Rape is one of the most abhorrent crimes. It is a violation as much of the body as the psyche of the victim. And whatever spin one gives to it – the girl should have been more careful, women should dress ‘properly’, she was asking for it by being flirtatious, she is known to be promiscuous, women should not venture out alone beyond a certain time at night – there is no condoning it. But these are the very reasons one hears being bandied about. In her book What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape, Sohaila Abdulali points out why these excuses make matters worse, urging us, as a society, to start afresh the conversation about and around rape.
Here is a sneak peek into a few stories that will astound, infuriate and ignite you to take a step forward.
 
Title: Your Love Is Killing Me
‘Girls and boys get completely different messages about sex. We assume that sex feels good for boys, but girls learn early that losing their virginity is supposed to hurt. We create the idea that sex is uncomfortable for girls, and we raise girls who don’t think they deserve pleasure, and boys who at best don’t care about their partner’s pleasure, and at worst are actively abusive.’
 
Title: Good Girls Don’t
‘Who gets raped? Who do we think gets raped? Are girls who can shit and vomit on command immune? What about sex workers? Even if we acknowledge that anyone can be raped, who deserves to be raped? When are we willing to call it rape? At what point do you lose sympathy of your peers? When you’ve drunk too much, when you’ve had sex with x number of men in the past, when you’re just not a nice person? … Maybe acknowledging that all sorts of women get raped by all sorts of men messes too much with the comfortable narrative that says only good girls get raped. Oh, but it also says good girls don’t get raped. Both these things can’t be true, and sex workers aren’t good girls, so how can they be raped, and if they’re raped, they’re human and hurt, and we can’t have that. So let’s just shut our eyes and maybe the whole confusing thing will go away.’
 
Title: What Did You Expect?
‘Much of the confusion comes from the sexist attitudes and cultural norms. But I think there is another aspect to the ease with which we blame ourselves for terrible events. It has to do with that familiar word: control. And if that’s the case, then it’s not necessarily completely pathological to blame yourself a bit. Maybe it’s a coping mechanism.’
 
Title: Oh, Please
‘There’s a subversive little thread that often weaves itself into any discussion of women actually speaking out and taking space to claim their histories of sexual violence. It’s an insidious thread that has choked us for far too long. I call it the Lose-Lose Rape Conundrum. It unwinds like this. If you talk about it, you’re a helpless victim angling for sympathy. If you are not a helpless victim, then it wasn’t such a big deal, so why are you talking about it? If you’re surviving and living your life, why are you ruining some poor man’s life? Either it’s a big deal, so you’re ruined, or it’s not a big deal and you should be quiet.’

In What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape, Sohaila Abdulali asks pertinent questions: Is rape always a life-defining event? Does rape always symbolize something? Is rape worse than death? Is rape related to desire? Who gets raped? Is rape inevitable? Is one rape worse than the other? Who rapes? What is consent? How do you recover a sense of safety and joy? How do you raise sons? Who gets to judge?
 

Rape and sexual assault have become commonplace, but lingering questions still remain. Drawing on exchanges with many survivors, Sohaila Abdulali, a survivor herself, looks at how we – women, men, politicians, teachers, writers, sex workers, feminists, sages, mansplainers, victims and families – think about rape and what we say and what we don’t say.
This book is a must-read in order to normalize conversation around rape. Here’s why.
Rape has different connotations for men and women
‘A bad sexual experience for a man is more likely to be a missed communication, sexual frustration and a sour aftertaste, whereas for a woman the menu is statistically more likely to include humiliation, pregnancy, rape and death.’

~

Shattering the good-girl stereotype
‘What makes a “good girl”? Too often being good means being docile, passive, accepting your lot without question. I hope, in that case, for a new generation of only bad girls, who listen to themselves and follow their own hearts. And get up and straddle their lovers with abandon.’

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Self-blame becomes an unhealthy coping mechanism
‘Maybe self-blame isn’t always about self-hatred and internalized patriarchy. Maybe sometimes it’s a convoluted way of making the whole thing less scary.’

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Speak up about rape, when conducive
‘Keeping quiet about rape has a whole other toxic effect: it lets abusers off the hook. I want to be very clear that it is never the victim’s obligation to speak up, or report, or do anything but survive. Her first responsibility is getting through it. But we are all culpable in the silence around rape, a “vast international conspiracy” if there ever was one.’

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Destigmatize the act
‘It’s going to be a long time until rape is so stigma-free that there’s no penalty for speaking out as a survivor. Sometimes the penalty is to be pigeonholed, somehow diminished.’

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Revolution is led by mass dissent
‘The #MeToo campaign made it impossible to ignore the scope of sexual harassment and rape, at the same time as we were treated to some unsavoury glimpses of rape culture.’

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No means no, irrespective of role
‘Being a sex worker doesn’t mean you deserve to be raped. Neither does being a spouse.’

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Make men accountable
‘We choose to blame each other, maybe out of misogyny, maybe simply out of fear, forgetting, as we do so, that there is someone else in the picture who also has a choice: a man who can choose between decency and dominance.’

~

Consent can have undefined, blurred lines
‘So often we tend to talk about the victims and the ways they went along with, or took advantage of, or kept suspiciously quiet about, rape. They didn’t leap up and stab the man and go running out clutching their clothes to their outraged bosoms, therefore they consented.’

~

Creating healthy boundaries
‘It blurs boundaries, or it can clarify them. Although I paid for my rape in many other ways, it actually helped me draw very clear boundaries, and for that I’ve always been grateful. Not to the rapists, of course, but just to whatever contrarian gene I have that hates being told what to do.’

In What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape, Sohaila Abdulali asks pertinent questions: Is rape always a life-defining event? Does rape always symbolize something? Is rape worse than death? Is rape related to desire? Who gets raped? Is rape inevitable? Is one rape worse than the other? Who rapes? What is consent? How do you recover a sense of safety and joy? How do you raise sons? Who gets to judge?
 

Female-to-male transgender people, or transmasculine people as they are called, are just beginning to form their networks in India. But their struggles are not visible to a gender-normative society that barely notices, much less acknowledges, them. While transwomen have gained recognition through the extraordinary efforts of activists and feminists, the brotherhood, as the transmasculine network often refers to itself, remains imponderable, diminished even within the transgender community. For all intents and purposes, they do not exist. In a country in which parents wish their daughters were sons, they exile the daughters who do become sons.
Here are 7 of the many struggles of transmen in India, quoted from Nandini Krishnan’s book, Invisible Men: Inside India’s Transmasculine Network:
Fear of the unfamiliar
While transwomen have had a peripheral presence in the public sphere, transmen have been conspicuous by their absence.
“All of us were terrified of the transwomen we encountered, at traffic signals and on beaches and on trains, clapping their hands boisterously, demanding money, and threatening to lift their skirts or feel up the boys unless they were paid.” “So alien is the concept of transmen to the world that even when I explain they are female-to-male (FTM) and not male-to-female (MTF), the typical response is a puzzled, ‘But then why do they wear saris?’”

~

The language of otherness
The alienation of transmen is further aggravated by ‘offensive’ vocabulary that floats around and enters our psyche.
“The term ‘transgender’ is largely acceptable as an umbrella term, but ‘gender change’ could be deeply offensive. To say someone was ‘trapped’ or ‘had the wrong body’ could be offensive too. I met a transman who was deeply hurt because a psychiatrist had written that he ‘suffered’ from gender dysphoria. He did not like referring to his transition as ‘treatment’, because, he said, ‘I’m not ill’.”

~

Disembodied souls or soulless bodies?
Society’s denial of non-binary gender is ruptured by misplaced curiosity that doesn’t allow any integration of form and soul.
Gee Semmalar observes “‘There’s a kind of voyeurism that is involved in piecing together our lives. We’re like lab rats. You place us on the table and you dissect us and you see what our bodies look like and how our bodies change and what surgeries are being done’.”

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Culturally legitimized violence
“Many of them have been victims of forced marriage, even rape. Nearly all have been victims of some form of physical or emotional violence. Not one person told me he had never contemplated suicide. All of them had friends who committed suicide.”

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The unobtainable organ
“ (…)the fact is that the gender reassignment or sex reassignment surgeries that a lot of transmen opt for are limited to uterus and ovary removal and top surgery, because the phalloplasty or the metoidioplasty for construction of a penis is not a very well-developed surgery in India. The surgery is complicated, and prohibitively expensive.”

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The circus of certification
“If the invisibility of transmen from public life puts them at a disadvantage, their invisibility in law cripples them. Largely invisible in terms of national advocacy, they sometimes have trouble convincing officials they exist.” The Supreme Court of India “allows one to self-identify with a particular gender, irrespective of what his or her birth certificate, hormones, or surgical history say.” However, “Many have paid bribes they could barely afford to get their documents falsified.”

~

The schism within

“Several transmen told me that because the Transgender Boards (…) comprised mainly transwomen, there was some gatekeeping within the community. ‘They don’t want what is already a small piece of the pie sliced up even further, so you have transwomen putting up all kinds of hierarchies of authenticity, saying transwomen who are post-operative are the most genuine, most authentic and most deserving transwomen and at the bottom of the totem pole are transmen (…).’”

Read Nandini Krishnan’s ‘Invisible Men’ as she investigates this seismic activity and brings it up from the depths to the surface.