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India: the Story You Never Wanted to Hear

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Re: India: the Story You Never Wanted to Hear

#151

Post by imperio59 »

It's a bit hypocritical to point at another country and say how bad it is over there, when the typical teenage boy in America watches his first porno clip at around 10 or 11 years old.

Granted we do not necessarily have as much of the kind of behavior the girl describes out in the open but it does exist behind closed doors, at frat parties, at high school parties, at office parties...

It's even worse in the fact that it is so hidden in America. The puritanism that this country exhibits publicly (abstinence only sex education strikes me as a prime example) is dramatically offset by the tremendous amount of sexual depravity and lewdness that occurs behind closed doors.

I'm not saying there aren't problems in India, but please don't be quick to draw the conclusion that we are so much more civilized. We are just better at hiding our own problems.

Re: India: the Story You Never Wanted to Hear

#152

Post by chrischen »

moultano wrote: post #103
rm999 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>people flee these countries for a reason ... massive cultural and social advantages Woah, there's some serious ethnocentrism in your comment. I know 100s of people who have moved to the USA from India, including my parents, a lot of their friends, and a large number of friends and colleagues. These people tend to be very progressive for India and still very few think Western culture is objectively better than Indian…

Have you talked to the women? My wife is Indian as are many of our friends. The men all think wistfully about moving back to India. None of the women do. People are skeptical of "American Culture" in large part because even after living here for years, they view it through the lens of how it was portrayed in Indian cinema. Regardless, the women all appreciate that in America they can safely go about their business in…

That's not culture so much as it is the side effect of culture merged with their current development state as a country. That is, if India's quality of living and development were advanced to that of the west, there probably wouldn't be anything objectively inferior culture-wise.

Re: India: the Story You Never Wanted to Hear

#153

Post by Sven7 »

eshvk wrote: post #71
Sven7 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. But just a word of caution, if we are talking about misogyny and treating women as sexual objects, lets also talk about the porn industry(which today is as responsible for the existence of the internet, as advertising is for Google). Is there a difference when the developed world spends countless hours objectifying women from the safety of their homes through technology?

I will bite. Women in Pornography are paid to do that (mostly). Women who get raped on the streets of Delhi aren't paid to do that.

Right. Objectifying women is okay as long as they get paid. And I guess in this fantasyland rape never happens too.

Re: India: the Story You Never Wanted to Hear

#154

Post by jpatokal »

sid6376 wrote: post #31
gnufied wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two problems: 1. Crime against women is specially high. Why is it high? Because - wheels of justice turn really slowly here and perpetrator has a good chance of escaping without punishment. From what I hear, Justice (or sometimes lack of it) is swift in China. That itself is a great deterrent. 2.If you go through all the recent rape cases reported in media, perpetrators are almost always - mostly uneducated…

What you forget are the rape cases that are not reported in the media or do not get the same attention in the international press - The rape of poor dalit(lower caste) women by upper caste men. In some cases its used as a tool for handing out punishment to the unfortunate girl's husband, brother or father. India's middle class or upper class cannot be so easily exonerated. There are equally horrific stories of women…

Thanks for posting -- that second link is considerably more depressing than the original article.

Re: India: the Story You Never Wanted to Hear

#155

Post by numbsafari »

dxbydt wrote: post #56
supergauntlet wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes me hate other Indians though. Admit there's a problem, and work to fix it. Don't just brush it to the side and pretend it's not a big deal if you ignore it. All that's doing is putting a bandage on an open sore which is going to fester and make it harder to fix down the line.

> Admit there's a problem, and work to fix it. You must be crazy. Its not like you do git pull india --rebase and everything's hunky dory from then on. Its 1.2 billion people. Beyond a certain threshold, systems are essentially unfixable. India has crossed that threshold a long, long time ago. You'd have a better chance if you just ran away & started a new community elsewhere - which is why there are little-indias ev…

Hmmm... some quotes come to mind...

"Be the change that you wish to see in the world." - Gandhi

"Whatever action is performed by a great man, common men follow in his footsteps. And whatever standards he sets by exemplary acts, all the world pursues." - Bhagavad Gita

I see a lot of blaming the "poor and uneducated masses" of India, but I see very little introspection about the massive wealth and educational disparities that the supposedly wise and benevolent wealthy and educated minority benefit from.

Re: India: the Story You Never Wanted to Hear

#156

Post by Sven7 »

kenster07 wrote: post #95
Nursie wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at pictures and movies of women voluntarily engaged in sex acts is in no way equivalent to groping them in the street, attempting to rape them or depersonalising them and treating them as objects. It's just not.

Forgeting about the india comparison for a sec, there are degrees of 'voluntary.' There are no girls out there who think that they want to be in porn when they grow up.

Porn is definitely a sensitive subject around here.

I have been down voted into oblivion before for bringing it up. I guess the accepted opinion around here is as long as women get paid to be objectified its all cool. And ofcourse there are no effects of such objectification on any of the minds that make up this enlightened society.

EDIT: Pretty sure everyone arguing for there being a big difference thinks things like Steubenville are just random events too.

Re: India: the Story You Never Wanted to Hear

#157

Post by tptacek »

coldtea wrote: post #146
tptacek wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I expected to be O.K. with misogyny in the service of "traditional values", or are traditional values beside the point here? A lot of "traditional" values turn out to be wrong.

> A lot of "traditional" values turn out to be wrong. As judged by whom?

Common sense, if the "traditional value" is that women should be in the house cooking lest they subject themselves to groping and leering. Common sense.

Re: India: the Story You Never Wanted to Hear

#158

Post by jpatokal »

droopyEyelids wrote: post #8

Thinking about India really made me grow up in some ways. Mostly by disputing the idea that the whole world is progressing and 'getting better'. Not saying India is particularly bad, but maybe the foreignness shocked me into noticing it.

India is getting better -- it's just doing so slowly, unevenly, and from a low baseline.

Re: India: the Story You Never Wanted to Hear

#159

Post by cesarbs »

eshvk wrote: post #80
rayiner wrote: post #12

I feel bad for what happened to this poor woman, but it just goes to show you the disconnect between academic romanticization ("South Asian Studies" major at U. Chicago) and the cold hard light of reality. And that reality is that people flee these countries for a reason. People don't just decide to uproot their families and leave everything they know 10,000 miles in the rear view mirror for nothing. What bugs me are…

> What bugs me are people, largely motivated by financial interests, in my opinion, who downplay the massive cultural and social advantages we still enjoy in the west over places like India. We may be dealing with demographic challenges and sometimes sclerotic economics, but I'd take France in decline over any BRIC country on a supposed upswing any day of the week... But the almighty dollar is the most important thin…

I usually criticize Brazil (the B in BRIC), which is my home country, in comments, but I must correct you here.

Regarding respect for people - be it that they are women, or members of minorities - Brazil doesn't have the issues those other countries face (and I wonder what the situation is like in Russia).

Women in Brazil enjoy the same level of freedom they would enjoy in America or Europe. There is no strong patriarchal culture in place, and there is as little misogyny as there is in America. In fact, a lot of Brazilian girls are sick and tired of Americans and Europeans that go to Brazil and treat them with much less respect than local guys do, because for some reason white foreigners mostly seem to think Brazilian girls are super easy (they are only very, very nice, but that doesn't mean they are nymphomaniacs) and that they all dance naked during Carnival (most of them don't).

Regarding minorities, while there is debate about racism and all, it is much less of an issue than say in America. My wife and I were surprised by how big of deal that kind of thing is here in America. I guess in Brazil we're just used to living with lots of people of varying ethnicities and don't care much about their color or whatever. Of course there is racism, and there is a clear racial aspect in the social divide, but again it's way less of an issue than it is in America.

Re: India: the Story You Never Wanted to Hear

#160

Post by moultano »

chrischen wrote: post #152
moultano wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you talked to the women? My wife is Indian as are many of our friends. The men all think wistfully about moving back to India. None of the women do. People are skeptical of "American Culture" in large part because even after living here for years, they view it through the lens of how it was portrayed in Indian cinema. Regardless, the women all appreciate that in America they can safely go about their business in…

That's not culture so much as it is the side effect of culture merged with their current development state as a country. That is, if India's quality of living and development were advanced to that of the west, there probably wouldn't be anything objectively inferior culture-wise.

It is definitely culture. The US didn't start treating women reasonably on its own. It required a generation of women to protest in the streets until the culture and the law changed. This hasn't happened in India yet, but is hopefully now beginning. I wouldn't draw too many direct parallels between women in the pre-'60s US, and women in India since the respective traditions are so hugely different, but what has to happen to fix it is the same.

What I'm going to describe is a bit of a caricature, but it's true enough that it's the dominant theme of Indian soap operas. Traditionally in north India, women don't even eat with the rest of the family. They are expected to remain in the kitchen cooking and serving food until the meal is finished, when they eat whatever is left, alone. The woman only gains power in the family when she's the oldest person left alive, at which point the veneration for elders supersedes her subjugation. The stereotype is that at this point, she takes out the frustration of her years of abuse by ordering around her daughter-in-law.

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