In light of the hyped-up rape crisis in India, I wanted to repost an old post of mine from 2008 that shows how feminist-inspired laws have only been making gender-relations worse:
In India, the Old Curry for the Goose is the New Curry for the Gander, April 30, 2008:
“The marriage of Naveen, an engineer in Florida, hit rock bottom in mere five months.
“I just asked her why she was in touch with her boyfriend. She tried to harm herself with a knife. We returned to India and I suggested she stay with her parents for some time. As soon as I was back in the US, she filed a 498-A case against my family and me. My parents were jailed for three days,” said Naveen, a case against whom is on in India and an Interpol Red Corner Notice pending abroad.
Anupama Singh, the secretary of Rakshak that has raked up such cases, said the voluntary organisation has received over 700 such complaints, half of them from the US alone.
“We don’t say all these are genuine cases, but many are. The government is not really concerned. It’s futile to talk about the plight of men and their families by the women they marry.
“In contrast, the cases of women being tortured by their husbands abroad have been overplayed with the government claiming that 30,000 brides — 15,000 from Punjab’s Doab region alone — had been abandoned abroad,” she said.
But in 2005, the government said in Parliament that only 100 such complaints had been received. The ministry of overseas Indian affairs (MOIA) recently revised the figure to 152. The trend, therefore, is more of vanishing brides and abandoned grooms abroad, Singh added.”
Comment
That’s from the Times of India last year, describing the ongoing barrage of domestic abuse of non-resident Indian males (especially high-status, high-earning males) by their delicately-nurtured, oh-so-domestic, docile, doe-eyed, dosa-making desi brides).
No surprise. Whenever the state starts “doing-good” with its right hand, its left hand has the thumb pressed into the pan of the scales. Dowry laws were cooked up to protect victimized wives. But after gender feminists got done with the recipe, a new set of victims had been trussed up for carving on the marital altar – husbands.”
Another MBP post from 2008 on the gender-nazis in India:
“Feminastiness: Eastern Men As Oppressive As Westerners,” April 14, 2008
I quote a men’s rights blog from India that satirizes the condition of Indian males (especially doctors and other highly educated men with middle-class or upper-middle class wives).
The blog suggests the following satirical remedies for “oppressed women”:
QUOTE:
2) As soon as a woman marries, she should get 50% rights to her husband’s property.
3) Large scale single parenting by woman (with maintenance provided by husband) is the norm. Research shows that children who are not allowed to see their fathers after divorce for years grow up to be very healthy. In India, Gender Sensitive judges alone should decide if the women should allow the father to see the child after divorce or not. Or if he should ever see them.
4) Any violence committed by woman against others (including murder) should be considered self-defense.
5) The disparity between life expectancy rates in men and women needs to be raised to the levels in developed countries. In India, women live 2.4 years more than men on an average. This difference has to be improved to the levels in the US and Europe where women live more than 6 years than men on an average.”
The writer is especially pungent about the abusive dowry death law, which punishes the man and his family by default:
QUOTE::
7) For any woman who commits suicide within 7 years of marriage, a dowry harassment (or other harassment) case against the husband should be filed by default. He should be imprisoned for at least a year for not taking care of his wife.
If a woman complains of domestic violence, the man should be imprisoned immediately and bail only granted by a court. All their joint bank accounts need to be frozen at once.”
Lila: The author shows how the new gender-roles make the women far more powerful than the husband, both financially and emotionally.
QUOTE:
9) A man must do half of all household work, even if his wife is not working. But he must always work full-time. If he does not, even if he does all house work, he should be labeled lazy, improvident, pathetic, and derelict, certainly in private, and preferably in public where it will cause maximum humiliation and pain either to him or to his relatives. If a woman does not work either outside the house or in, she is nonetheless entitled to all consideration and respect and anything less than deferential treatment of all her needs, demands, whims, and psychiatric moods should be considered a violation of her human rights.”
Lila: Having full control of the husband’s finances and of her time, she thus has the power to entirely control his life, his family and all other relationships.
QUOTE:
10) After marriage, a man must not stay with his parents or allow his parents to stay for a prolonged period with him (”prolonged” to be decided by the woman and subject to revision at any time on request by her, her friends, or her relatives however distant and uneducated). He must allow her in-laws to stay in his house for at least the same length of time his parents stay in his house. If he violates any of these fundamental human rights of a woman, he can be imprisoned for neglect and abuse of his in-laws.
Lila: In some cases, the in-laws stay with her continuously at the husband’s expense, while the husband’s family are kept at a distance. The isolation of the male perpetuates a system of hidden but intense abuse that would be considered rank criminality if it were to take place between business associates.
QUOTE:
13) The richer and the more educated the men are, the more pressure should be placed on them. They should provide the wife with a lifestyle equivalent to their status….. and they must also spend quality time with family (See 9, 10, 11 above). If this is still impossible, see 12.
14) By definition, Bangalore techies (since they work with software) are required to be softer than others. Since they are also paid more than most, they should deposit 20% of their monthly salary, at least, in their wives’ names.”
Lila: Finally, the author points out that women who really do suffer abuse in India (usually poorer women) use domestic violence laws far less than the upper class urban sector, where women are increasingly the predators, not the victims.
QUOTE:
19) Since, rural women do not suffer from domestic violence (see 18), domestic violence laws must be used mostly – and most stringently – in urban India.
“More here in the archives of one of many new blogs on the feminist abuse of dowry and domestic abuse laws in India.