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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

#81

Post by chunky1994 »

tptacek wrote: post #77
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…

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.

I think O.P was conflating two issues there, one about patriarchy in India being very traditional, two about misogyny (apparently) being rampant.

I for one don't expect anyone to be okay with misogyny, whether it be cultural or not, and I presume all the other Indians here feel the same way.

Re: India: the Story You Never Wanted to Hear

#82

Post by npalli »

This behavior is the unfortunate effect of modernization and move into cities. India, is predominantly a rural society. Like many traditional socities in asia, morality is enforced by concepts of honor/shame/loss of face. So, you have individuals who behave appropriately with women in their local villages or towns. Your family will loose face if you behave inappropirately and you will be cut off from society. However these guys land in cities far from their local environs and suddendly all sense of morality goes out of the windows. Everyone around you is new so what does it matter, you can do some crime and move somewhere else. It must be noted that most of this criminal behavior is committed by recent entrants to cities.

That in itself is not new. Every society has this problem (of modernization) but India has an additional issue. The state (internal police, law etc.) has historically been very weak and continues to be so. Enforcing any laws is a huge problem so these cases keep getting compounded by the day. Some dude seems his neighbour get away with stuff and he gets emboldned to do the same.

Re: India: the Story You Never Wanted to Hear

#83

Post by suprgeek »

This is the story that you actually WANT to hear if you are currently or might possibly in the future ever wish to travel to India. Having stayed in India until very recently, I can not only believe this but also think that the problem is a bit understated(!) if possible.

There are numerous reasons why but many vested interests have aligned to sweep misogyny & sexism that is deeply rooted in India under the carpet. Being stared at is one of the Least of your problems if you are a Caucasian woman by yourself in India.

As frustrating as it is to say for me - If you are a foreign (non-Indian) woman contemplating travel by yourself (or an all female group) to India - THINK LONG and HARD. All the spiritual retreat, Yoga, Taj Mahal, Lush green forests, Sandy Beaches in the country will fade from memory when something like this happens - and the chances of it are relatively high.

Re: India: the Story You Never Wanted to Hear

#84

Post by slurry »

speeder wrote: post #39
fennecfoxen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "patriarchal and sexist" adjectives are presumably necessary but not in and of themselves sufficient. For instance, there have been plenty of sexist, patriarchal regimes in European history where behaviors such as the ones described would be considered gross affronts to basic morality by the Christian church (which was an empowered entity whose opinions carried some import). (One could theoretically hope that gen…

Actually, in strong patriarchal societies, these sort of behaviours are NOT tolerated, mostly because women are assumed to always "belong" to someone else (be it her dad, husband, tutor... whatever), and when people DO try funny stuff, other men will put a end to it. Societies where people start to feel entitled to have women, are the ones that unite several things at once: materialism, individualism, lack of women t…

"Actually, in strong patriarchal societies, these sort of behaviours are NOT tolerated, mostly because women are assumed to always "belong" to someone else (be it her dad, husband, tutor... whatever), and when people DO try funny stuff, other men will put a end to it."

This isn't actually true. There will always be women not recognized as "belonging" to a male (prostitutes, menial laborers, travelers, orphans etc.) or whose superintending male figure is not high enough status to enforce his "property rights."

Unless we are going into No True Scotsman territory, "strong patriarchal societies" - however defined - do in fact tolerate these sort of behaviors in a great many contexts.

Re: India: the Story You Never Wanted to Hear

#85

Post by makomk »

gnufied wrote: post #34
thisisnotclear wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well as an indian it saddens me to say that i agree with you. also I believe that middle class and rich are the most misogynist among indians. There is no morality that works in india accept "I can get away with this because I have money and power to do so". I think that world will face a lot of problems integrating india and indians in near future.

Are you implying education has little impact on how a person perceives the world around him/her? Can we deny that, all rapes that were reported in media were done by people from lower rung of our society? Sure for every poor criminal there is a educated bureaucrat taking bribe and doing as he pleases. But we are specifically talking about street harassment and crime against women here, which is fixable by educating p…

Even if that's true, the qualifier "reported in the media" is an important one - are there rapes out there by the wealthy that aren't reported, because no-one would take the word of a poor woman over a wealthy man?

Re: India: the Story You Never Wanted to Hear

#86

Post by slurry »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #15
kunai wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very much so... I don't think I can describe in words just how horrifying it was to read this. This is a country that my ancestors were from. It's hard to imagine it being so patriarchal and sexist as is described here. But, as we see from the news, it is. It's hell. And it's not going to change.

The "patriarchal and sexist" adjectives are presumably necessary but not in and of themselves sufficient. For instance, there have been plenty of sexist, patriarchal regimes in European history where behaviors such as the ones described would be considered gross affronts to basic morality by the Christian church (which was an empowered entity whose opinions carried some import). (One could theoretically hope that gen…

"(One could theoretically hope that gender-studies departments at various universities should find it productive to scrutinize the differences in these patriarchal, sexist regimes in order to understand the nature of the cultural differences which engendered these disparate results. Theoretically.)"

Empirically, this is a core part of what gender studies departments in fact do. Just off the top of a quick Google search:

http://isites.harvard.edu/course/colgsas-83347

http://wellesley.smartcatalogiq.com/2013-2014/Course-Catalog...

We could debate whether this is doing it well or adequately, but gender studies, if we're discussing it in practice at decent universities and not just theoretically, has a non-zero amount of rigor as a discipline.

Re: India: the Story You Never Wanted to Hear

#87

Post by tootie »

rm999 wrote: post #66
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…

>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…

It's not ethnocentrism, it's real. Even from wealthy countries in East Asia where the strict Confucian relationships put huge burdens on women. Obviously, a lot if not most people are inured to those cultures and don't like the Euro/American level of cultural freedom. The ones who moved are the ones who couldn't deal with the oppression.

Re: India: the Story You Never Wanted to Hear

#88

Post by realrocker »

A few years ago while travelling in a sleeper class(the cheapest seats) on a long route train I met two British women hitch-hiking across India. Needless to say I was horrified and scared for them and gave the customary warnings I give to my sisters. They replied that they have already been told the same things before. One of them asked me, "How does the common citizen view them?" Thinking that they were not scared enough travelling across India, I replied, "Like animals in a zoo. They want to touch you. Some will admire and some will harass". A few minutes later, a young village woman sitting on the floor(probably without ticket) with a child in her arms asked me in Hindi to tell the British women, "They look very pretty". I did. In response I was requested to pass the same message back to the young woman(which I did not, her husband was already on to me). I continued my rant about how dangerous India is for woman to instill some fear in those poor devils. I am not sure I was successful.

Re: India: the Story You Never Wanted to Hear

#89

Post by MichaelSalib »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #15
kunai wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very much so... I don't think I can describe in words just how horrifying it was to read this. This is a country that my ancestors were from. It's hard to imagine it being so patriarchal and sexist as is described here. But, as we see from the news, it is. It's hell. And it's not going to change.

The "patriarchal and sexist" adjectives are presumably necessary but not in and of themselves sufficient. For instance, there have been plenty of sexist, patriarchal regimes in European history where behaviors such as the ones described would be considered gross affronts to basic morality by the Christian church (which was an empowered entity whose opinions carried some import). (One could theoretically hope that gen…

there have been plenty of sexist, patriarchal regimes in European history where behaviors such as the ones described would be considered gross affronts to basic morality by the Christian church

Really? I'm skeptical. Can you point to any historical evidence that this is true?

For example, consider slaveholders in the US. It was always recognized that they could rape their slaves. No one at the time thought that was wrong. Even the church. But perhaps I'm wrong: again, can you point to any recorded historical cases of slave owners who raped their slaves but were chastised by the church? Anything? Even just one case?

I'm pretty skeptical that the church would have opposed a random lord of the manner raping a peasant woman under his dominion either.

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