’s work removed from the local English syllabus so that younger local authors (presumably like himself and his cohort) could occupy that territory. A woman who had authority, comprising seniority and comparatively high socio-economic status and literary skill, especially as this woman was English-educated and came from a foreign country, was a many-layered threat to a mindset like this. Taking her down seemed like a duty to the downtrodden. The editors at his newspaper were threatened with legal action by the writer, and they scrambled to try and placate the lady. The rule with defamation matters is that an apology should be offered in the same forum in which the injury has taken place. A woman’s professional reputation is her sovereign territory and having earned it, she has every right to defend it in any public forum against such devaluation.

The internet and the obsession it generates with gaining followings and increasing likes and clicks and views perfectly meshed with the ambitions of self-aggrandizing perpetrators. Controversy sells. Aiming for the lowest common denominator yielded short-term rewards. They bought in big and tried with varying success to cash out before the market fell.

They seemed ignorant and uncaring of the reputational damage they were causing. In fact, they seemed to derive satisfaction from it. One of these individuals took the slander and libel that had become normalized in the digital culture in this period to an extreme when he attacked a female writer on his public Facebook platform. The post and the comments thread in that instance were photographed and handed to the police. The perpetrator was formally summoned by the police and asked why he had attacked this woman in such a public way. He had mistakenly thought that by removing the post 24 hours after he had posted it, he could not be held accountable.

He tried to justify his actions by claiming that she had written an article attacking him. Asked to produce the article he had cited, which was read in front of him by the police officers who were interviewing him, he was asked why he held this belief since no actual name of any individual was in the published article and it was a general article that did not identify him in any way. He had to admit this as a fact. He was charged with malicious harassment and threatened with having his social media accounts deactivated if he offended again.

The underlying grievance held by this individual was that he had wanted to be reviewed in the most widely circulated print newspaper in the country. Desiring social credibility, he had approached this woman writer to review his 80,000-word book so he could gain the more public recognition he craved at that time. Her refusal to do the review was made on professional grounds that she was in the midst of her own professional schedule. But it triggered narcissistic rage in him. In his view, women existed to service him, to succour his need for praise and to advance his career.

Disrespect for a woman’s professional career, her life and her schedule is part and parcel of misogyny. And many men see a woman’s commitment to her unfolding career, her professional development and her prioritizing of her professional challenges, duties and responsibilities as personal rejection. We see the cycle of love bombing, grievance, devaluation and discard operating in every harassment case. The perpetrator’s frustrations do not need to be sexual. In fact, sex in professional spheres is about power and validation, not desire; power imbalances excite predators. The desire to dominate and control what threatens us and to assert ourselves at the expense of others is a tale as old as time.

The traditional beliefs of our parents were that people’s professional and personal lives should be kept separate and judged separately. But when a person uses their professional workplace for personal gratification, these demarcations come down, and the boundaries get blurred.

Our online culture today also escalates this blurring of boundaries. Sri Lankan men in their twenties, thirties and forties, and now even younger and older, are increasingly avid consumers of pornographic content. Women are being trafficked, their images deep-faked and distributed for money, and they are being coerced into creating content to cater to the rising demand for them to be reduced to images of their sexualized and objectified bodies. Women in the workplace conducting their professional lives are interacting every day with men whose perspectives are now saturated with provocative and enticing images and ideas of women online, women who are offered up to men visually like items on a smorgasbord or a room service menu, on demand.

Old boys’ clubs and isolated young women

Sri Lankan society as a whole has upheld the old beliefs of droit du seigneur (right of the lord) and classified the male gender as the elites in a social hierarchy that made men of all ages consider themselves entitled to the servitude, the support, the admiration, the appreciation and the submission and self-effacement of girls and women.

The old boys’ club activities of drinking, sports, warriorship, swearing, dancing and acting inappropriately to women seem to be the contemporary equivalent of the hunting and shooting activities of the privileged people in the old days. Playboys are often predators. And they are now being threatened by exposure, extinction and erasure.

The women were trophies or toys (women in Hugh Hefner’s Playboy world are termed playmates or bunnies) in this arrangement. Translated to the corporate or governance sphere, we see internalized misogyny operating to further entrap and isolate young women who are being subjected to abuse. Colleagues look the other way or are deaf to grievances and complaints, and human resources executives violate their codes of conduct and become public relations agents for their bosses. Like any systemic corruption, the enablers and facilitators act as a supportive infrastructure – those who profit from it will not speak against it or call it out. The intersection of sex and commerce and predatory misogyny can be seen very clearly today.

The younger generation has an opportunity to overturn this extractive capitalist conduct. Recently passed legislation recognizes the conduct of preying on the vulnerable as criminal behaviour and enables it to be prosecuted as such.

Like any observable criminal conduct, there are red flags that can be lined up to make a red carpet stretching straight to jail. There is an unofficial predators’ playbook, and there are signature moves tabled there that constitute a recognizable pattern.

The task now is to progress from identifying this behaviour to criminalizing it.

The new Anti-Corruption Act No. 9 of 2023 has a dedicated sexual bribery statute. Another important change in the law is that, unlike previously when only a favour, money or gratification given to a public sector officer was considered a bribe, now even private sector bribery is a criminal offence. Coercion is being outed.

So, if someone in a private company like a mid-level manager asks a junior employee for money, then it is a bribe and a criminal offence. Similarly, if any sexual favours are solicited, then it constitutes a bribe and is punishable as a criminal offence. The victim can complain to the Bribery Commission. Here, the transactional attitude that governs this conduct can be used to prosecute the perpetrators.

-This article was originally featured on groundviews.org