It is embarrassing to any right-thinking person to read that since January 7, a two-judge bench of the Delhi High Court has been conducting daily hearings of a clutch of petitions asking for the marital rape exception under the Indian Penal Code to be struck down. India remains one of the few countries in the world that does not treat[Read More...]
In the Sonnet 116, William Shakespeare defines relationships as marriage of true minds, where sovereign individuals love each other to overcome all impediments in life with the tempest of unchanging will. These voluntary, organic and humane ideals are institutionalised and domesticated to comply with the requirements of patriarchal, religious and capitalist cultures in different continents. The moral philosophers have also[Read More...]
The 70th Miss Universe pageant was held recently in Eilat, Israel and there is a lot of celebratory chatter going on. After 21 years another Indian, Harnaaz Sandhu has won the crown. The celebration is for Chandigarh’s daughter having won the title. The last time an Indian won the said beauty pageant was 21 years ago — when Lara Dutta[Read More...]
[A version of this essay was presented to the UK Engage Conference: Masculinity, Patriarchy, Feminism on November 19, 2021.] Before talking about pornography and men, I should say a few words about pornography and me. I have spent my adult life working as a journalist or a professor, acquiring information that has helped me understand […]
Passage blames ‘feminist revolt’ for teenage indiscipline. Content of a reading comprehension passage in a CBSE’s Class 10 English examination, held on Friday: “What people were slow to observe was that the emancipation of the wife destroyed the parents authority over the children… In bringing the man down from his pedestal the wife and mother deprived herself, in fact, of[Read More...]
300 Dalits were murdered in Tamil Nadu between 2016 and 2020 This is a sad story on ‘Honour killings’ in Tamilnadu, the land of ‘self-respect movement,’ being published on December 6 to mark the death anniversary of BR Ambedkar. This is Part-1 of a two-part article. Honor killings, an euphemism for murder, is violence committed by a group of one[Read More...]
Islam is one of the great religions of the world, whose followers are found in every country and continent. As an egalitarian belief system, it introduced the concepts of universal brotherhood and non-discrimination among Muslims on the ground of sex or race. Islam gave the women fundamental rights and championed all movements to improve the status of women, at a[Read More...]
[This is an expanded version of testimony delivered to the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on Commercial Sexual Exploitation, November 2, 2021.] My thesis: The pornography industry does the worst to women and brings out the worst in men. Let me explain this claim. I am a retired University of Texas professor who began studying the pornography industry in 1988, which[Read More...]
Ecological wisdom emanates from a deep awareness that, while humans are unique among all animals, they remain utterly dependent on their biophysical environment to sustain human life, and therefore must strive to live in harmony with the entire community of creation in order to ensure their own wellbeing. This is not what we are doing. We now face a situation of ecological overshoot due to[Read More...]
In a day when America is ruling over a global Empire maintained with violent enforcement to insure universal subordination to its will; and in a day when a military-style domestic police state relentlessly makes sure anti-government protest and dissent is contained, the patriarchal part of that America has been enhanced and strengthened. Feminist movements have […]
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