Consider that video of the Japanese lady getting groped and harassed by males celebrating Holi. Consider how a lot of the response to the incident recommended that the pageant overrides an individual’s proper to protest: “Bura na maano, Holi hai”. Consider how simply individuals blamed the sufferer for being harassed: “If women don’t want to play Holi, they shouldn’t step out”. Consider additionally that she later apologised on social media for “harming people’s sentiments”, minimising her personal victimhood.

It’s no surprise that {couples} grapple with consent within the bed room; there’s barely any out of it. Because what we predict is a sex-life situation is absolutely an all-life one. No one’s taught to set boundaries, not to mention respect another person’s.

Grown-up acquaintances come proper out and ask an individual how a lot they earn, why they’re nonetheless single, why they haven’t had a child after marriage, or the second child after the primary. It’s all cloaked in concern. Your enterprise is usually everybody’s enterprise.

Families do it too. Photos are circulated, unasked, amongst well-meaning matchmakers. Phone numbers of family are added to WhatsApp teams they didn’t ask to hitch. Husbands demand to know wives’ ATM pin and phone-unlock codes (however maintain their very own non-public). In-laws name employers to search out out if the brand new bride acquired a bonus this yr, as a result of “she never tells us at home”. Employers cross alongside non-public info as effectively.

Friends suppose nothing of violating your privateness, sending your particulars alongside to a stranger with a enterprise curiosity, with out checking with you first. Some will take photos of you or your kids with out asking, and submit them on-line.Others will anticipate private particulars: medical diagnoses, sexual habits, spending budgets and why a being pregnant is being terminated.

India was by no means been huge on consent. How might we be, when Bollywood films have offered males as hunters, ladies as prey and love as a persistent pursuit. When exasperated heroines give in simply earlier than Intermission. Films have proven us that no doesn’t imply no. It means strive more durable, add stress, get creepier. That grownup ladies of sound thoughts don’t know what they need, anyway.

So ladies who protest undesirable intercourse and even consideration are not often listened to.Much of India didn’t even talk about consent in public till 2017, when #MeToo tales got here tumbling out in each skilled subject, indicating how widespread and deep the wilful ignorance about private boundaries unfold. Sexual assault victims who don’t combat again out of worry are seen as complicit within the crime. Marital rape shouldn’t be against the law in solely 32 nations of the world. India stays certainly one of them.

So anticipate extra incidents earlier than the subsequent Holi rolls round. Because we haven’t even began to ask permission, to respect a refusal, to honour somebody’s boundaries, to permit somebody their privateness. Many of us are but to know that consent isn’t that cool factor we ought to be asking or providing within the bed room. It’s that cool factor we should always study to train in all features of life, with everybody we work together with.

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From HT Brunch, March 18, 2023

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