Rape as flippant metaphor:Salman Khan reflects attitude of our society

We should be outraging about a whole other thing that Salman Khan said

Swetha Ramakrishnan Jun 21, 2016 15:01 IST

It wouldn't be a stretch to say that 2016 has been the year of outrage. Ask Lisa Haydon, Tanmay Bhat or the makers of Udta Punjab. Another name to add to this list, would be the repeat offender, but also king of a lot of (Bandra) hearts, Salman Khan.

The superstar was recently in the news (again) for his comments on rape. According to Salman, a really tough scene in his recent film Sultan left him feeling like a "raped woman" who could "barely walk straight". The outrage around this statement has multiplied with time, and rightly so.

Here is a celebrity who is comparing a gruelling shoot day to rape. With his comments, he brings into the forefront only the powerless, shame angle of a crime, while missing the bus on a tiny little word called 'consent'.

Like Vishnupriya Bhandaram mentions in this opinion piece, "Salman should have stuck to saying that he was exhausted because he wasn't being coerced into the physical exertion. No one put a gun to his head and asked him to do push ups. No one said that they would leak photos of him working out, if he ever told anyone about his shooting schedule."

What followed is a heated round of twitter outrage, a demand for an apology from the NCW, and an explanation from father Salim Khan. However, before we close the file on this year's 100th outrage case, here's an Indian Express article that claims to reveal what happened immediately after he made those statements.

Reportedly, Salman Khan was giving media interviews at Mehboob Studio, Bandra on Saturday afternoon (18 June). It was in the second batch of interviews that he made the rape statement, and he immediately followed it up with, "I don't think I should have [said that]." Salman then rectified his statement by saying, "It feels like the most difficult...I couldn't take steps."

This is not a defense of Salman Khan. This is not even to say, "but he has such a good heart and he does charity so we should stop hating on him". In no universe is it okay to make light of rape, under any circumstance, even if you're Salman Khan and your intention was not wrong.

But rape culture, and our use of the term rape is a far bigger issue than a celebrity making a faux pas. Rape is now used as an acceptable term to denote a powerful win, rather than the reality of it being a non-consensual act of sexual crime. Statements like "India raped South Africa in the match!" or "bro my landlord is raping me over the rent" are very often heard in daily conversation, and that's the real issue.

Salman is a mere product of this culture. We make light of everything, and then when someone around us does it on record, we go bat-shit crazy. This is not to say that we should completely ignore his comments in light of this clarification. However, an unintentional faux pas, and an apology later, we should be focusing on a far bigger problem: Salman's attitude towards women. You need us to tell you that it is problematic.

The interview with Spot Boye has far more cringe-worthy comments that are being ignored because of his comments on rape. Tomorrow, we will forget about his comments, just as we have forgotten about Lisa Haydon's comments on feminism. We will still watch Housefull 3 and contribute to it earning 100 crores at the box office. We will outrage about Tanmay Bhat "drawing the line" when it comes to national icons, and promote objectification, infidelity, regressive misogyny is our films, (Hi Riteish Deshmukh, we're talking about Great Grand Masti). Basically one man's outrage is another's man "just an entertaining film yaar".

But what about Salman Khan's continuous objectification of women? This has not changed with time, and isn't likely to, even as we change our topic of outrage. He will still think of women as a vice, like a mysterious force out of his control, that makes him do bad things.

In a Mumbai Mirror interview earlier, he had said, "Yes, I'd like to have a child but the problem with that is with the child, the mother comes along. If I can avoid the mother and have a child I wouldn't mind two or three." Salman Khan is a product of a generation that forwards Whatsapp jokes on how being husband is akin to being a servant. Basically, in Salman's universe, women stop you, slow you down, they control you, they're a vice, but they're bloody addictive, just like a drug.

"Leave every second vice in your list - that's the mantra I follow. And I have left everything one by one. When it was between coffee and cigarettes, I quit coffee. Between cigarettes and drinks, I quit the stick. Between the drinks and women, I have chosen women. Ab iske baad duniya chhod do! But I will never quit movies," said Salman, in theSpotboye interview.

When the journalist asked him if he thought women were a vice, he furthered, "I'm leaving everything for women. There's nothing left to quit anymore. Ab to bas haath pakadna baaki hai. Wahi reh gaya hai."

I don't know, Salman. When have you ever really held a woman's hand and claimed her to be your equal? The last time I checked, you were lifting your co-star's skirt in a song, with your mouth.

http://firstpost.com/bollywood/we-should-be-outraging-about-a-whole-other-thing-that-salman-khan-said-2846866.html

'Felt like a raped woman': Why this faux pas is not only Salman Khan's fault

Vishnupriya Bhandaram Jun 21, 2016 11:00 IST

"When I used to walk out of the ring, after the shoot, I used to feel like a raped woman. I couldn't walk straight. I would eat and then, head right back to training. That couldn't stop."

In an interview with Spot Boye, Salman Khan said that a "tough" shooting experience made him feel like "a raped woman" who "couldn't walk straight". I understand Salman's sentiment that it must have been a gruelling shooting, he says there was so much "lifting and thrusting on the ground" - I get it, it was a lot of hard work and physically taxing, but Salman, rape for a man or woman is not "tough", it is traumatic and an experience no woman/man ever wants or asks for.

Salman Khan isn't really the issue. Rape culture is.

We are living in a culture in which the images, language, laws and everyday life around us validates and perpetrates the rape culture. Salman Khan is merely a case in point. When he's saying he felt like a "raped woman" - he means tired, spent, exhausted but that's after doing the things he wanted to do.

Salman should have stuck to saying that he was exhausted because he wasn't being coerced into the physical exertion. No one put a gun to his head and asked him to do push ups. No one said that they would leak photos of him working out, if he ever told anyone about his shooting schedule.

Someone on Twitter defended Salman Khan with this:

When you say I am F@#ked, do you really mean it??? NO na. Well thats exactly what happened with #SalmanKhan's statement. (End of topic)

- G9 Divya Solgama (@DIVYASOLGAMA) June 20, 2016

@DivyaSolgama, semantically speaking, 'fu***d' implies an unpleasant sexual situation, that may or may not deal with consent. Rape on the other hand is quite clearly about invasion of personal space and physical boundaries and an assault on another human's agency. To use a tragic crime to describe an unpleasant situation is definitely in poor state.

You're not wrong, when you say that rape also means to destroy or pillage, but the next time you want to use that term, use destroy or pillage instead - India has a significantly lower rate of rape reportage, indicative of the social stigma that people assign to the crime - not upon the perpetrator but on the victim/survivor. Not only do we owe it to our own 'authentic' selves, but in our endeavour to deliver a better social experience to men and women in the future, we have to be judicious in our use of words. For example, when someone is saying that Team India 'raped' some other team in a cricket match, you might mean that India destroyed their team by being superior and better at the playing the game, but what anyone can hear is that a thing/object gets raped and there is nothing wrong with that.

Brock Turner, the Stanford rapist's father reduced the woman's traumatic experience to "twenty minutes of action" - this is rape culture. Turner got a lenient sentencing because he had a "bright future" ahead of him and the woman he raped must look ahead in despair that there is no one out there who would listen to her, get her justice. Reducing an invasive, thoroughly personal yet deeply social crime like rape as "twenty minutes of action" or "she wanted it" or "the exam was so tough we got raped" shows how we're giving a cold shoulder to the thousands of sexual assault survivors - we are telling them that their stories do not matter, that they are 'spoilt goods', that they are to blame and most of all, that we do not believe them because rape is an act to be enjoyed, not a crime to complain about.

Rape is not an action - it's not like horse-riding, running, jumping - it's a crime, but rape culture is a "permanent state of this suspension of disbelief, from the perpetrator, to his father and friends and anyone who prefers to view the staging of this tragedy as a romantic comedy," writes Julian Vigo in Counter Punch. Rape culture reifies the notion that women are willing victims in their own rape and therefore not victims at all - just like how Salman Khan was a willing actor coping with a "tough" shooting schedule.

Curb your instinct to call me and my allies 'Feminazis' or 'Feminists who spoil the fun' (actually do whatever you want), but please think about rape culture and absorb the fact that both sexes have similar experiences of sexual victimisation. And perhaps, when you don't know better, it is better to err on the side of caution - why remind a woman about the constant fear they have in the back of their mind of being raped, by using that word out of context, to explain something else. Use a thesaurus and find another word to explain yourself because we can all do with avoiding language that objectifies and degrades women and trivialises violence against women.

http://m.firstpost.com/bollywood/felt-like-a-raped-woman-its-not-just-salmans-fault-we-are-caught-in-vortex-of-rape-culture-2846410.html