The Patriarchal War On Indian Women – OpEd

Thu, 22 Aug 2024 09:44:31 +0000
World

On August 9, 2024, a female doctor at R.G. Kar Medical College, Kolkata, was brutallyrapedand murdered in a seminar room on the fourth floor, where she had gone to rest during her night shift. Her semi-naked body, splattered with blood, was discovered in the morning. There was an attempt to cover up this incident: the victim’s parents filed a petition claiming that the assistant superintendent of the hospital first informed them that their daughter was unwell and later that she had died by suicide. Arunabha Chowdhury, head of the department where the victim worked, has criticized the assistant superintendent for informing the parents prematurely without waiting for a police report. If this cover-up attempt wasn’t enough, a mob entered the R.G. Kar Medical College in the early hours of August 15, assaulting the protesting doctors, and vandalizing property and vehicles.

The Kolkata rape case represents the tipping point of a patriarchal war that has been simmering for a long time. In India, a woman is raped every 16 minutes. The massive scale on which gender-based violence is enacted attests to the systematicity of the crisis that confronts us. Rapes need to be located in the social structure of male power that authorizes the feeling of sexual entitlement among men. However, this hasn’t been the way in which the mainstream society has been thinking. Mamata Banerjee, the Chief Minister of West Bengal under whose rule the Kolkata rape took place, has been focusing all her political energies on demanding capital punishment for the accused. This demand arises from an unwillingness to consider the social roots of the rape epidemic. If the response to a murderous case of sexual violence can be confined to the hanging of the accused, then there is no need to undertake radical measures aimed at the empowerment of women. All the blame can be pinned on a single man, as the entirety of the male social group goes scot-free, its material power untouched.

Once policy-makers believe that gender-based violence can be stopped through the execution of the rapist, one ends up with the argument that “not all” men are “bad,” that there are a lot of “good” men who can assist women in achieving equality. This is a wholly individualist conception: rapes happen because of the personal evilness of a few men, not because of social relations of oppression. Female empowerment has to take place not through a material struggle against male power but through the pedagogical enlightenment of ignorant individuals. But from where this does ignorance come? What makes men unaware of the immorality of raping women? To this question, the hegemonic perspective has no substantive answer. It can only contrast the misogyny of the individual man to a hallowed standard of normality, in which “good” men are perfectly aware of the need to respect women. But there is no such standard of normality to which one can compare the individual failings of men. Such individual failings are simultaneously collective failings, reflecting the social relations of patriarchal power from which men derive their misogynist ideas.

Given the falsity of attributing sexual violence to the personal evilness of individual men, one is inevitably forced to look at the social structure of patriarchal power. In this perspective, all men are born into a historical architecture that confers upon them a set of privileges vis-à-vis women. It is these material privileges that are responsible for sexual violence. The task of women empowerment consists not in the intellectual enlightenment of “bad” men but in the frontal destruction of the power imbalances between men and women. Women empowerment is not about “good” men and women raising awareness among “bad” men. It is about women uniting as an oppressed social collectivity against the historically produced oppression of patriarchs. In this feminist politics, there is no normative distinction between “good” men and “bad” men. In a patriarchal system, all men are born with a socially given propensity to exercise their unquestioned feeling of sexual entitlement. None of them can magically rise above the pressures of the social structure in which they are situated. As such, they have to considered as part of the problem, instead of being regarded as morally clean human beings. In the words of Vasundhara Sirnate Drennan and Nithya Nagarathinam:

Men in India have no incentive to give up their privilege and entitlement in favor of women. They have absolutely nothing to gain and everything to lose by being real feminists for they are wholly dependent on the wife-servant, the mother and other women for their caretaking and sexual needs and to enhance and project their masculinity and so on. In other words, if women stop playing their assigned roles, masculinity as constructed in India would collapse.

Since all men have an immediate interest in the preservation of patriarchy, even supposedly “good” men can’t be trusted to treat women with dignity. Their inability to individually extricate themselves from the patriarchal social milieu means that they continue to passively derive benefits from the oppression of women, as is clear in the existence of gender pay gaps, political representation, spatial inequalities etc. This passive privilege continually dulls any sense of criticality that they have towards patriarchy. It is this pervasive power of patriarchy that expresses itself in a concentrated form in sexual violence. Given the molecular atmosphere of patriarchy that makes every man into a potential rapist, there has to be a militant irreverence towards all men. One needs to combatively criticize the oppressive privileges enjoyed by men, disrupting the sense of security that they enjoy under patriarchy. Here, the question is not one of turning “bad” men into “good” men through intellectual illumination, through a pedagogical solution to their ignorance. Rather, the question concerns the annihilation of the position of power from which men speak.

In the hegemonic model of women’s empowerment, one pursues the pedagogical enlightenment of men so that they can address the cause of rapes, namely incorrect ideas with regard to women. In militant feminism, the political strategy is centered around an opposition to all men so that the root cause of sexual violence, namely male power, can be broken apart. Without addressing this material power, any awareness-raising campaign will fail, as it is not in men’s interest to suddenly give up their privileges. Misogynist ideas can’t be eliminated through rational, peaceful argumentation. They are grounded in the concrete power of male bodies, the social relations that enable such bodies to enact collectively sanctioned violence against women. Since the incorrect ideas that men have can’t be changed through the force of arguments, foisting such a strategy upon women leaves them completely vulnerable to the exercise of patriarchal violence. Instead of placing trust in men’s ability to have a sudden transformation, one needs to build female counter-power so that it becomes impossible for men to govern women. As women become ungovernable, the patriarchs will have to give up their privileges. This dynamic of un-governability entails that women simply ignore men. One doesn’t need to convince men of the necessity of feminism, since the oppressor is never going to willingly concede defeat. One needs to materially enact the necessity of women’s liberation through the political blockage of male power. r