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Are we raising men who will eventually rape us?

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Sreemoyee Piu Kundu
Sreemoyee Piu KunduJan 17, 2017 | 09:55

Are we raising men who will eventually rape us?

Last week at a party on December 31 in my ancestral Kolkata home, a friend who’s single and divorced and a surrogate mother of sorts joked about the way her nephew, an 11-year-old young boy, was critical of the off-shoulder dress she was wearing.

While we urged her to remove her bolero jacket, she remarked how he had scoffed, saying that the outfit was way too revealing, something that had naturally made her extremely conscious — to be judged by a boy who was in no way less than her son.

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Humiliating

“What will people say if they see you this way? Too much skin,” she repeated his scathing comments, verbatim. One of my readers recently also wrote to me about her son, a teenager, a pimple-faced 14-year-old who always threatened her when she expressed a desire to socialise alone with her girlfriends or her male classmates from catering school, often using the line: “I’ll tell dad what you are up to behind his back.”

His words, humiliating and hurtful, especially since she had sacrificed her flourishing career for him and was a stay-at-home mother, tending to her bed-ridden mother-in-law, most of the time, while her spouse, a busy corporate, was flying around the world on work, and hardly ever home.

“Is this is the price I have to pay for? The son I bore treating me like a slave — he even checks my phone and hates it when I wear Western clothes, laughing at my paunch, like my husband, calling me ‘fatso’. Must I justify my moves around the clock — where I want to go? Who I will have over at home? Must I feel like a slut each time I wear a backless blouse or a short skirt?”

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Is our freedom then nothing but a compromise? A paltry give and take? An answering to male authority?

I think of everything I recently read on social media, post the Bangalore molestation, angry, retaliatory voices, protesting against what Samajwadi Party politician Abu Azmi commented, of women who wear short skirts and scour the streets past midnight deserving to be raped, sounding honestly no different than the Nirbhaya rapist who, sitting in jail, made sickeningly misogynistic comments during a BBC documentary.

Or how in August 2016, the Union tourism minister had said foreign women should not wear skirts or walk alone at night in the country’s small towns and cities “for their own safety”.

Discussing tourist security in Agra, Mahesh Sharma added foreign arrivals to India were issued a welcome kit that included safety advice for women. “In that kit they are given dos and don’ts,” he told reporters. “These are very small things like, they should not venture out alone at night in small places, or wear skirts, and they should click the photo of the vehicle number plate whenever they travel and send it to friends. For their own safety, women foreign tourists should not wear short dresses and skirts... Indian culture is different from the Western.”

Self-hatred

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I think of how on Brigade Road, when I lived in Bangalore many years ago, in a crowded bylane, a group of drunken pub-hoppers had pressed their swollen privates into my buttocks, as we made a line waiting for an autorickshaw. How I froze in fear at the forced fornication.

How it transported me back to a time when I was about 10 and a man with the coldest brown eyes and the roughest hands had squeezed my breasts roughly, in front of a train toilet. How I couldn’t scream or ever confess what happened to me to my own mother and dreaded train journeys, paralysed by a looming sense of fear and self-hatred. I was a fat girl, my periods coming on at 10, much before other girls in my class, the ways neighbourhood boys waiting for the school bus often pushed me on purpose.

Choices

Or the time my boyfriend had forced himself upon me, the first time we were alone in a hotel room. I was 24. I had a bad cough. I tried freeing myself. Caught between my infatuation with a man I was engaged in a long distance love affair with, and my own sense of consent. The way I didn’t want to be groped, and fondled. The way I craved tenderness, not lust.

I think of a commercial sex worker I had once interviewed who said at the end of our interaction, touching her own breasts, “All men want the same thing. What you people can’t give, they snatch from us, use force since they have paid for their time. A woman’s voice is never heard. Ours. Yours... We are all the same in the end — vagina, breasts, buttocks… flesh, skin… pleasure providers, never seekers… never sanctioned to be in first place…”

I think of the little boy who was playing in my home or my reader’s growing son, and I ask myself, when did they start judging us? Our bodies? Our clothes? Our life choices? Are we raising the men who rape us, in the end? Be it on a crowded street corner or a deserted highway? In a pub? Or in the darkness of our own bedrooms? Day after day, after day...

Is our freedom then nothing but a compromise? A paltry give and take? An answering to male authority? Are we scared to assert our individuality?

When will we fight? Back...

(Courtesy of Mail Today.)

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Last updated: January 17, 2017 | 09:55
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