Viraj's Blog

So, for the past two Fridays I’ve gone to this club in D.C. with some OCA girls. The first Friday I went- two weeks ago- I had one of the best nights of my life. I’ll spare you the sickeningly sweet details, but it was a fun (innocent, you dirty bastards) time. Whee!

This past Friday, I returned to the same club and had a drastically different experience. The companions that I went to the club with were still great- fun, adventurous, and really just out to have a good time. The guys were a different story.

That night, Russell Peters (the comedian) was scheduled to make an appearance- I’m going to assume that was the reason that there were so many more males of South Asian descent in the room. However, one thing I noticed as opposed to the week before, was that the guys that were talking to me and/or asking me to dance were mostly from India- that is, they weren’t born/raised in the US. This was definitely a different dynamic from the week before, where the South Asian guys who I did talk to were all born/raised here, like me.

Here’s a synopsis of my interactions with two of the guys this second night (both from India).

Guy #1

While standing in the “protective circle of girls who like to stare at each other while dancing, apparently), guy #1 starts dancing with me. He makes some small talk (i.e. asking me my name, telling me he’s a student .etc.), but he is clearly inebriated, and spills his drink down my back. Wearing a tank top, I (obviously) pull away from the shock and I probably expressed some sort of disgust on my face at being drenched in alcohol. The guy, for some reason, continues to try to dance with me, and I step away, indicating that I’m going to go to the bathroom to dry off. He shoots me a look of disgust (uh, f’real?), and we part ways.

Guy #2

After coming back from the bathroom, guy #2 starts dancing with me- surprise attack. By “Surprise attack” I mean I’m dancing in the “protective circle” and he literally just walks up behind me and starts, basically, thrusting his hips towards my rear. Uh. Gross. I pull away really quickly, politely say that I’m not interested in dancing with anyone right now, thanks, and go to turn back. Before I can turn back to my friends, he leans in to me and says “come on, the clothes youre wearing….you’re begging men to dance with you”. Well, perhaps it was more crude, but anger/time have fuzzed the details. Essentially, he was asserting that the way that I was dressed was making me “ask” for him to “dance” with me in an extremely disrespectful way.

For the record. I was just wearing a red tank top, and a black skirt that went down past my knees.

Still fuming from this, here returns guy #1! He was walking past me on the dance floor and just happened to make eye contact with me in the midst of my fury/shock over what guy #2 had just had the gall to say to me. I broke eye contact with him pretty hastily and turned back to my friends, and when he walked by he (and yes, someone asked me to clarify this) slap-and-grabbed my ass. I spun around, startled, and he winked at me, started to walk towards me, saw the look on my face [v. close to a death stare], and quickly spun around and kept walking.

I was so angry and hurt…I still am. Never in my entire life have I been so verbally and physically disrespected. I’m still reeling because not only did it happen twice, but both times they were South Asian men who had grown up in South Asia. Guy #1 told me, and I’m going off of guy #2’s accent here.

After I had some time to kind of fume and recover from the shock, I started thinking about this. My hair, body type, clothes, and even the people I was with scream that I’m American. It’s extremely obvious to anyone from India. Given that, I suppose these men bought into the stereotype that “all American women [or at least the Indian American ones) go out and have the sex all day” (to quote Bunty & Babli) and that we’ll basically have sex with anyone that walks up to us in a club.

Hey, for some women it might be true- I’m just not one of them.

In any case, these men found it masculating to physically and verbally disrespect- me. Why? After all, if I WERE the stereotyped Indian American girl, I’d probably disgust them as the perfect example of the corrupted Indian girl. Hardly marriage material, and hardly the kind of girl you’d want to be associated with. So I started wondering…why is it that they were so insistent on dancing or ‘getting’ with me?

Then I had to wonder…if they know I’m American, and given that they both have lived in the states for at least some time, they probably can assume that I have some American feminist ideals. Really? You think it’s going to turn me on to slap my ass and tell me I’m dressed like a whore? Yeah, I’m totally swooning.

Why were they exoticizing me? It’s so contradictory, isn’t it? That, on one hand, I’m the “dirty corrupt Indian girl”, and on the other it’s some sort of prize to get with me. I don’t understand. I probably don’t even want to.

At the end of the day, I’m still incredibly offended to find that there’s men out there in the country I live in who still believe it’s completely okay – and perhaps even complimentary- to treat women in such a manner. I’m even moreso upset that I share a social identity, or at least half of one, with these same men- it disgusts me.

Of course, then I wonder…if I WAS having sex all day with random guys, these guys clearly don’t know anything about sex education to think that I’d be an ideal partner. Another call for increased sex ed in India! And in Gloucester, Mass!

At the end of the day, the friends I’ve talked to about this (all male) have been incredibly empathetic and have repeatedly asked me why I didn’t just punch them in the nuts. I should have- especially since I saw one of them the next day while I was in a car with my boss. Oh well- you live you learn, I suppose. My faith in men remains intact (well, for my American born friends at the moment, anyway) and I’ll continue to ponder how the Indian American female is exoticized. Hey, maybe I’ll get a PhD in it.