Name the Gene

Someone on Tamil Twitter published a theory this week. It had three moving parts.

One: women have stopped seeing their own bodies as bodies and started seeing merchandise — and as long as they think that way, the trade will continue and the customers will keep arriving.

Two: men are built at the level of the gene to want women's bodies, and the wanting never dims. Same breast, same navel, same everything, and the pull does not weaken.

Three: no woman has ever looked at a man's body and felt any of that.

He closed with an analogy. Nobody shuts down the cigarette company or the liquor company, he said — we only prosecute the people who smoke and drink. Same principle here. As long as women treat their bodies as goods, this goes on.

Then, one post later, came the sentence that should have ended the argument. He had googled it. He did not know whether it was true or false. It would be good, he wrote, if the intellectual society discussed this.

The intellectual society discussed it. Within a day. Almost entirely women, almost entirely in Tamil, and the answers were far better than the question had any right to expect.

I am not naming him, and I am not speculating about his life. The handle will be forgotten by the next outrage cycle; the argument will not. It is one of the oldest arguments in the country and it comes back every few months wearing whatever vocabulary is fashionable that season. Everything below belongs to the women who answered him. I have rebuilt their reasoning in my own words, in the order that makes it land hardest.

Name the gene

The theory arrived dressed as science. It had the vocabulary — genes, design, wiring — it had the confidence, and it made an appeal to a mechanism sitting underneath human behaviour. What it lacked was every one of science's obligations: a source, a name, a number, a claim that could be tested and found wrong.

A doctor gave it the only reply it deserved. Give me the name of the gene. Give me its number. I will go and check whether women carry an equivalent, and if they do not, we will write it up properly with evidence — you are an author too, after all.

He did not have a number, because there is no number.

Desire does not run off a single switch in either body. Testosterone circulates in women as well as men and is one of the things that drives wanting in both. The reward circuitry that lights up is the same circuitry. And the variation inside each gender — between two women, between two men, between the same person at thirty and at fifty — is vastly larger than any average gap you can draw between the columns.

There is also a shape of desire that his theory has no room for. Much of the clinical literature on women's sexuality describes desire that is responsive rather than spontaneous: the wanting arrives after arousal instead of announcing itself in advance. A desire that does not walk in the door declaring itself looks, from the outside, exactly like a desire that was never there.

There was a second question inside the doctor's reply, and it is the sharper one. Did you ever ask this with the genders reversed? Put the same sentence the other way round — no man has ever felt desire looking at a woman — and every man reading it knows instantly that it is absurd. The asymmetry lived in the direction he was willing to point the question, never in the biology itself.

What silence actually measures

In 2003, two researchers ran an experiment that answers him more completely than any argument could.

Alexander and Fisher gave undergraduates a questionnaire about their own sexual histories — masturbation, use of pornography, number of partners. Then they varied one thing: the cost of answering. In one condition the experimenter might see the answers. In another the answers were fully anonymous. In the third, participants were wired to equipment they were told could detect a lie. The equipment did nothing at all.

What moved across the three conditions was the gap between what men said and what women said. Under threat of exposure it was at its widest. Under anonymity it narrowed. Under the fake lie detector it shrank to almost nothing — and it closed hardest on exactly the items a woman gets judged for.

Same questions, same population, three different prices for answering honestly.

One woman on the timeline set out the price in four lines, and they are worth keeping.

The question nobody owes you

He put his own evidence on record, and it is the most revealing thing in the entire thread.

Another woman asked the obvious thing back: why do you need this answer at all? Are you writing a research paper?

What a woman wants is hers to disclose or to withhold, and one man's curiosity does not convert it into open data. If she admires someone, she will say so to whoever she decides has earned hearing it. That is the whole point of it being hers. Nobody else gets to open the file.

So the twenty-five years did produce a finding. The women around him did not want to hand him that information, or did not feel safe handing it to him, or did not think he had earned it.

They told you nothing. That is a fact about the asking. He entered it as a fact about the species.

Who gets the bill

Now look at the economics, because his own argument eats itself.

Demand, he says, is natural, permanent and written into the male genome. And also: this will continue only as long as women treat their bodies as commodities. Both cannot be load-bearing. If the appetite is permanent and biological, the market exists whether or not any individual woman participates in it — which makes the woman on the screen the last name in the chain you would put the blame on.

Watch what happens around a single two-line post with a video attached.

That last row demolishes the stated concern. If the worry is genuinely about children, addiction and a society coming apart, all of it is sitting in the open right now, free, without a password, at a scale no subscription account will ever reach. It draws no threads at all. It gets waved away with the left hand.

Then a woman charges for a video of herself, and the society rediscovers its children.

None of this is a new arrangement. The film industry has been running it since the 1950s: the song picturised for exactly one purpose, the costume chosen by a man, the camera operated by a man, the cut approved by a man, the theatre whistling on cue, and the profit banked at a man's desk. There is a respectful word for that entire operation. We call it glamour, and we give it awards.

Nobody opens a thread about the producer's morals. Nobody asks the choreographer whether he has thought about what he is doing to society. The heroine absorbs a certain amount of abuse, and the men who built the frame, sold the ticket and kept the margin walk away clean and are invited back next season.

Then a woman points her own camera, sets her own price, and keeps the entire margin. The rule she has broken is old and has nothing to do with decency. Anything free gets swallowed, whatever it is. The first person to ask for money gets hit.

Measure the outrage against the amount of skin on a screen and it fits badly. Measure it against who is holding the money at the end of the transaction and it fits perfectly.

The video was entertainment on the way in and evidence on the way out. Same body, two revenue streams, and she was the only person in the chain who got a bill.

The dot

Everything above is about money. What follows is not, and this society collapses the two on purpose.

A woman with a subscription account decided what to show, set a price, and told everybody exactly what the arrangement was. Somewhere else, a man and a woman were together in private. He filmed it, or she trusted him enough to let him, and either way it was meant for the two of them. Then he put it online. That is a broken promise, and in this country it is also a crime under more than one statute.

Underneath that second video, the replies start arriving. No arguments. No opinions about the decline of the society. Just a single full stop, again and again, account after account. Every man watching knows what the dot is asking for. Send me the link.

There is a temptation to call them vultures, and it is unfair to vultures. A vulture cleans the carcass and keeps the rest of us from disease; it has a function, and the world is better for it. These men clean nothing and produce nothing. They arrive only to ask each other for a link, so they can watch a woman who never agreed to be watched by anyone.

Ask how often you have seen this run the other way. A woman leaking a man. A queue of women underneath it asking for the link. Ask it honestly, and then ask why the answer is what it is.

They will call it porn while they do it. What is actually moving through those replies is a private hour of one woman's life, handed to one person, now being passed between strangers who are pleased with themselves for finding it.

And none of it arrives from nowhere. It is the school corridor, grown up. The ranking of classmates out loud, the vocabulary invented for the bodies of girls who were twelve, the group that laughs and goes quiet when a teacher passes. Nobody is ever made to put that down. It simply ages — it acquires a salary, a marriage, a display picture with a child in it, and a phone.

Not one thread about the state of society gets written that week. She showed her own body on her own terms and got seven days of moral instruction. He broke a promise to someone who trusted him, and got a link.

Criticise the market, not the woman standing in it

The most valuable thing anyone said in those two days was also the quietest. Criticise the platform. Criticise how it turns closeness into a monthly line item, how an algorithm learns that a body outperforms a paragraph, how a culture that prices everything eventually gets round to pricing desire. All of that is fair, and serious, and worth a real conversation.

None of that work requires you to pull one woman out of the crowd and try her for the whole economy.

We put sweated labour on trial without calling the labourer a criminal. We can put commercial surrogacy on trial without putting the surrogate on trial. None of the women arguing with him was defending commodification. What they refused was the promotion — one woman, one decision of her own, lifted out of her own life and entered as an exhibit in a case about what this generation of women is doing to the country.

Two questions, and everything turns on which one you are actually asking.

What does a culture that has learned to price everything end up doing to the people living inside it? That one is worth years of anybody's attention.

And have you seen what she has put up now — these girls today. That one is a village meeting with a smartphone.

And to settle a question somebody raised in the replies: no, a subscription account is not feminism. Nobody claimed it was. Feminism's demand is narrower and much harder to dismiss — that the latitude a man already assumes for himself, without ever having to argue for it, is extended to her.

The cloth theory

Covering women has been tried. It has been tried for centuries, at enormous cost, with total commitment.

Women are harassed in sarees. In school uniforms. In burqas. In hospital scrubs, in wedding clothes, in clothes chosen by their mothers-in-law. Children are harassed in children's clothes. If fabric were the mechanism, the most covered women in the country would be the safest women in the country, and every one of us knows they are not.

As one woman put it: did all that covering ever reform this society? Are women not still going through exactly what they were going through?

A society that reads the AI news on Monday morning and convenes a banyan-tree panchayat about a stranger's neckline on Monday evening should stop describing itself as rational. Across all of it the common variable sits on the other side of the encounter — an assumption of access that no quantity of fabric has ever talked anybody out of.

Who wrote the rule

There is a line in the Manusmriti, chapter nine, verse three. In childhood her father protects her, in youth her husband, in old age her sons — a woman is never fit for independence.

Men wrote that. Men then attributed it to divine order, which made questioning it not a disagreement but a sin. That is the trick, and it is the same trick in every religion and every century: the human hand disappears behind the divine curtain, and the rule acquires an authority no human being could have given it.

The fight has never been with God, and never with anybody's private faith. Faith is a person's own and belongs to nobody else. The fight is with the men who wrote oppressive law and signed heaven's name at the bottom.

Periyar took that apart with a precision nobody has improved on. He asked why chastity was demanded of women and never of men, and answered it in terms of property: a man needed certainty about which children were his, so a rule was invented, then sanctified, then taught to women as their own virtue until they enforced it on each other for free.

The answer has been in Tamil for fifteen hundred years

He says no woman has ever told him what she wants. Tamil has been telling him since before the language had a printing press.

The entire akam tradition of Sangam poetry is built on a woman's interior voice — her longing, her waiting, what absence does to her body, what the sea and the rain and the red earth are doing to her while she waits. Dozens of women sit among those poets. Read what four lines of Kurunthogai do with red earth and pouring rain, and then try holding the position that Tamil women have never put desire into words.

Then there is Andal, and Andal is the case that closes it.

Everybody knows the Thiruppavai. Thirty verses, sung across Margazhi at dawn by enormous numbers of people, taught to children, played from loudspeakers in streets where nobody would tolerate this conversation for a minute.

The same girl wrote the Nachiyar Thirumozhi. One hundred and forty-three verses, in fourteen parts, and they are frank. She prays to Kamadeva to be given Vishnu as a husband. She describes wanting in her own body, in the first person, without apology or hedging. In one of them the god has left the imprint of his saffron paste on her breasts.

Eighth century. In Tamil. By a girl. Inside the canon, not outside it — sung in temples, commented on for a thousand years, translated into English by scholars in our own lifetime.

And her most desirous verses are still rarely performed in public.

Tamil never lost the answer. Tamil keeps the poem and edits out the parts where she wants — and then a man stands in the street and says no woman has ever told him anything.

And when Tamil women wrote it in the present tense, in the present language, here is what this society did.

That is the archive. Four Tamil women answered this exact question, in print, in Tamil, and the recorded public response was a proposal to set them on fire on the main road of the capital. Twenty years later a man asks why women will not tell him what they like, and files the silence under biology.

And if fourteen centuries feels too far away to count, come to the radio.

An industry that had been running on women's bodies since the 1950s took until 1998 to let a woman write the words. Thamarai made her debut that year and has worked steadily ever since — the first woman to sustain a career as a lyricist in Tamil cinema. Some of the most played Tamil songs of this century are hers, and several of them are a woman's plain account of what a man's presence does to her, written by a woman and sung by a woman.

He has been humming the answer in his car for twenty-five years.

Goddess, moon, honey

One of his sharper moves was to turn the poetry around. You enjoyed being called the moon, he said. Deer. Honey. Goddess. River. Not one of you ever objected to those comparisons, because you liked them — so the false images men carry about you are images you helped build, and you should be the ones to dismantle them.

It is a real argument and it has a short answer. A metaphor in a love song is not a contract. Nobody who smiled at being called the moon thereby signed away her right to also be a person with opinions, appetites, and a bad mood on a Tuesday.

The longer answer is about what those particular images do for a living.

Being compared to a lion costs a man nothing. Being compared to a goddess costs a woman a great deal, because the pedestal arrives with a job description attached: purity, patience, silence, permanence, and no visible wanting. Deer means startled and pursued. River means endlessly giving. Goddess means worshipped from a distance and never once asked what she thinks. Every one of those images is affectionate on the surface and load-bearing underneath — they are why a woman who admits to desire drops out of the "family girl" column in a single afternoon.

Which is where the word men reach for most often in this argument starts to come apart.

Then there is the request itself. Women were being asked to take on the additional labour of repairing men's understanding of women — to break the images, correct the poems, run the remedial class. Half the species holds a wrong model of the other half, and the repair work has been assigned to the half that did not build the model. When your model of someone is wrong, the reading is yours to do.

The wall in the toilet

One question he asked was honest, so it deserves a straight answer. Men's public toilet walls are covered in sexual writing — names, numbers, drawings, stories. Is there an equivalent in women's toilets? Is this urge only in men?

A wall is a record of what a person can write without consequence. That is all it measures.

And look at what is actually written there. Most of it is a woman's name and a phone number — somebody else's availability, advertised to strangers by a man who never asked her. A woman writing the equivalent would be publishing her own address to every man who walked in. The difference in the sample is explained by that, completely, without recourse to a gene.

The seat and a half

You have seen the posture on every bus in this state. A man sits with his knees wide apart, taking up a seat and a half on a vehicle where every passenger paid the identical fare. He is not thinking about it — that is the whole point. The body learned early that the space around it is negotiable in his favour, and it goes on expanding until something physically stops it.

The timeline is the same seat.

A man with no stake in the question, no training in it and no invitation to it opens a thread on what women ought to be doing with their bodies, and occupies the space exactly the way he occupies the bus. Same certainty. Same obliviousness. Same working assumption that the woman beside him will fold herself smaller to make room.

There are three words in circulation for this, and they describe three different sizes of one thing.

Look at what it cost him. Twenty-five years of asking, and not one honest conversation about desire with any woman in his life. Not with friends. Not at home. He published that fact himself, in public, and offered it as evidence about women.

The arrangement pays men far less than they have been told. Its dividend is a man in his forties on a public timeline, asking strangers a question he was never able to ask anyone who loved him.

What it comes down to

He did post something the next day. There may have been mistakes in the earlier post, he wrote. He would not claim otherwise. Some things had become clearer to him.

Weigh what that cost him. Nothing of his was circulated. No thread was opened on his morals. No stranger arrived in his replies with a full stop. He walked away from two days of free instruction with a better working model of women, and no bill.

The bill went where it always goes. Women spent two days of their lives explaining their own interior existence, for nothing, to a man who opened by calling their bodies merchandise and closed by asking them to take the first step. That labour happens every week, in this language, on this timeline, and it never once reaches the person who ordered the lesson.

Strip the theory down and one failure is holding it up: he treated what women withhold from him as a measurement of what women can feel at all. Everything else — the genes, the cigarette companies, the market research, the toilet walls — was built on top of that single substitution.

For most of this country's history, the rules about women's bodies arrived with a divine signature. Men wrote them, heaven took the credit, and asking questions became blasphemy. The signature has since been updated. It now reads biology, and it comes with a citation nobody can produce, because the search that generated it took four seconds.

Same rule. Same hand. Newer curtain — and this one falls down the moment somebody asks it to name the gene.

Related: Marriage Is Not Sacred. It Is a System of Control. on what the same machinery does once it is inside a house.

Every argument in this piece came from Tamil women answering, in Tamil, on a public timeline this week — a doctor, a poet, and several women with better reasoning than the men they were replying to. I have rebuilt their arguments in my own words. The thinking is theirs.