Just Not That Low
What The ₹ 370 Haggle Reveals About the Price We’ve Already Accepted
A first date, a plate of biryani that cost Rs. 370, and a woman’s consent priced at the same — a return on investment sought. These have been the keywords circling our timelines these past few weeks. They came from an audience member who, at comedian Pranit More’s Gurugram gig, claimed to have ‘bought’ his date’s consent for Rs. 370. After the clip surfaced online, it sparked a debate bigger than anyone could have anticipated (thankfully so). But in a society where judgements about women’s bodies and sexuality get passed around faster than MPs switching political parties, what does the specific shape taken by the outrage tell us? Is the issue that struck people the actual ‘pricing’ of consent, which by its very virtue is meant to be invaluable, or the price being ‘too low’? And while we scroll through video after video tearing the culprit apart, do we have the spine to name the system that produced this man?
The clip makes clear that what the man said was not met with a silent room. It was met by a more ‘detailed’ probe from the comedian on stage, and an audience roaring with laughter. The act of describing the woman, and the specific ways in which he violated her boundaries based on what he thought he was ‘owed’, disturbed everyone who later saw the video. But we have to stop and ask why no one in the room got up to tell him to stop, or even to question the territory it was steering into, territory that, far from being comical, was descending into dehumanisation and a complete disregard for a person’s autonomy. It makes sense only when we acknowledge that this man was not as unique in his irredeemable remarks as we would like to believe, and that perhaps he was not the only man in that room who would think this way after a woman agreed to a date with him. This bears a clear link to Raewyn Connell’s typology of masculinities, in which ‘complicit masculinity’ involves men benefitting from the patriarchal dividend without necessarily exhibiting the most dominant traits themselves. When our outrage tries to isolate just one ‘man’, it gives a pass to the systemic entitlement and control over women’s bodies and sexuality that patriarchal structures enable. The man’s ‘audacity’ did not arise out of thin air, and the substance of his remarks was not so unlike others we have heard, in a hundred different combinations, throughout our lives.
What bothers me is our treatment of this moment as a ‘cause’ rather than a symptom. The commodification of a woman’s consent, a man feeling it can be bought with money, is hardly a novel occurrence. How else do we explain the entitlement a sex worker’s client feels over her body simply because he has ‘bought’ a few hours of her services? How else do we explain the implied consent assumed of housewives, who are expected to repay the fruits of their husband’s “real” economic labour? The catch, then, does not seem to be that consent was priced; it lies in the specific vocabulary he employed, which handed us an ignominious image to hold onto, an explicit comparison with a plate of biryani costing a mere Rs. 370. The objectification stung more because it was phrased in a way that brought it home, in the language of an everyday fast-food item. And this seeded an unsettling question about my own verdict on the whole fiasco. Would I have been as angry if the context were different and the price not so low? Would our response be the same if they had gone to a fine-dining restaurant and the man had spent thousands, or if he had booked her a relaxing retreat? A specific strand of the response that has flooded the internet tells me no.
I have come across enough videos of women fighting back, price-tagging their sunscreen, cosmetics and skincare far above the 370 mark, to have also come across a separate stream of backlash targeting these women and their ‘sunscreens’. While true in every fiscal sense, and drawing an important line between what is acceptable and unacceptable today, this hardly helps the ‘consent cannot be commodified’ case, subtly confirming my fears. It attacks the instance while conforming to the premise. Because why are we fighting the reduction of a person’s consent to a price, one obviously considered embarrassingly low, with another price? This can also be tied to a not much older social media trend where women expect a man to spend enough money on them on the first date to at least cover the cost of their outfit, makeup and accessories. This comparison is not as unfair as it is dehumanising. The fact that our rebuttal is then taking on the same vocabulary the man employed might somewhere be prompting more ‘jokes’ like these, instead of sitting with the uncomfortable implication that comes out of such discussions: that consent can be priced, just not that low.
The price tag was shaped by contemporary practices in which estimating the return on investment, even the emotional kind, is the default, and even encouraged. And our response, in turn, is shaped by how much a woman profits, or does not, by engaging with such a man. If we have challenged every limit on what can be commodified and measured for productive return, then where do we draw the line dividing the ‘non-saleable’ from the ‘saleable’? Is a universal benchmark, or even a consensus, possible? Here a nuance from Derek Hall (2024) comes into play, certain things lose their very meaning when they are openly priced (for instance, graduate school admissions or Nobel Prizes) instead of being sold “under the table”. It prompts the hard question again: is the anger directed at the supposed buying of consent, or at the public expression of a phenomenon we were complacent about for as long as it was not shoved in our faces?
The ‘joke’, then, rather than being a specific instance of crude entitlement by a specific man in a specific setting, becomes a mirror for us, its recipients. We are faced with the difficult choice to either restrict our commentary and treat it as an individual instance of violation, or to hold the mirror up and look ourselves in the eye to ask what the outrage so carefully avoided. Not whether Rs. 370 was too little, but whether there is any figure that would have been enough, any sum at which a woman’s consent becomes a fair purchase. The man named a price and we disputed it; almost no one refused the ledger altogether. That refusal, that consent is not cheap, nor dear, but simply not for sale, was the one punchline the room, and the internet after it, never delivered.
About the Author:
The author is pursuing an MA in History at Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi. Her research sits at the intersection of gender and female agency in South Asian contexts. She previously served as editor-in-chief of her department magazine at Miranda House. She writes about questions that sit just outside the archive.
 | A guest post by
|