He wooed her with threats
Calls have been growing in India for the chief justice of the Supreme Court to resign “without a moment’s delay” after his recent remarks in two cases of alleged rape.
What remarks?
Justice Bobde, who was heading a three-judge bench, asked a 23-year-old man accused of raping a girl whether he would marry her.
“If you want to marry (her) we can help you. If not, you lose your job and go to jail,” he said.
His comments shocked many, especially considering the horrific accusations the girl – who was 16 at the time of the alleged rapes in 2014-15 – had made against the man, a distant relative.
According to the letter, he “is accused of stalking, tying up, gagging, repeatedly raping a minor school-going girl, and threatening to douse her in petrol and set her alight, to hurl acid at her, and to have her brother killed”.
It added that “the rape came to light when the minor school-going victim attempted suicide”.
This is where patriarchy gets things so very wrong. From the patriarchal point of view, what the rapist has done is to use and spoil and make dirty the female piece of property. If he marries her that won’t matter any more. She will be married and thus under firm control, and her dirt will get on no one but the man who made her dirty, so that’s fair.
But from the human point of view, what the rapist has done is to terrorize and torture her. Marriage to him would be nothing but more torture and terror, but the judge is apparently blithely unaware of or indifferent to that fact. He thinks of her as a filthy leaking vagina walking around dirtying up Pakistan, while she thinks of herself as a human who doesn’t want to be used like a rag.
Her family was fine with it though. It’s not clear whether she was fine with it too or simply had no option.
The girl’s family also alleged that they had agreed not to go to the police because they were promised by the accused’s mother that once the girl became an adult, they would marry the two.
In a country where victims are often blamed for rape, and sexual assault carries lifelong stigma, her family agreed to the arrangement.
But after the accused backtracked from his promise and married someone else, the survivor went to the police.
…
Gatherings of village elders in rural communities steeped in patriarchy are known to offer such a compromise formula to broker peace between families, and over the years, there have been several instances of the judiciary trying to play matchmaker between the victim and the accused.
“Village elders” of course are all male, and patriarchy treats women as fucktoys/babymachines.
This is so disgusting. This is supposed to be an educated, sophisticated person in a democracy. (I mean, it’s not ok for anyone to think this way, but if a society’s leaders endorse this reasoning, what hope is there for progress?)
Pakistan?
That does not sound like a recipe for a happy marriage.
But about this:
How is this consistent with the previously stated concept that rape is something that only a man can do to only a woman?
“Terrorize and torture” is something any person could do any person. Is the idea that rape can only be man on woman, penis-in-vagina continuous with the same patriarchial perspective? If not, how so?
How it’s consistent is that I nowhere said that “from the human point of view, what the rapist has done is to terrorize and torture her and nothing else.” That wasn’t a formal definition of rape, it was a description of how her feelings about it differ from the patriarchal idea of it.
Not to mention that Papito is committing a fairly basic logical error. Saying that action A (rape) causes effect B (terror and torture) does not imply that only action A can produce B.
I’m not sure where I stand on the definition of rape, but this seems a dubious objection to the prior post.
There are subcultures in which anal sex is not considered “real sex;” they consider that a woman is still a “virgin” after having had only anal sex. In these subcultures (yes, highly patriarchal), anal rape is not considered to be in the same category as vaginal rape, because it doesn’t result in a woman’s “loss of virginity.”
Papito:
It used to be the same (and doubtless still is) in the ‘purity’ movement in (particularly and especially) the US. That’s the (again highly patriarchal) movement in which teenagers wear rings signifying their ‘purity’ (virginity) and preach endlessly about being virgins until marriage.
Of course, it just means that they engage in riskier kinds of sex, including anal sex, which they’ve convinced themselves doesn’t count.
latsot, I’ve sometimes wondered if the men who made the rules (in multiple religions) just had a thing for kink.
I think that different groups may be marching in the same direction (but not necessarily together) on the question of whether only women can be raped, and only men can rape.
As they say, politics makes strange bedfellows.