Contemporary Literary Review India | eISSN 2394-6075 | Vol 6, No 4: CLRI November 2019
Sarwar Morshed
An (Ironic) Apology for the Rapists
I wonder why people across the globe are so panic-stricken at the sky-rocketing rate of rape in recent times – they must be unschooled in history, myth and biology. Even though these days we see the highest per capita rape rate in human history, sex-induced incidents are nothing novel – they are as old as Cain; temporally as distant as the mythic Philomela; historically as indelible and real as the penetration of Roman ‘manhood’ into the Sabine women. Carnal crimes are concomitant with the existence of the homo sapiens on the surface of this planet. It was there in ante-deluvian times, it is now with the exponential growth-rate and it will be there in future, for, it is rooted in the male biology. If you have even a cursory look at the biochemical constitution of men, you come to comprehend the biological foundation of rape. It is not the man, rather the presence and secretion of testosterone in him that makes him violent and penetrative. If blaming is unavoidable, please, do blame the male hormone. The man himself is a genetic victim as his gene is his destiny – so should we continue victim-blaming? Why, especially in this case, are we so oblivious of the popular saying, ‘Hate the sin, not the sinner’?
Noam Chomsky, albeit metaphorically yet irrefutably argued that we have a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) softwired into the human brain. This ‘genetic endowment’ theory can be well extended to the domain of sexual coercion. Like the ‘language gene’, we have a ‘rape gene’ in the male segment of the humans. Following the Chomskyan footstep, we can label this gene as Rape Enabling Device (RED). RED, the erotic black-box is in-built in the male system. Testosterone-triggered, this dormant device is fully activated by the arousing stimuli from the environment. Why do we have a clear propensity to make a scapegoat of the rapist – do we blame a device for giving output from the input?
As the environmental issue has cropped up here, let’s make reference to the video ‘How to Not Get Raped’. Have women anywhere paid any heed to the commandments meant for their sexual safeguarding? In compliance with the suggestions, do they dress unprovocativley? Do they use the buddy system? Do they carry a rape-whistle? Do they wear jump-suit with rape-proof belt? Do they keep their hair short? Why do they create opportunities for potential rapists by their ponytail which can be used to drag and subdue them? Why do the women metamorphose them into perambulatory f…dolls by not embracing rape-proof lifestyle? Aren’t their rape-friendly ways making rape a Sisyphean problem? If you oscillate tamarind in front of a person premeditatedly, can you blame him for salivating?
Survey the corpus of human languages and you will come to understand how our codes encourage and invite the rapists to consummate their task! The only difference between the rapists and commonfolks is that they are prone to take language literally and no sane men can blame them for a fault which is not theirs. Don’t we say, ‘She’s dressed to kill’, ‘She’s a bombshell’, ‘She’s a knock-out’, ‘She’s a ravishing, stunning femme fatale’. Michael Kimmel opines that when an aggressive, alpha male thinks that she has knocked him out, justifiably he retaliates with the weapon at his disposal!
Demography is a contributing factor to the global pandemic of rape. Some people thought of organizing an ‘Annual Rape Festival (ARF)’ with a grand pro-rape rally in an exotic location like Assam with the dream of becoming ‘Rape Superheroes’. The dream of ARF now has become a diurnal reality with the rape-curve displaying a tangible upward trend. How to deter it? Mary Daly has suggested that the decontamination of the planet can be achieved only through a drastic reduction of male population. In her The Future – If There Is One –Is Female, Sally Miller Gearhart, opines with statistical precision, ‘The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately 10% of the human race.’
Sociobiology is also responsible for what we call forced copulation. Researches have revealed that most of the rapists are with low ratio of facial symmetry belonging to the lower rungs of societal and monetary ladders. The members of the fair sex are not normally attracted to these people leading to sexual deprivation. Before denouncing the rapists shouldn’t we dispel the sociobiological factor-induced discriminations?
Contrary to the discriminations the rapists have been subjected to over the millennial time-span across cultures, surprisingly, we can see through our naked eyes, how fair they have been to the womanfolks! Rapists have been untiringly trying to inject copular happiness to women from all age-groups irrespective of race, religion and color! They do not discriminate among women on grounds of caste, creed or complexion – how egalitarian, how magnanimous they have been! In a world, unbridgeably segregated, these great souls have not ignored anyone – they are warriors fighting to transform the discrimination-prone human society into a perfect, equal-attention getting place! With equal zest, zeal and dedication they have raped the fair, the unfair, the young, the old, the rich and the poor. Material considerations and external, skin-deep factors have not blurred their egalitarian perspective! And hence to safely neuter the divisive class war, they have raped the jolly, the depressive, the anorexic and the bulimic!