When rape makes the headlines in India, talk of hanging begins. Commentators blare from news screens; politicians pledge death. These stories of brutal crime and brutal punishment, all in the name of protecting women and girls, tell us something important about contemporary Indian responses to rape. They also tell us about a fundamental flaw in…
Category: Sexual violence
Chokhri, a New Sexual Health Project, Maps Marital Rape and Abortion in India
There’s a scene about birth control in the questionably feminist 2017 Hindi flick Lipstick Under My Burqa that stuck with me. Shireen, whose abusive husband rapes her and refuses to use condoms, goes to the gynecologist for another abortion. The gynecologist tells her she can’t keep having abortions and using the morning after pill, and the only other form of available birth control…
Is There a “Gray Zone” in Consent?
If you’ve ever made a formal complaint of gendered violence, you might have felt that translating raw experience into the language of law is like describing a walk through the forest using only the formal scientific names of the trees. Whereas in lived reality, you saw the sunlight filtered green through the leaves, noted the precise…
Justice for Asifa: Sexual Violence, Religious Conflict, and the Politics of Outrage
On January 17, Muhammad Yusuf Pujwala and Naseema Bibi saw the body of their eight year old daughter, Asifa Bano. The child, a member of the nomadic Bakerwal community, a Muslim herding community residing in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, had been missing for several days. While her parents hoped for her safe return, they…
My abusive partner promises they’ll change. Will they?
“I promise I’ll change.” These are four words most people in a relationship with an abusive partner have probably heard. Longed-for yet dreaded, the words can offer both hope and disappointment. Hope that things really will get better this time, and disappointment when, inevitably, the abusive behavior—whether emotional, physical, or verbal—begins all over again. We’ve all…
Is #metoo a moral panic? Not if we’re clear about our values.
Last month, in response to a profile of pornography literacy programs, conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote an op-ed entitled “Let’s Ban Porn.” In it, Douthat argued that banning porn was not just feminist but also the logical conclusion of the #metoo movement’s quest for better sex. After all, Douthat argues, “It was only a generation…
When it hits too close to home: #metoo, Ansari, and the difficult question of justice
Check out the original piece at Feministing. The more we realize that sexual violence is not a series of isolated, one-off occurrences, separate blips on the radar screen, the more we have to contend with the violence of the everyday. Isolated, spectacular violence warrants isolated, spectacular justice. But how do we imagine justice, and healing, and survival,…
No, the #metoo movement is not about women “playing the victim”
Check out the original article at Feministing. You’ve been stuffed into a box your whole life. You contort yourself to fit. Twist your legs. Chop off your arms. Breathe shallower. Then one day you realize—we realize, together—the box has seams in it. After lifetimes of contortion, we realize: Explode the box. It’s easier said than done, but…
How Men Can Confront Toxic Masculinity (+ Why It’s Important for Mental Health)
With the #MeToo movement dominating the headlines over the past few months, many of us have had to ask tough questions about our own experiences of gender, power, and relationships. While women have taken the forefront of the movement, it’s also been a moment of reckoning for men. The movement has not only provided an…
Having Healthy Sex after Sexual Assault
The summer I was nineteen, I researched and wrote a travel guide to Italy, journeying from Venice to the Cinque Terre armed only with a sundress and my handy dandy Macbook. It sounds pretty ideal, and it was—except for the constant, terrifying, enraging sexual harassment. From being groped on the train to being kissed non-consensually…
