A Reason to Rape?

I thought I wouldn't have anything to do with the kind of things that make newspaper headlines, in this blog, but today I feel impelled to break that little unspoken rule, perhaps because this is to do with a view I have held for long and yet can't help being confused about - since it's so complex and problematic.

So the news is that Bollywood rising star Shiny Ahuja has been arrested on charges of raping his domestic help. Other than the conventional sense of shock and maybe voyeuristic excitement at such an unusual celebrity development, one of the common reactions I heard from people, went along the lines of this gem (that) I unearthed from the comments section of a news website :

"In a country like India where prostitution is so open and for an actor like him who can essentially enjoy with any high society girls, it's very strange that he opted for a domestic helper. I feel sorry for the girl and pity for the actor. How strange that people at that level don't even think? It was not good for the actor even if it was a mutually agreed instance. "

So people commit rape because they are not getting enough sex? A well-to-do man with access to prostitutes and "high society girls" wouldn't "opt" for his housemaid? A "thinking" man in Ahuja's position would act more "reasonably"? Even if it was consensual, the actor had no business fornicating with his maid as this was too unusual to not mean trouble?

Perhaps Ahuja was more certain of getting away with this than with those aspiring model/actress casting couch women who might have the confidence to bite back? Perhaps he did not enjoy the raw element of power he secretly coveted in his relationships with women of his class? Perhaps he wanted to teach his maid a lesson for not doing his laundry well, and rape sounded like a good idea in his rabidly patriarchal worldview? Perhaps it was a consensual relationship after all and Ahuja was in love with his maid, but things turned complicated for some reason (one always hears of abusive husbands or wives)? Perhaps he is a sadist and gets thrills from domination and abuse?

Rape is problematic. Why would people like to see linear narratives here? It's always "Not getting enough sex -> incentive to rape" , man pursuing his evolutionary sex instinct, eh?

I grew up being more uncomfortable with the idea of rape than murder, because rape is a crime that is committed to gratify a selfish pleasure, right? whereas murder and killing could have some justification, some honor code about it, right? I didn't feel guilty while watching the good guys kill the bad ones in the movies but I found it horribly perverse when a woman was abused on screen, particularly as a male audience when there is an element of titillation and therefore extra guilt involved. Then again nobody blames a murder victim or shuns the victim of an attempted murder just on grounds of allowing him/herself be victimized. Rape however also reflects on the victim. A rape victim also has a future to live through, and a past to live with, unlike the murder victim. So rape sounds more heinous than a lot of "necessary murders", eh? These are the values I internalized. But later I thought : nobody ever died from a mere sexual assault (unless it's a crime of "rape and murder") and whatever the trauma and humiliation, one could always recover from it. What is more disgusting about rape is the violence and the power imposition, not the act of sex per se. Murder is naked violence and taking away another's right to life - the most important right if ever there was one. Yet our narratives provide us with enough justification for it. I remember a certain nationalist politician (who has incited mobs to riot and kill in his distinguished political career, by the way) demand capital punishment for the rapist, on the floor of the House, claiming that it was as bad as murder, because it leads to the "spiritual death" of a person. I was reminded of my Hindi movie days and the lines I would draw around the heinous crimes of rape and murder.

Now we know that rape could be a weapon of war (Congo, Darfur, Bosnia, Bangladesh), a method of interrogation and torture (Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib), a patriarchal strategy to keep the woman in her socially ascribed hierarchical position (eg marital rape in countries where the concept is yet to be legally recognized and the wife is still considered the husband's "property") and maybe a whole gamut of other things that are yet to be recognized and accepted.

But in the end we would like to see it as horny man blinded by lust seeking out vulnerable (and possibly gullible and loose) woman for some extreme fun, looting her "honor" in the process. The woman has all our sympathy but will no longer be considered chaste and "normal". We believe the man is guilty and we feel anger and moral angst, but also a tinge of sympathy for his rashness and inability to control his "jawaani ka josh". And in many places, if in the end the rapist marries his victim, the order of things is restored and the elders heave a sigh of relief.

ps : Shiney Ahuja is yet to be proven guilty although the rape on his maid has been clinically established. The thoughts I raised here I hope are general and independent of the conclusions reached by the jury on this particular case.

pps : Any discussion on rape is bound to remain incomplete without considering the "rape epidemic" in South Africa The survey shows that in a sample : one in four men there is a rapist, one in ten men himself a rape victim. Men with HIV are known to rape female infants there because they believe that sex with a virgin could cure AIDS. This shows how sexual aggression can be culturally learned behavior and how it could assume the form of a mass hysteria or mass psychosis in society as a whole.