January 04, 2013

What Is Rape?

Women can be very Zen about the fact that men don't ask before making plans. It is the spiritually upright way to go about it.

Or women can be deeply disturbed that men don't ask them before they plan the simplest course of action.

Because women always do. It is the emotionally right thing to do, as a woman. To check. To ask. To know. To ensure they have provided for, before they can go seek their own little dreams.

Because by saying that it is okay to let it be this way, women submit to the way their twisted society is wired. That a woman must ask, but a man can get away with informing.

Women of my world who burn other women to death for money, who kill girl children, or who are less obviously harmless because they give preferential treatment to the boy child over the girl, to the son-in-law over the daughter-in-law, will tell you that men are simple beings, they don't complicate things, they don't "overthink".

They are right. Men do not "overthink", or for that matter, don't think at all about how the smallest of things can demonstrate who the boss is.

If this blog is being read by a man at the moment, please ask. Ask if your decision concerns a woman in any way. A violation of this basic dignity in its cruelest form is called rape. Often, men do this without realising they are doing it. And women take it thinking it's normal.

But just because something has been done in a certain way for centuries, does not mean it is right.

2 comments:

shIrIn said...

Men need to ask and women need to understand that It is okay for men (especially their sons) to ask.

Mayuri 'Meera' said...

Interesting take... I thought even prying x-ray eyes on the road side were one of the many arms of rape. But what you say is true. Rape is much more mundane than that. It starts from within, in fact, within women themselves. It is omnipresent at all times in all places.