Write and Wrong

Does it ever happen to you that you agree with what someone is saying, but the way they're saying it makes you cringe and want to bludgeon them with a suitably blunt instrument?

Take this article in the Asian Sex Gazette by someone called Roshni Olivera that DesiPundit linked to recently [1]. It's so incoherent, so poorly written, that despite the seriousness of the underlying message I couldn't help laughing out loud reading it.

Look, obviously rape is a serious issue, and there is good reason to emphasise the need for consent to be explicit, not implied or assumed by some arbitrary standard. No is (or should be) No, irrespective of the victim's past sexual record or the perpetrator's beliefs about her willingness. So the two cases that Ms. Olivera points to in her article, both involving rape by 'friends' of the victim are serious crimes and deserve to be appropriately punished.

The article does sort of make this point, but its buried away under a lot of rambling obfuscation. In Ms. Olivera's world view, apparently, "all such rape incidents highlight an issue that has been simmering for a while now - can't a woman just be friends with a man?" Harry and Sally, meet Thelma and Louise. Let's say, for the moment, that a man and woman can't just be friends, that it always has to be sexual. Does that make the cases she talks about okay? No, right? So how is that the issue here? Ms. Olivera seems to recognise this too, and hastily switches back to the issue of consent ("even if there's a bit of teasing bordering on flirtation, does it have to end up in bed?"), but it still leaves you wondering - would it have been too much to ask that she take the trouble to edit her own article? Has it occured to her that there might actually be a difference between a piece of writing and a rambling conversation with a friend? That putting down the first thing that comes into your more or less empty head is not the way to write a good thought-piece?

Where the article gets truly hilarious, though, is when Ms. Olivera decides to 'investigate' the causes for this malaise. She does this in two ways. First, she talks to the 'experts'. They inform her that "The main issue is that men and women perceive things differently". Ah, so that's why. You would never have thought it, would you? No, no, we needed the EXPERTS to tell us this. There follows a lot of psycho-babble about 'misconceptions' that men have, drawn, one can only surmise, from the long, difficult hours the 'expert' has spent watching Hindi movies.

But Ms. Olivera is not content with this. No, as a true journalist, she feels the need to capture 'public opinion', which, as we all know from regular readings of the Onion, consists of stopping the first three half-wits you meet on the street and asking them for their 'views'. This process, as always, yields deep insights, including:

"Some decades ago you wouldn't find a girl and a guy having much interaction. Today, you have girls, even actresses, very open about their relationships. Times have changed. These kind of rape incidents, where a friend is the perpetrator, are appalling."

Anyone care to explain how the sentences in that statement connect to each other. I'm particularly curious to understand the 'girls, even actresses' bit.

And wait, wait, it gets better. Just as you thought this whole date rape thing was a lost cause, Ms. Olivera manages to find the one right-thinking engineer who has practical suggestions to make:

"a girl should be smart and understand the guy's intention. If he's just a good friend, there's no question of any sparks. If he's flirting with the girl, she has to clearly set the boundaries. There has to be communication in these matters. And if it's a guy who's the kind to get drunk and misbehave, she should just dump him."

Oh, wonderful. So now it's the girl's responsibility to be smart enough, is it? And never mind the possibility of being sent to jail for years, all we really need to stop people from raping their dates is the threat of being dumped. Why bother with police complaints, criminal trials, etc. when a simple break up will do?

Finally, Ms. Olivera pulls in yet another expert, a legal one this time, who informs us, drawing doubtless on his deep understanding of the sub-clauses of the law concerning rape "The law is always a little behind social trends, always trying to keep pace. Let's hope for further strides now!". Who would have known?

Never mind the ridiculous stereotyping. Never mind the fact that Ms. Olivera doesn't seem to realise that opened quotation marks need to be closed. Did no one ever tell this woman when she was in school about the importance of a logical sequence of thought? Consider this:

"The main issue is that men and women perceive things differently, say experts. And in most of these cases the perpetrators are either teenagers or young men in their 20s or early 30s. "A girl might not suspect anything.

Can you imagine anything less coherent?

The kindest thing I can say about this article is that it might be a spoof, if an extremely subtle one. Somehow I doubt that. And I'm not convinced I'd appreciate spoofs written on so serious an issue anyway.

[1] Why anyone would be reading the Asian Sex Gazette in the first place is beyond me, of course. At least with the Bombay Times the ads are informative.


Categories: Rant