I saw an image where a few Gen Z women, wearing tight jeans and short, sleeveless tops, were standing very close to Swami Vivekananda’s statue during a protest against rape in India—which eventually turned into something targeted at men in general.
Calling all men rapists is like calling all women whores. Both are equally unacceptable.
But well, that is not what this blog is about.
It is about someone who called the picture “a powerful picture”—for which I honestly didn’t understand the meaning.
Powerful because he was a saint?
Powerful because he wouldn’t touch any woman without her consent?
Powerful because women feel safe around men like him?
Or women want Indian men to be like him?
Now, here is where it gets interesting.
Swami Vivekananda was a disciple of Ramakrishna Paramahansa—a staunch devotee of Goddess Kali. Ramakrishna had around 15 direct disciples, out of whom only Swami Vivekananda became famous and world-renowned.
Ramakrishna, when he got married, apparently could not look at his wife with sexual lust because he had already sublimated his sexual energy towards divine energy. He never had sexual relations with his wife and never had children.
And something similar happened with his disciple Vivekananda.
In his process of spiritual growth, Vivekananda struggled tremendously with the thought of lust towards women and what their bodies could do to his body. He could not simply switch off his biological reaction to a woman’s body.
And according to one traditional account of his life, things became so extreme that he once contemplated taking a drastic measure—cutting off or even burning his own penis in order to put an end to his sexual urges.
Thankfully, his master stopped him.
Ramakrishna’s message was essentially: the organ is not the problem. The sexual thought is.
If you want to sublimate the sexual thought, call every woman a sister or a mother—and the thought will vanish.
Ramakrishna himself saw his wife as Goddess Kali, and therefore, according to the traditional account, his sexual desire towards her disappeared.
From then onwards, Vivekananda meticulously followed his master’s instruction.
And then came that famous “Dear brothers and sisters of America” in Chicago.
Now here is the catch.
If you start sublimating your sexual thoughts in exactly the same way, you may eventually never get married or have children.
Neither Ramakrishna nor Vivekananda had children.
And if Gen Z wants every Indian man to become like Vivekananda, they would never have been born in the first place.
Because for humanity to exist, lust is more important than sexual sublimation.
And perhaps this is where Indian culture developed something rather interesting.
Women call men “bhaiyya” when they see no possibility of sex with them.
Men call elderly women “behenji” or “ma ji” when they don’t see any possibility of sex with them.
The relationship is linguistically transformed into something non-sexual.
But notice something very funny.
You will rarely see a woman calling her attractive boss or a CEO “bhaiyya.”
And you will rarely see a man looking at a sexy woman and saying, “Behenji, could you please pass me that file?” 😉
And you don’t see this particular relationship-based terminology in Western countries because they never bothered about sexual sublimation but were busy indulging in it.