The present milieu has thrust woman into the vortex of a virulent desanctifying process. Man Superior, responsible for her rapid secularisation, himself, is undergoing a role change from son to lover. If one could afford to assume a moral tone, there is a simultaneous degradation in the status of both woman and man. Technology is increasingly sorting out for man his mother-whore muddle that he has so frequently found himself in from time immemorial in his role as suitor; it is making it so qualms-free for him to pull the woman from her high pedestal down to the couch. Just an effortless push, technology-aided push, to make womanhood tumble from the vertical to the horizontal. The innumerable opportunities that the multimedia revolution offers in harlotry! That too without gender bias. No other technology in the post-industrialised world could boast being an equal opportunity provider the way this IT spin-off does.

The galloping crime against women can only be explained in the background of the ongoing e-revolution. It is an explosion. An explosion that is breaking all barriers. The strong fort between immorality and otherwise has been shattered, too. The hymen of culture has turned out to be too weak against the onrush of depravity vitalized by pervasive sleaze. Researchers have it that about half the web content consists of pornography. What is perhaps left unquantified is the porno-traffic, a measure of which can be obtained by a perfunctory peek into any cyber café where the only item that is not provided to the avid male browser is a tissue roll. (What is not provided is what is not needed. Privacy, for instance. Erotica lost its need for privacy in the Victorian age, perhaps). Young Prahallada told his tormenting father that Hari is everywhere. Today, not Hari, but Hymen, the God of Marriage, or Eros, the God of Love, will more easily emerge from any PC at the click of a button. Titillation was never so uncontrollable. En masse. (“Once you decide to titillate instead of illuminate . . . you create a climate of expectation that requires a higher and higher level of intensity” (Bill Moyers).

Titilation was never before so isolated and so completely unaccompanied by thinking. The pounding from the plethora of hedonistic channels has become ever so constant and sustained that it has beaten the hell out of our wits and ground the tall and thick wall of reason into fine dust. It has spawned a widespread ravenousness for unadulterated kitsch. The assault from the cyberspace has long made us forget the potential dread of Ronald Reagan’s phantasmagoric designs in outer space. Thoughtless waves of tsunamic intensity are lashing the shores of human sensibility. Sanity is running neck and neck with shame to shed its last remnants everywhere.

Do you want to know why there is a rape a minute reported from all over?

There is a surfeit of stimulants all around, but without the necessary outlets. There is an ever expanding urge, but no ventilation. It is rapaciousness unbound. Perverse rapaciousness, abusing technology, to tear asunder the cloak of civilised behaviour. Whether technology is fuelling perversity or perversity is inspiring technology, is tricky as the chicken-or-egg-first riddle. An ocean of thirst-riven humanity, tired of chasing mirages for a lifetime, finding an evaporating oasis. This could be the definition of ‘carnalinflation’. Rape had to become commonplace. Age scarcely is a bar, neither for carnality, nor for its target.

Rape has a couple of meanings. One is what is known and is becoming increasingly known: The crime of forcing another person to sex acts, especially sexual intercourse. Another meaning of rape is: abusive or improper treatment. The Indian woman is being raped in both these senses of the term. Because she is routinely chosen for improper treatment in other ways, she becomes a lame duck for being targeted for the rape of the benumbing kind. The heroine that is chosen for the actual rape scene is chosen because she is already a recipient of abuse by the director and his crew. One form of abuse leads to the other, the more abusive one. Directorial passivity finds an ally – and therefore its raison detre – in audience passivity. Stage gets set for the next rape.

Rape is a ghastlier crime than murder, though both crimes seek to obliterate the existence, the identity, of their victims. The murder victim faces no stigma; if they do, they do posthumously, whereas the rape victim lives with it. In the socio-cultural contest that we live, it is not the dead alone that tell no tales. The raped tell fewer tales. (Don’t scream, tells the rapist. She complies with the order for her life). Rape condemns them to a life of hapless obscurity and anonymity, if not to one of stigmatized obscurity.

Media projection of the female species fixates her role: to bodily pleasure outsourcing. Salacious after salacious film, lascivious after lascivious channel, lewd after lewd portal, bawdy after bawdy magazine all render woman to a uni-functional organism. A gadget of sexual gratification. A faceless being whose existence is fulfilled by the appropriateness of the size of her vital organs. The media prepares her for a rape the same way the chicken is shorn of its feathers before it is dressed. The woman is dressed and undressed similarly. To shear her of all other qualities which accord her elegance and dignity. A demonetized woman is more readily violated. In fact, rape is no violation (else, societal response to it would be more proactive and corrective). It is this non-entity that becomes the target of a potential rapist more easily.

Rape does not really alter the victim’s status. She was a non-entity even earlier.