300 lbs And Rising: The lonely path of the frotteur

Being a shamelessly fat brown man who makes his living mooching off the crumbs of American capitalism has its advantages. You get great financial aid if you’re from a crappy country. You have the privilege of being offended by things like bacon and get cool first names like Kaniskachakroborty or Arafat. If your major happens to be English, you get sympathy from professors with fake British accents and bad trousers for growing up in a colonial environment. If you want to hit the BU Pub in the middle of a class, all you have to do is take umbrage at how Keats says “Darkling, I listen to thee” in Ode to a Nightingale and haughtily waddle off.

But much as America can answer most questions life has to offer, especially on the internet for $29.99 a month, there are some doubts that even the New Rome can’t address: Is beauty absolute? Can we handle the truth? Does love hurt? Will I ever get a girlfriend?

I guess that last question has been kind of answered by all the lovelorn females who send me email every day, wanting to be plastered with my “gummes of glutinous heate,” as Milton would say. But I’m talking about real life here, bunky. The Hank McCoy of our bestial passions, our battles with the Bloody Tyrant Time, the Iron Gates of Strife and all that.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to bore you with the kind of pithy philosophy that graces AIM profiles. Nor will I quote the Book of Matthew for Ultimate Knowledge or give you belabored prose on that fable about the camel that traversed a desert with no oasis and ended up with a dry hump.

The problem of Love and Girlfriends doesn’t go away that easily though. Most people, asking Allah or Albus Dumbledore (hey, I ain’t judging) the question that I ask the mirror every day, get for their answer a stout “No! Never!” Something needs to be done about it. Some of us choose to lose weight and shower, some of us bribe their way into getting a column at the college paper in the hopes that some girl will read and understand.

And yet others among us walk the lonely path of the frotteur, eventually getting arrested on the Red Line for groping women. I’m not being sexist. It’s a lonely life, but it’s also a really wretched thing to do. And — just to make things clear — I do not in any way condone groping women in subways, clubs, hallways, elevators, checkout lines or any other place. Groping, like kissing with tongue (I’ve heard that both are a lot of fun, but I’ve never been able to find out), is something that should be done with the full consent of the other party involved. In fact, I’m so concerned with it that you can frequently find me at the Park Street station in dark glasses and a trenchcoat, looking like a secret agent and making sure that nobody else (err, umm, I meant nobody) partakes in this shady form of gratification.

Anyway, I’m talking about the guy who was arrested on the Red Line the other day for groping random women in his search for the goose that would lay a golden egg. He’s hopefully behind bars right now, as opposed to inside crowded bars. It was a headline in the Boston Metro last Thursday, but I’m too lazy to look it up or even find his name. My research, like the women that I’ve loved and lost, is on the internet. So let’s just call him Randy.

Randy might be alone in his not having yet found a soul-mate who likes brie, poetry and long walks down subway stations, but he’s part of a social sub-group called “chikans.” A chikan is one who frots. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “frottage” by quoting some Hoity Toit on it thusly: “The special perversion of frottage ... consists in a desire to bring the clothed body, and usually though not exclusively the genital region, into close contact with the clothed body of a woman.”

From what I understand of this phenomenon, it seems to be a psychological disorder. But what kind of a world would allow such a loveless life to be lived, where a neurosis like this spawns and festers? Where did we go wrong in allowing such a state of being? I can’t help but wonder, is this the natural order of things? Is this what people like Darwin and the younger Huxley and all those other cultural anthropologists (whose names, to be honest, I don’t know) were aiming for when they dissected Society and laid down what they believed to be the rules of humanity? Is this what Watson and Crick labored for?

The answer, I would hope, is a resounding no. But when you take our urban setting, filled with TV, the internet and magazine ads, where sex, love and spiritual completion are so tantalizingly presented to the public as they are so easily attained, you’re bound to spawn hopes. When those hopes are shattered in the crushing defeat of everyday dystopia, the perversions and crimes against complete strangers almost seem inevitable. I’m sure that you guys who are reading this are filled with the same distaste that I’m feeling right now. But the overwhelming pity of this is that frotteurs and chikans are just the comic punchline to a serious, growing problem. It’s like Trwstrynd Aylsquythe-Poynsenby said in the third Minstrel Uthyr album:

Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream-

Verily, verily, verily, verily, life is quite obscene.

As long as we keep on inculcating our children with false values, as long as we keep on objectifying women as instruments of sexual gratification and nothing else, the situation will just continue growing worse. Today, it’s Randy on the Red Line and a snicker or two, but tomorrow it may be a friend, a sister, or even you. (That is, if you’re female. My religion forbids me from the consideration of male-to-male chikans.)

I’ll just leave you with a last word of caution. Ladies, please be careful in crowds. You don’t want to be groped by random strangers, unless they have your prior consent.

Or if you do, call me.

Arafat Kazi, a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences, is weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press and can be contacted at futhman@thewatsonbrothers.com