India, the motherland as we call her, has lost another daughter. A 27-year-old veterinarian doctor was brutally raped and murdered last week by four men on the outskirts of Hyderabad.
In India, as per the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data, 24,923 rapes were reported in 2013 and 32,559 in 2017. One no longer bats an eyelid upon hearing about yet another woman being violated – unless a rod is inserted in the woman’s body or a minor is raped inside a temple or when the burnt body of a gang-raped woman is found.
Incidents like these are bound to move a nation and send shivers down the spine of women who are struggling and striving to fight patriarchal conventions while also trying to make a living.
Here’s a disturbing question: Are women who acquiesce to patriarchy safe? If a drunk woman in a modern city like Delhi is likely to get raped, as per the common discourse, is a woman showing not an inch of skin in a small town less likely to be raped, or a nun sworn to celibacy?
Or a wife within the four walls of her own home?
The clothes a victim wears don’t matter one bit, as has been well documented.
The science of rape
After the initial disgust and weariness one feels upon hearing such news, one ponders over the psychology of rape.
What makes a man, born of a woman, brutally strip a woman of every human dignity?
Rape symbolises an act of control against a resisting party, a non-consensual atrocity to satisfy one’s sexual desires. Viewed through the lens of post-colonialism and post-modernism, a man (a hegemonic conqueror) invades the body of a woman (colonised/subaltern).
India and the world are no stranger to seeing rape being used as a tool of abuse to assert dominance and exhibit aggression; the Partition of 1947 resulted in countless gang rapes and murders of pregnant women and young girls. In riots that have struck India since then, it is innocent women who are violated time and again.
Also read: The Aftermath: Survivors Speak on Coping with Sexual Violence
Thus, when 19th century reformists socialised the issues of women, women were indirectly declared to be bearers of culture and preservers of tradition. While the westernisation of men was considered progressive, the westernisation of women was condemned.
An inhuman rendition of toxic masculinity, rape culture, though despised, has been nourished and nurtured in India by millions of Indians unconsciously. Men have been socially conditioned into regarding women on one hand as means for procreation, carriers of ovaries, objects of desire, toys of pleasure and on the other hand as markers of culture, upholders of tradition and goddesses of modesty.
Women in Indian society
Patriarchal Indian society has contributed to the inception of this psyche in various ways. Children are raised in an atmosphere where mainstream Bollywood movies set up the standard for an ideal man to have superhuman qualities, while objectifying women with the trend of ‘item songs’.
Children tend to get heavily influenced by cinema when growing up and forming their own ideas. From 2005’s Parineeta where Shekhar (Saif Ali Khan) slaps Lalita (Vidya Balan) with an assumed authority that is apparently considered justified because of the love relationship between them, to 2019’s Kabir Singh where Kabir (Shahid Kapoor) exercises total control over the personality and character of Preeti (Kiara Advani) on account of ‘love’.
Thus, audiences are exposed to a relatable Indian setting with realistic characters speaking the same language, where a woman’s silence and passivity is seen as synonymous to consent and a man’s possessiveness is justified.
To decolonise the body of a woman, we must all start unlearning the fundamentals of patriarchy.
Psyche of rape
Adrian Lyne’s Unfaithful (2002), depicts its protagonist Connie as a happily married woman who indulges in a clandestine sexual affair with a younger book dealer. In a heated moment between the two, the actor forces himself on her and asks her to resist and hit him. She complies, and a scene that starts as a non-consensual act with the woman constantly fighting against her temptations and saying ‘no’, subsumes into one of mutual pleasure.
Researchers at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Texas gave standard psychological tests to 355 women undergraduates, surveying their sexual fantasies; 52% of women were found guilty of having rape fantasies.
The desire of women to be sexually dominated by a male figure can either be a result of the inherent inertia of patriarchy still left, or an acquired fantasy through pornography and media.
Whatever be the case, the ramifications of the same have resulted in a complex mess, which has ridiculously affected the psychology of men and women alike. Yet it is an acknowledged truth that a realistic rape cannot evoke any feeling other than disgust, anger, fear and trauma. A scene like that in Unfaithful fuels the male view that there is acceptance in the denial of a woman.
This is also a popular idea in Bollywood: “Uske na me bhi haan hai.”
Laws not stringent enough
To tame the monstrous temptations of a human with inhuman attributes is not an easy task by any means. It will take a generation of unlearning for undoing what is already etched in the minds of the population.
Thus, the only way to prevent sexual assaults and violence is to make laws more stringent. Feminists point out the difference in punishment between stranger rape and marital rape – thus implying that the law differentiates between protecting women inside the home and outside.
There are contrasting views on the question of laws on sexual violence. Two feminist theories differ slightly on capital punishment for rape – but both underline clearly that the current system is patriarchal, and severe laws of rape will merely legitimise women as the ‘weaker’ sex, in need of protection from the ‘stronger’ sex.
India needs a solution for rapes. The culture of victim blaming and victim shaming is still so prevalent rise, there’s a section of women who also agree that a woman’s attire is responsible for rape.
What is the need of the hour? A feminist uprising of men and women or a change in law?
Hayaat Fatemah, 21, studies literature and history at Aligarh Muslim University.
Featured image: Reuters/Anushree Fadnavis