Indian journalist and author Sonora Jha — who is currently finishing a memoir about raising a feminist son, as well as a second novel about Islamophobia and campus unrest — wrote an interesting article in January for The Establishment that has been gaining quite a bit of traction as of late.
Stemming from the sexual assault allegations on Aziz Ansari (
see this post, which sources a piece that was poorly covered by babe.net), the article digs into a conversation that dips its toes into the "grey area" of sexual harassment.
Some excerpts and points worth highlighting:▻ Jha has spoken to her son about the
#MeToo movement and says that on the topic of Ansari, "the conversation with my boy gets complicated".
"We are talking about something beyond sexual assault, abuse, or harassment. We are having a conversation that isn’t even really about Ansari.
What we need to talk about are the cultural conversations rising up around the Ansari incident. What we need to talk about is training men to read women the way women have been trained to read men."
▻ Touches on how women are taught, from birth, all about the needs of men before writing about how such 'training' can lead to all sorts of pressures, "from society, from culture, from her friends, from boys — to be sexual".
▻ The author was invited to speak in Mumbai (after not having been there for four years) where she met Padmini Ray Murray, who wrote in a Facebook post:
"For those of you dismissing the Aziz incident as a ‘bad lay’ — it is sad that our experiences have socialised us to consider flagrant disrespect in sexual negotiations as something we can just chalk down to a below par experience. Aziz, in this account, disregarded ‘Grace’s’ wishes to be respected, both her wishes and her body. Is this sexual violence of the magnitude of the monstrous behaviour of a Weinstein? Probably not. Should it be considered a part of toxic masculinity that allows for rape culture to flourish? Absolutely."
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