Saturday, November 5, y

RAPE : On Coercion and Consent.

- Intense reading and not easy to grasp. Shows what a woman

goes through, full of pain and anger but also helplessness.

- Feminist analysis : rape is not an isolated event or individual

interchange gone wrong but an act of terrorism and torture.
Rape is an act of violence and not sexuality and the threat of
which intimidates all women. Expression of male sexuality.

- Marxian analysis - women’s sexuality is socially, a thing to

be stolen, sold, bought, bartered but a woman never owns it.
To be property would be an improvement.

- Liberal tradition (Brownmiller) : First wave of feminism.

Rape is a displacement of power based on physical force onto
sexuality, domination is alien. Eg - rape in riots, wars, by po-
lice, parents.
- Myths about rape: that it is motivated by uncontrollable male
lust rather than violence. Her counter-discourse about rape,
reframing it as an act of power, even mass terrorism, which
had the consequence of controlling female behavior. In other
words, Brownmiller argued, rape was fundamental to the pa-
triarchal domination of women.
However, she also agreed that the way a woman dresses would
be a reason for the rape. Blaming the victim and not the rapist.
- Rape : extension of sexism, women are treated as objects.

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- State calls rape a sex crime that isn’t crime when it looks like
sex. Rape : intercourse with force or coercion, without con-
sent.
- Male view : whatever women lose is non materialistic.

- Sadomasochistic tone underlying the state’s definition - can

be or become consensual although there was force and coer-
cion because it looks like sex. Abuse is romanticised and
fetishized.

- Protection of woman’s sexuality is in male genital terms. Eg -

rape of a woman is a man’s loss (her family members’), name
and honor of the family. Definition in male genital terms.

- Other incidents like her attitude being open and asking for
rape - Jindal case. The recent video “your dress is consent to
rape”.

- Rural mentality : raping a woman is manly, watching porn

isnt.

- The moment a woman has sex, she loses everything. Level is

set by what is seen as normal male behavior rather than at the
victim’s point of violation.

- Rape, a crime against monogamy than woman’s sexual dig-

nity. Speaks about how injury is also defined by the law.
- Rape is coerced sex. Coercion, in turn, is “best understood as
a use of asymmetric power that one sort of agent may hold
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over another, in the former’s ability to inhibit broadly the

ability of the latter to act, by means such as killing, injuring,
disabling, imprisoning, or drugging, placing the former in a
position to threaten another with such arms or constraints.
- Rape wont be seen to violate women until sex and violence
are confronted as mutually definitive than exclusive.

- The “rape debate” as it has existed for three decades. On one

side are, traditionalists, who define rape as “nonconsensual,
forced sex” – thus requiring both non-consent and force (and
sometimes adding on a requirement of “utmost resistance” for
good measure), and on the other are reformers, all of whom
view the traditional definition as at best redundant (because it
requires both force and nonconsent) and at worst, danger-
ously under-inclusive. Traditional definition – that requires
both force and nonconsent – excludes rapes that are forced
but arguably “consensual” where the consent is dubious (such
as “date rape,” “marital rape” or “rape with prostitutes,” each
of which, at various times in the near past, have been viewed
as either literally or virtually consensual), and also excludes
nonconsensual sex where there is no visible force (such as
rapes where no force is required or used for the threat of vio-
lence to be viable). The dangerous under-inclusiveness of the
traditional definition has prompted two camps of reformers:
those who want to drop the force requirement altogether leav-
ing rape defined as nonconsensual sex, and those who want to
drop the consent requirement and define rape as forced sex.
- Some sex overrides a woman’s lack of consent in circum-
stances that clearly involve boorish and immoral behavior but
not behavior that should be made criminal – such as where a

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partner in a long standing relationship eventually relents to

her husband’s romantic overtures, but does so only “to get a
good night’s sleep” – she doesn’t want the sex and at no time
explicitly consents to it. So, a definition of rape as noncon-
sensual sex is simply too broad
- Men say it is easier for a woman if she is raped by someone
she already knows and shares sexual intimacy with rather
than a stranger.
- Cases about women and evidence being dismissed - Bhanwari
devi.
- Pattern of male bashing, rape limited to one gender, narrow
minded, traditional thinking.
- Sees law in a negative way - one section of women are al-
lowed to have intercourse with, the others arent.
- Marital rape? Taught from the beginning about how sex is
bound to happen on the first night. What if either of the par-
ties don’t want to? But fed into one’s minds. Does society and
its mindset trigger incidents