Rape as flippant metaphor:Salman Khan reflects attitude of our society - Page 2

Salman Khan felt like a raped woman on the set of Sultan. India, it is time to show your intolerance

Salman Khan said he felt like a raped woman after his wrestling practice for Sultan! Here's why we shouldn't tolerate this man and his rape comment!

Salman Khan has been trending on Twitter and Facebook since last evening. What did he do this time? No, his driver did not run over someone sleeping on the footpath but this time, he compared himself to a raped woman. He is playing a wrestler in his upcoming movie Sultan and in an interview where he was asked about his training to be a wrestler he said it would be difficult to walk out of the ring, and he would feel like a raped woman. And this comment is not going down well with a few people and the problem here is that it is only these few people who are bothered by a comment such as this.

It is the time all of us are bothered by a comment like this especially when it comes from someone who tries to Be Human. Did he not realise that his statement actually propagates rape culture? What is Rape culture you ask?

Well, to put it simply, this is a culture that propagates rape by victim blaming and trivialising marital rape and also by encouraging male privilege, sexual objectification, gender policing, sexual abuse, and other less heinous acts such as molestation and eve teasing. By tolerating remarks such as the one made by Salman Khan, we are inadvertently contributing to rape culture in India.

So how does Salman Khan's comment lead to propagating rape culture? Comments such as feeling like a raped woman are an example that this man and his fans in society don't realise what the victims go through when they are raped. It totally reduces a heinous crime such as rape to a joke. And it's not just him; it's you and me too who contribute to this culture. How many times have just laughed off a sexist joke at work? How many times have you called someone a s**t? How many times have you set a deadline for your girl child to reach home? How seriously do you take cat calls? How many times have you ignored lewd comments made at you/at someone else? How many times have you said that the woman deserved to be hit by her husband or deserved violence because of her behaviour? Yes, we do it all the time. We believe ignorance is bliss, and that is how we contribute to rape culture. We encourage such behaviour; we are fine with it! We let go!

We are letting Salman Khan go scot free by simply calling him insensitive. At least that's what the trending hashtag says. And to counter this hashtag there's another hashtag that has just started trending called SalmanMisquoted. Is he misquoted? NO. There's a certain Bollywood gossip website which has released an audio where the entire interview with Salman Khan is played. In the interview, he talks about how he prepared for Sultan. And when he says that he felt like a raped woman there are people including women who are laughing about it. That's the problem. We laugh about it. We do not realise that it is a big deal. Rape is a big deal. It is not a laughing matter. We are not sensitive enough. We do not realise that rape or even eve teasing is an exhibition of one's prowess, one's superiority over the other. And who decides who is superior?

We also ran a poll on Twitter asking people what they think about Salman Khan's comment. Over 45% people thought that he was just being an asshole and only 13% thought that he was promoting rape culture. This is the problem. We don't realise the seriousness of his statement. But what is even more shocking is the fact that 26% people still like him.

Yes, Salman's immediate comment in the audio is that he probably should not have said that. But, how easy it is for us to make such comments? And this ease or lack of awareness is what promotes rape culture. It is sad that we are not intolerant about Salman Khan and his comments. This is the time to be intolerant. Call this man out

http://www.thehealthsite.com/news/salman-khan-felt-like-a-raped-woman-on-the-set-of-sultan-india-it-is-time-to-show-your-intolerance-po0616/

Actor Salman Khan has proven something to us once again, that despite all the anger and rage that surfaced after the 2012 gang rape and murder in Delhi, rape is still taken rather lightly in the country.

Talking about the gruelling shooting for "Sultan", Khan said that at the end of each sequence he "felt like a raped woman". While there are now claims that the actor immediately retracted the statement, the very possibility that something like the repeated takedowns of a wrestling match could be compared to rape is alarming. Because, and let's get this straight, his statement is not an outlying aberration.

Indeed, it lies squarely in the middle of the norm, as rape gets thrown around as a casual description of any kind of humiliating defeat or assault. That self-proclaimed voice of the junta, Chetan Bhagat, for instance, reportedly tweeted in 2013 (less than a year after the Delhi gangrape) that the Rupee was being raped. "The Rupee is asking, is there no punishment for rapists?" he wrote. And he was not alone in the comparison, joined by BJD MP Jay Panda, who also tweeted that the rupee was being raped by the government.

Then there is that other great voice of the Indian conscience, Aamir Khan, whose character in "Three Idiots" (ironically a Chetan Bhagat book-turned-film), plays a prank that involves a public speech that is essentially one long rape joke. Khan's character purposely mistranslates the words chamatkar(miracle) and dhan (wealth) with balaatkar (rape) andstan (breasts) in an Indian-Ugandan student's speech praising the dean of the institute, and the education minister.

Of course, public rape quips like this get immediately noticed and called out. But they're only more visible manifestations of a more pervasive presence of rape analogies in everyday men's conversations. As this cartoon indicates, any attempts to call out such casual misogyny (because while, yes, men can also be sexually assaulted, rape is predominantly deployed against women) are seen as overreaction. "What's the harm in just a word?" you get asked.

The answer has to do with the nature of rape as an experience of trauma. As our politicians have shown, rape is often thought of primarily inducing shame for the victim - making them, in BJP leader Sushma Swaraj's terms, a "zinda lash". But the real consequence of rape is the feeling of violation and powerlessness. And in that sense, rape is a crime whose trauma continues to undermine the lives of victims even as they struggle to continue past it. In that sense, it is also distinct from other forms of assault, in that it leaves psychic wounds that sit deeper and quite apart from the physical wounds of the assault.

Forget this, and it's easy to think that rape is just a word. That in jokes, analogies and casual comparisons it can be funny and even "harmless". Because ignoring the trauma of powerlessness caused by rape focuses attention solely on the sexual act, which can then be shaded in a whole range of directions. Thus, Stanford rapist Brock Turner's father could refer to his son's crime as "20 minutes of action."

Take account of the real power of rape, its ability to undermine any potential for regaining one's sense of autonomy, and you can see why such jokes are never harmless. In a country where rape continues to be an alarmingly common occurrence, where violence against women is systematic and hyper-regular, every joke about it only reinforces its normalcy. Then no amount of outrage about rapes helps.

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It seems that when it comes to Salman Khan, to err is Being Human, to forgive is divine.

Salman has shown that he does not need helpless blackbucks and hapless pavement dwellers to land himself in hot hot water. He can do it very efficiently on his own even while doing publicity for his own film.

The latest brouhaha is around a remark about his grueling schedule for the film Sultan. In an interview with Spotboye.com, Salman said, "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."

Cue the predictable outrage. Also cue the predictable #misquoted defence. Of course, Salman Khan did not mean it literally. It was just a maladroit metaphor. Why be so serious, yaar? He was obviously joking. Didn't he also say that he'd left every vice except women. Haha.

A superstar like Salman makes for a juicy target. But let's be honest. We can candlelight vigil all we want. We can outrage about the safety of ma-bahen-beti and demand capital punishment for rape. But Salman's latest remarks prove that in the end we just don't take rape seriously. We might say it's just a metaphor, used in jest, perhaps in poor taste but not with malicious intent. But it's interesting that more often than not it's a metaphor used by men, it's a joke made by men in a country where the law does not even recognize male rape.

But it's not just Salman.

Chetan Bhagat, our number one bestselling English-language author compared the plight of the sinking Indian rupee to a rape victim. "The rupee is asking is there no punishment for my rapists" tweeted Bhagat.

BJD MP Jay Panda tweeted that the rupee was the victim of rape by the government.

Dev, muscle-hero turned politician in Bengal, was asked by the Bengali tabloid E Bela how he was enjoying the huge media attention his campaign was receiving.

"Enjoy,,,!" quipped the young star. "It's just like being raped, yaar! You can shout or you can enjoy. Nothing more than that."

More often than not it's a metaphor used by men.

Another Bengali actor turned politician, Tapas Pal, threatened to set his boys on anyone who so much as touched a Trinamool supporter. "They will rape them" he bragged.

CBI chief Ranjit Sinha tried to use rape to make a point about legalizing betting. "It is like saying if you can't prevent rape, you (should) enjoy it'," said Sinha trying to make the point that if the state could not prevent betting they might as well earn some revenue from it.

Bollywood actor Salman Khan speaks to the media in Mumbai May 21, 2009 .

All of these men expressed varying degrees of regret. Sinha reiterated his "deep sense of regard and respect for women" and apologized for any hurt caused as "same was unintended and inadvertent". Dev tweeted "SINCERE SORRY" in all caps to underscore his sincerity and pleaded newness in politics.

Panda admitted that it was never appropriate "to use the rape analogy for anything other than rape" and deleted his tweet. Pal's wife apologized on his behalf while he checked into a nursing home. Bhagat deleted his tweet but also played victim. "People here are flipping out on using word rape as metaphor. Murder is OK. Using F word is also ok."

The point is not that rape is special. The point is that rape is still regarded as something not special at all, quite trivial. The point is that more often than not women are still blamed for bringing rape upon themselves - for the clothes they wear, the drinks they have, for flirting with strange men, for accepting a ride from a man they met at the bar, for being out too late, for working too late, for going to a nightclub while the children are asleep at home.

The point is that rape is still regarded as something not special at all, quite trivial.

Salman Khan in a promotional event for the forthcoming film 'Sultan' in Mumbai on May 24, 2016.

A famous Tehelka undercover operation in 23 stations across NCR revealed that a majority of policemen did not believe women were really raped: "There are cases but 70 percent involve consensual sex. Only if someone sees, or money is denied, it gets turned into rape": Anyway according to them a "good" woman would never want to come forward and admit to being raped. "In reality the ones who complain are only those who have turned rape into a business."

With attitudes like that is it any wonder why it's so difficult for us to understand that there's really nothing funny about a rape joke. Or why an outspoken woman on Twitter, especially a journalist, can get routinely threatened with rape. It's a manner of speaking we say. We do not take rape seriously as a crime that's about power.

Instead we regard it as a sex crime. Rape is about sex, and sex is deemed to be enjoyable even when it's not that good. We think of rape as a sort of "adult" joke, a wink-wink nudge-nudge metaphor about anything and everything from cricket to election campaigns to a grueling workout.

We may pick on Chetan Bhagat and Salman Khan but it's a flippancy that permeates our culture through and through. We are like that only. Remember Mulayam Singh Yadav dismissing Mayawati's fear of rape after being attacked by a mob? He said "Is she so beautiful that anyone should want to rape her?"

When Tapas Pal made his rape threat, the crowd did not boo him, they hooted and hollered. Rape was a figure of speech for them, a colourful way to make a point. A few weeks after the Jyoti Singh gang rape in Delhi was dominating the news cycle I remember a joke circulating on Whatsapp. It was about a candlelight vigil at Eden Garden in Kolkata, not for Jyoti Singh but for the "rape" of the Indian cricket team which had been thrashed in some match or the other.

We've all seen those jokes. We might have even cringed. But how often do we call our friends out on it for forwarding them? Or do we hold our tongues afraid of being called politically correct spoilsports who need to lighten up? For all the brouhaha now, it's not clear whether the journalist who was interviewing Dev for that tabloid or Salman Khan for spotboye challenged the remark or even flagged it though the journalist did challenge him when he equated women to a "vice" ala cigarettes and alcohol.

We've all seen those jokes. We might have even cringed. But how often do we call our friends out on it for forwarding them?

Salman Khan might be facing the heat now but he's just a symptom of a much larger malaise. Until we understand this we'll always remain a society that teaches as Kat Kelley put it on Mic "don't get raped' rather than don't rape'".

And as long as the onus is on the survivor, the rest of us will not understand that a rape joke is sending out a message that sexual violence is not such a big deal after all. It's just boys being boys.

http://www.huffingtonpost.in/2016/06/21/salman-khan-rape-comment_n_10584356.html