It is common to hear in protests that rape is not sex. Yet how true is it?
Going by the literal meaning of sex, rape usually involves sex. Feminists tend to add the role of consent and in essence reduce the meaning of sex to “consensual sex” to make it clear that lack of consent is rape. In the process there is a massive disconnect on understanding that is likely sabotaging our efforts to prevent rape.
If I choose to stress the distinction that tomato is a fruit and not a vegetable, that doesn’t mean I will be able to buy it at a fruit stall instead of vegetable vendor. In other words, our functional meanings are more by consensus than nuanced distinctions by a thinking few.
I think that it is important to realise that the Indian idea of sex does not consider a woman’s consent. This is how girls below the age of consent continue to be married. This is how a vast swathe of public figures see rape as a consequence of attraction (which is what underlies the idea of the victim tempting the rapist). This is how rapists and their victims end up married to each other. This is how a gang rape trial results in acquittals and the judge tells media that the minor victim was a prostitute. This is why a judge can rule in court that forced sex with a wife is not rape and this is why all the will for reform chokes itself into oblivion when it comes to outlawing marital rape.
There is no concept of consent. Heck, a woman liking sex is not even required to be a part of our collective definition of sex. Out here, rape involves villains who are pure evil brute forcing sex on screaming women. That is it. Reluctance is likely seen as virtue in a woman when it comes to sex, and refusals are an actual expectation of modesty. Kind of like “no thanks, I just had lunch before coming here” instead of “please give me a cup of tea”.
It is illustrated well in films, where a good deal of our film history immortalised with stunning songs is all about the shy girl being persuaded by the hero. Sometimes with public pursuit and declarations of intent, at times even starting off as dares and all reluctance “turns out to be temporary”, all anger turns out to be, misguided. Once the hero has chosen the target, the film can only end with the girl ending up liking it. The villain on the other hand will make brutal overtures at the girl and the heroine will never get “sullied”, while some supporting character will.
Fit all this together, and it isn’t all that difficult to understand how a panchayat marries the girl to the rapist, because she has been ruined. That makes it okay. The girl’s consent or even outright revulsion is irrelevant. This actually extends to gang rapes, where a girl partying with a lot of men who can be drugged into having sex with all, is seen as a kinky girl. There is no real issue over how she ended up in that situation or consent. Consent doesn’t currently have any equivalent in the traditional patriarchal view of sex. Remember the sting operation of Delhi police attitudes on rape?
I wouldn’t go as far as saying that films have created this view, because films reflect reality just as much as they shape it. Certainly no one seems to have been outraged over the early songs of romantic pursuit, the way the item numbers introducing a new idea get outrage. Nor is there any particular evidence of the girl’s consent mattering before that.
Regardless of who did it first, the point remains that “sex” in India includes a heck of a lot of rape by default. While us not being an outright barbaric people, we do draw the line at screaming women, the woman herself is hardly the point. Objections are more about what people like us find inhuman, or of course, the woman, of a man of respect, being sullied. This of course excludes dalits, tribals, anyone you are rioting against, etc. They aren’t respected. The nuanced distinction of rape not being sex makes little sense to most people beyond those objecting to rapes.
My belief is that the denial of rape being sex does more harm than good, because it has advocates of women’s rights communicating from a different planet than the unshaved masses. So, understanding the problem or objections in itself becomes tough.
Instead, it might be useful to define rape as sex without consent, which gives the people something they recognise and specifies that they notice something that hadn’t mattered earlier. That way, the public is more likely to learn to recognise rape in order to object to it.
There is a need for a great deal of talk on what sex is, the role of two people in it, mutual participation, consent, etc before we can hope to awaken people enough that they understand why rape is wrong or change the common views enough to make rape, molestation or otherwise violating a person’s autonomy absolutely unacceptable among “decent folk” as opposed to the criminal class (not prostitutes and other primitive definitions of indecent).
There is a need to actually create a new parameter related with sex called “consent”, which currently does not exist for most of the masses – not just “rapists”. At that point, we will be able to uproot patriarchy as a side effect, but this war of defining what sex is needs to happen before we condemn rape or say that it is not sex. People have no clue.