What We Talk About When We Talk about Rape

by Sohaila Abdulali

Sometimes I wonder if we consider bad table manners a worse breach of protocol than forcing a random object up a personal orifice.

women are like flowers and men are like thorns. “If you put that flower in a gutter, it is spoilt. If you put that flower in a temple, it

will be worshipped.” Later he compared women to diamonds and men to dogs. I couldn’t keep track of the metaphors after that.

Her sister read the letter and called immediately to say that the same man had done the same thing to her. They had grown up together, each alone with the same secret.

People in the townships do talk openly about rape—as long as it is rape by a stranger. “It’s secretive when a family member is the perpetrator.”

In India, rape in close communities is actually one of the justifications for child marriage. Better for the girl to go to her in-laws while she’s still a virgin, and get legally raped, before an uncle or neighbor gets to her.

Telling doesn’t always come with a reward: comfort, closure, justice. Sometimes, women tell but everyone acts as if they said nothing at all.

Sometimes, telling can cost you precious relationships. One grandmother holds your hand; the other gives you a death glare. Sometimes you tell and you have to comfort the other person. Sometimes you tell and the other person says something appalling.

He gazed at me with horror, as if I were a precious porcelain figurine that had been damaged by the big bad world, which it was his job to protect—which he proceeded to do by following me adoringly around campus until I got so creeped-out I had to be brutally rejecting.

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.

It’s quite a balancing act—you don’t want to have a secret you can’t share, but you equally don’t want this one thing that happened to you to be the biggest thing on everyone’s mind when they think of you.

Where in the world is it pleasant to report a rape? I find it very hard to believe that droves of girls and women are rushing to say they’ve been assaulted when they haven’t.

The police didn’t believe us, despite our visible wounds, and the doctor was too embarrassed to even examine me properly.

If I had insisted on the truth, and on filing charges, I would have been locked up in a detention home. I would not have been allowed to leave the country, go back to the US to my mother, and begin college. So—I lied. But not about being raped. I lied about not being raped. Do women ever lie about being raped?

But anyone who thinks lying about rape is the default for the victims is delusional.

It’s an astounding, insidious motif all over the world—if you can’t take it on the chin (or in the vagina) and get over it quietly, you’re a wimp.

The minute you speak, the moment you write your own narrative, the second you open your mouth, you are no longer just a victim. You are taking back some control. It is the opposite of victimhood.

Keeping quiet about rape has a whole other toxic effect: it lets abusers off the hook.

But we are all culpable in the silence around rape, a “vast international

but remember this is a country where the belief that it’s better to die than be raped runs deep—rape victims are called zinda laash: living corpses.

I had four men with weapons threatening to kill both me and someone I loved. They made him drop his pants, held a knife to him, and said they would castrate him and kill us both if I didn’t stop fighting. So I did. I “let” them rape me. I “chose” rape over death. Some people might call that consent.

It’s complicated to look at women’s agency in a system of abuse, but we must.

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’re 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.

One woman told me about an uncle groping her, and how she still socialized with him until he died many years later. Shunning him would have meant hurting her aunt, whom she loved.

many cultures tend to value boys more than girls. Yet, if you want to humiliate the men of a culture, your best bet is to rape the women. Boys are worth more, but girls are more worthy of rape. This gets to the core irony of being raped: you’re simultaneously not good enough, and too good. You have no value, but you represent everything that we value.

Rape culture. The totality of all the big and little things we do, say and believe that ultimately lead to the conclusion that it’s okay to rape.

mother’s boyfriend Frank, speaks to different

telling us to run if we felt threatened, but, if we couldn’t run, then the best way to deter a rapist was to either defecate or throw up.

truth is that the only people who are truly responsible for preventing rape are rapists.

Rida, who was molested by a grown man when she was a toddler, said, “I always dressed in shorts. Was it my fault?”

Talking about “prevention” is tricky, because, if we know that the fault lies with the men who rape, why should we talk with women and girls about prevention at all?

I should have twirled madly around with my cape flying in the wind, kicked them in the balls, dropped them, thrust my sword into their throats, flung them off the mountain, spat on my blade to clean it, and marched triumphantly home, not a hair out of place.

Too often, being good means being docile, passive, accepting your lot without question.

There’s damage rape (you want to cause pain) and there’s casual rape (you want sex).