Rape culture embedded in our daily lives.

Rape culture in the simplest words can be explained by how normalized rape is in a nation. This normalization is often influenced by society's views towards gender, gender roles, and sexuality. This represents itself in horrifying ways, such as sl*t-shaming, victim-blaming, and evident objectification.

A very common example of victim-blaming is simply when parents tell their children to either cover-up, not show too much skin or even reduce the child in question to a position where they are made to feel they're dressing to get "unwanted" attention.  As a young female in India, I can definitely vouch for the fact that this isn't just a one-time thing. 

Another example of this is when females are shamed when they even slightly tilt from the prescribed dress codes in schools. Things such as showing shoulders, knees and chest are often labelled as distracting to other students, and this not only conditions females to feel that they do not have a right over their bodies, but also leads the fellow students, particularly the males, to believe that females can be controlled and should be controlled.  It leads to a belief in everyone that a female is an object to ogle at, and hence must be covered up to not distract the others. Such objectification finds itself into our daily lives unconsciously, adding to internalized misogyny.

As we can see, these restrictions come into place because of the constant sexualisation of a woman's body, and how society still believes the body needs to be controlled. Little things like not letting your daughter wear crop tops because her father and brother could see, leads one to believe that she should maintain that level of modesty as there are males in the house who might feel uncomfortable. This is an explicit example of such embedded rape culture in our lives, and how society still aims to not let females have rights over their bodies. 

A case of victim-blaming can be how females are often told that if they go out wearing revealing clothes, men will have uncontrollable motives, which they can't be blamed for. Court rulings regarding rapes have often included the victim's clothing as evidence because if the victim had been wearing provocative clothing, "she was asking for it".  Even in small cases where the victim was either drunk or was coming back late from work, the victim is seen being blamed for doing so. 

As the rate of rapes increases in a nation, so do the restrictions on females. And as curfews for the female youth become earlier in the evenings, while their brothers get to go out whenever without being asked, we can see how detrimental rape culture is. A girl is told, before stepping out of the house, to be safe, to cover up, to come back early, to not drink, to not walk alone, to not hang out with their male friends because they could be a potential threat,  but is a boy ever told to not misbehave when he steps out of the house? 

Yes, not all males are at fault, but most females have borne the brunt of sexual misconduct.