Monday, October 21, 2013

The good men of India...

IN India today, the rapes of women, from children to grandmothers, are daily news. Frothy television programs on sentimentalized family values are interrupted by advertisements for a new smartphone app: VithU, which allows women in danger, at a double press of a power button, to send an S O S alert with their location to predesignated friends and family members.

Universities are debating requiring students to abandon jeans and adopt formal dress codes, as though the trappings of civilization are needed to hold at bay the anarchy of sexual violence. Twelve-year-old schoolgirls are attending rape awareness seminars, in a death of innocence.

Indian cities are awash with feral men, untethered from their distant villages, divorced from family and social structure, fighting poverty, exhausted, denied access to regular female companionship, adrift on powerful tides of alcohol and violent pornography, newly exposed to the smart young women of the cities, with their glistening jobs and clothes and casual independence — and not able to respond to any of it in a safe, civilized manner. This is the world of women under siege, the medieval world of the walking undead, the rise of the zombies, targeting females rich and poor. For women, at least, winter is coming.

 In this context, it might appear odd to examine any other variant of the Indian male. But it is important to do so and to do so now. To bear witness to an alternate male reality that also pervades India on a daily basis. Full story...

Related posts:
  1. Rape in India: it's your fault, of course...
  2. Gang rapists sentenced to death, but India's denial will continue...
  3. India: Courts fail thousands of rape victims...
  4. Some rapes are more newsworthy than others in India...
  5. Gang-raped by 40 men, victim in India waits 17 years for justice...
  6. When low-caste Dalits in India are raped and killed by upper-caste thugs
  7. A 15-year-old girl in India was kidnapped and repeatedly gang-raped in...

No comments:

Post a Comment