The current feminist and women’s rights organizers have used
the “no means no” slogan, as well as “teach him not to rape” slogans to counter
the growing number of sexual harassments and sexual assaults committed against
women worldwide. It is important to see this struggle in the context of the
larger class-struggle against capitalism and religion.
Capitalism has colonized the human right and freedom to control
and mediate its own social relations with the opposite gender/sex and
transformed this otherwise natural human social relation into a highly
sexualized consumer market. The system has taken away some of human conscious ability
to have wilful control over how s/he is socially reproduced and has replaced
this “freedom” with consumerism: you can only identify who you are in relation
to where you sell your labour power and your market consumption. Without any
regard for basic human ethics, capitalism uses countless marketing strategies
to sexually objectify a person’s self-identity via commercial media in order to
sell commodities: this system has forced human beings to live in a world where
the market has a large monopoly on the continuously changing definitions of sex
and sexuality.
“Teach him not to rape” is an incomplete response to a
system that continuously perverts human self-identity and gender relations
through a highly sexualized consumer market social reproduction. Not to
disregard the importance of human choice, this choice must be viewed in a context
where both the victim and the victimizers are both subjugated to a coercive and
systemic social repression that is so total in scale that it seems imperceptible.
To take away the system’s responsibility and to individualize all the blame is
to ignore this colossal social reality which has a foundational part in
reproducing sexual assaults.
To take this argument to a religious country, it becomes
even further pronounced. Where misogynistic patriarchy, often embedded in the
state itself, has a say on how human beings are socialised in society: it will
always be the primary engine for generating sexual assault against women.
Teaching boys not to rape will never be enough to put a stop to religious
ideologies propagating hatred towards women on daily basis.
The fight against the sexual assault of women and girls in
society must be side by side with an anti-capitalism and anti-religion struggle.
The empowerment of women in society is not reduced to an educational movement
through teaching boys to respect girls, but it is a revolutionary
counter-current movement against the embedded patriarchy built into both
capitalism, where human sexuality is bought and sold in consumer markets, and
religion.
Chia Barsen
www.chiabarsen.com
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