As the Indian parliament currently debates its way through the drafting of a new rape law, I’d like to politely suggest that what that nation lacks is not new legislation, but vigorous enforcement of existing laws. It would also help to have a police force that has received some measure of training in the complex and highly sensitive area of sexual crimes against women. Just writing a new law or strengthening the provisions of a previous one are not of themselves going to solve the problems a girl in India faces daily when she is coming home from work “unprotected” and must defend herself from lewd suggestions, groping and sexual aggression.
Neither is law alone going to help with the gross under-reporting of rape or the difficulties its victims have when trying to get justice in a society that sees them as temptresses or even perpetrators, regardless of how that law is worded. Because India, like other fast-emerging economies, is still at a very early stage of socio-sexual consciousness (equivalent to the 1950s in Europe) that expects a lawyer to prove the unimpeachable virtue of a client before she can expect a fair hearing ... even if she’s dead. Maybe that’s going to change now.
It appears that the Orient is every bit as hung up as we are on certain classic female stereotypes: virgin, whore, vixen, iron maiden, cute kitten, dumb blond and mother ersatz. The monumental disrespect that such knee-jerk stereotyping shows is only matched by the crass behaviour it causes. Such behaviour, if isolated, would be bad enough, but when it is compounded by a prevailing lad culture bent on kicks and entertainment, then it quickly becomes socially malignant. Badly behaved boys everywhere find easy meaning in gang codes of perverted honour and violence, particularly in a time when older patterns of masculinity fail, new ones have yet to be established and entire generations have lost their moral compass.
Young Indians grow up on Bollywood plots that twist traditional values of manly strength and virtuous maidenhood into a bizarre cocktail of pestering, posturing and protesting to gain affection or resist it for the sake of form. In films, the more you badger and bully the poor girl, the more likely she is to fall into your arms in the last reel. Especially if you turn out to be rich after all and just pretending to be a pauper.
This odd form of courtship strutting is not so strange if looked at anthropologically or even as a dramatic template, but it sits very badly with the modern reality of increasingly educated and competent girls who are quite clearly a cut above most of their would-be or wannabe suitors. Young men are left feeding their sexual fantasies and indulging their daydream of one day being an interesting prospect because they have a job that pays and a scooter to go with it. In the meantime they can only look on with hunger as life passes them by and every desirable female is unattainable for a compound of religious, financial, social and now also educational reasons. In that context – and within the mindset it subsequently engenders – harassment, molestation and rape begin to look like readily available and highly attractive options in a sexual game plan. Relative impunity through weak law enforcement only encourages that perception.
Indian men, like men the world over, are starting to realize that the world no longer belongs to them: that their place is not only threatened but in many ways already lost. Urban women in India are more likely to be employed and employable, more likely to finish school, more likely to raise their qualifications through vocational training, more likely to succeed in running their own business etc. This realization is hard to conjugate with the received stereotypes I mentioned above, unless your addled mind has long ago accepted them as the true reasons for female emergence, empowerment and success. In other words, she succeeds because ... she’s slept her way up the ladder; because she’s a cunning vixen, a scheming bitch, a fluffy kitten or a trouser-suited, closet lesbian who needs to be taught a lesson. Men without self-esteem will find a dozen reasons like this to justify their aggressive sexual behaviour rather than the only one that fits: that they’re no-account losers whose lives are going nowhere and that they’ve never got laid and probably never will unless they use force. When enough young men like this get together, a tacit fraternity of humiliation is formed that will eventually wreck someone’s life.
Just as bad are the power-dressing alpha males whose sense of entitlement leads them to assume that all women are gasping for a chance to share their glory. In Indian society, these are often pampered Brahmin mother’s boys waiting for dead men’s shoes to turn them loose on the grand stage of industry and commerce. The nice, quiet marriage prospect that mum has found will never be enough. They will always be in search of a cheap conquest. Fuelled by the easy money of an economic boom and with smart phones as their chosen vector, they text and tweet their secretaries, interns and waitresses into uncomfortable corners, bullying and groping their way into liaisons that their parents would never permit, but which are tolerated by their social peers as the kind of high-spirited and macho posing that will stop them from burning out early from stress. The girls are barely considered. Harassment is the unwritten part of their job description.
Without full acceptance of their equality and respect for their integrity, women will continue to have a hard time of it in a society that currently values them less than men, pays them less than men, gives them responsibility without power and consistently fails to listen to their needs or grant them the attention and resources that their contribution to the health and wealth of the nation richly merit. It will take a lot more than a law to do any of this.
©
Edwin Drood, January 2013
Illustration after a print of the painting "Hanuman kills Ahi and Mahi"
by the Indian artist Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906), 1910.
