‘Indian sex workers may have spurred #MeToo’

It was at

Ruchira Gupta

’s home at New York City that actress Ashley Judd exposed Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein and kickstarted the #MeToo movement. “She gave the interview to the journalist from The New York Times on my dining table, while I was arranging flowers and listening to the conversation,” says Gupta, an Indian

sex trafficking abolitionist

, journalist and activist, who founded Apne Aap Women Worldwide, a grassroots organization working to end sex trafficking by increasing choices for at-risk women.

Since 2006, Judd has been visiting brothels in Delhi and Kolkata through Apne Aap and listening to destitute, low-caste women, who are the most vulnerable to being trafficked, break their silence. Gupta is convinced this spurred her to speak out against Weinstein. “Courage is contagious,” she says.

Gupta will be in Mumbai this weekend to speak at the

Times LitFest

along with other feminists like

Julie Bindel

and Laurie Penny.

Both Bindel and Gupta refer to themselves as “radical feminists”, which Bindel describes as “looking at the very basis of women’s oppression and recognizing that the cause is male supremacy or patriarchy”. This differs from other forms of feminism that focus not on patriarchal power structures but biology. For Bindel, the only solution is to “take the power from men” rather than “strive for ‘equality’ with men”.

In fact, she practises “political lesbianism” because she believes sexuality is a choice, and there’s an inherent contradiction in fighting male violence while sharing a bed with a man. “My friends who are heterosexual feminists recognize it as a contradiction,” she told TOI over email. “There is no such thing as a ‘gay gene’ or a ‘straight gene’. I love the sense that I have chosen my sexuality.”

Gupta sees the same rebellion against patriarchal control in women who opt to stay single or marry for love. “Basically, th-ey are saying, ‘You are not the boss of me’,” she says. “All three are different experiments with choosing a life where we are not controlled or subjugated.”

Gupta had published ‘River of Flesh and Other Stories: The Prostituted Woman in Indian Short Fiction’ in 2016, which brings together 21 stories about trafficked women by some of India’s celebrated writers, including Ismat Chughtai and Munshi Premchand. The book was conceived because Gupta often found that people mistakenly romanticised prostitution or equated it with other professions like ragpicking or domestic work. “I kept trying to tell them that this is different because it involves body invasion, which has bleak mental and physical consequences,” she says. “Finally, I thought fiction may be a better way to get into people’s consciousness.”

Bindel believes that the sex trade is “riven with misogyny”, explaining that sex buyers “often select specific women on the basis of racist and colonialist stereotypes”.

Her new book ‘The Pimping of Prostitution: Abolishing the Sex Work Myth’ throws light on this misogyny and dissects the views of pro-prostitution activists and abolitionists through 250 interviews with pimps, survivors and clients.