By Amreeta Das:
I received (as did all contributors to this platform) an invitation from Youth Ki Awaaz, to express my views on any topic that has stirred me somehow this year, with a reference to Nikita Azad’s letter, that sparked off the #HappyToBleed movement. So, I take my cue from this very reference. Before going into my subject, I would like to openly salute Nikita. Her move has emboldened me and many other women like me to rethink our taboos regarding menstruation. These taboos are some of the innumerable strategies that the society employs to make women feel weak, and uncomfortable about their bodies. I begin my article by commenting upon this psycho-social construction of a woman’s body, which is one of the most powerful tools of psychological subordination.
[envoke_twitter_link]A woman’s body is the greatest space of oppression for her[/envoke_twitter_link], the most potent source of inhibition, fear, weakness and fragility. Her ‘honour’ depends on whether her body has been ‘legally penetrated’ by a male, or ‘illegally violated’ by a stranger. In case the latter takes place, she is ‘dishonoured’, made ‘impure’.
From her childhood, [envoke_twitter_link]a woman is made to disown her body. It is usurped by the society[/envoke_twitter_link], and the way she feels about it, in turn too, is programmed by the society. So, in a dark night, if she is grabbed by a man or few men and forcibly made to surrender her body to him/them, it is no longer a question of private or individual suffering that invites the legitimate sympathy of the society (as it would have happened if she was just beaten up, or maimed or tortured, without being sexually assaulted), it is most powerfully a question of a suffering induced by the society’s branding of that ‘tortured body’ as ‘impure’. The sympathy, the numerous sighings of “So sad”, “They destroyed her for life, bechaari“, “Kill them, they destroyed her purity, those beasts”, “Imagine her trauma!”, and a thousand more lamenting cries come with the hidden admittance that those men actually succeeded in destroying her ‘honour’ and ‘purity’.
It is also a cruel reality, that the next time when she steps out of her house, she will be looked at with pity, that she is no longer ‘pure’. Yes, that one incident will maim her for life, make her feel guilty about herself. At least five out of her 10 avid ‘sympathisers’ will have speculated, perhaps secretly, about what exactly she was wearing that night and whether that garment adequately covered her body or when exactly she was attacked. Was it too late in the night? If so, then what on earth could a woman be possibly doing alone at that time of the night, knowing that rapists lurk the streets at that time? Could it be that she herself had (of course unconsciously), made some inviting gesture, and of course, the inevitable thought—how clean is she herself as a woman? Is she of the sort who would easily sleep with guys at night or is she the right sort, who firmly protects her ‘virginity’ for the ‘right man’?
The degree of sympathy is directly proportional to the ‘appropriateness of her character’. If she dances in clubs at night, then, of course it is not much of a wonder that she was raped (I mean, big deal, a woman like that is any way used to sleeping with multiple partners, why not few more?) She is painfully aware of the whispers, the curious glances, and the hushed conversation of her friends. She comes to inhabit a warped, ‘violated’ environment. She is socially raped a hundred more times.
It is this ‘rhetoric’, this nightmarish claustrophobia of ‘pity’ and ‘sympathy’ that makes the women re-live the trauma, again and again. This rhetoric makes her feel ‘dirty’, ‘impure’. We all know that language has the enormous power of creating realities. She is made to inhabit this warped reality, where her ‘honour’ is measured by her ‘sexual purity’.
But I ask, which man/woman possesses the power to dishonour or disgrace a woman by forcefully having sex with her? How do we define her ‘honour’? Is it so brittle, so weak that any man can sully it, by inappropriately touching her body, by forcing himself on her? Instead, we make her feel weak and ‘impure’, by actually ascribing the power of dishonouring and violating her to the rapist.
It is shameful that our pious authorities are (the same people who vociferously demand the death of the rapist or even wishes to lynch him) perversely occupied with her ‘sexuality’. They cannot look at her without immediately imagining her ‘body’ and measuring it in their self-created ‘purity metre’. Of course, this same society wishes to burn the rapist alive or castrate him. But does it give one moment of constructive thought that it must redefine the way it expresses its collective sympathy for the woman?
Collective sympathy has the real power of boosting somebody, making somebody believe that she was the victim of a heinous crime and that the society stands by her. But no crime has the possible power of interfering with her ‘honour’. Her honour is far greater, far beyond her ‘sexual status’.
[envoke_twitter_link]A woman is not just about the size of her breasts or shape of her buttocks[/envoke_twitter_link]. Her ‘purity’ (Notwithstanding my grave objections against the usage of this very vague term in any context, I use it in its popular cultural sense) had never anything to do with her sexual status.
The psychological trauma that any victim of sexual assault has to go through has much to do with this deeply patriarchal rhetoric that in powerful ways make the victim feel guilty and the perpetrator powerful. We need to shatter this ‘warped’ reality that has been killing girls all over the planet, whether raped or not. We need to militate against this linguistic subjugation of the mind. We might torture the rapist to death. But would that change the way a woman is perceived? Would a man begin thinking that it is irrelevant whether his fiancé is the survivor of some gruesome crime and whether that crime had anything to do with her sexuality?
The way we use words or have been taught to use words reflect the way we have been conditioned to think. The onus is on us and no one else, on how we liberate ourselves from this conditioning.