Thanks, I asked for it

If my plunging neckline, low-waist skirt and six-inch stilettos are evidence enough that I’m ‘asking’ for it, then what is stopping you? Go ahead; make the most of my ‘provocations’. You need not think about mundane things like guilt and remorse. They wouldn’t unsettle you, anyway. After all, you are bound to get away scot free. No, don’t even let a scintilla of guilt bother you. The crime is mine. Don’t you see the way I ‘provoked’ you, the way I ‘asked’ for being raped?

And as for the entire ‘experience’, I can hardly draw any parallels. I wasn’t aware that you had so much of masculinity in you. I’d mistaken that half-smile of yours as an innocuous one – next time; I’ll keep your underlying ‘ability’ in mind. I hadn’t been able to understand how ‘strong’ a man you were, and how you could lay all my inhibitions to rest. Forget about my consent. Once you have decided something, how can I be so presumptuous as to contradict you!

Cast aside those doubts of ‘what next’. And I know that your range of understanding rights and wrongs are that of a teaspoon. Your brain resides in your ‘pride’, your ability to be so ‘masculine’. Do not be ashamed of it. You have made me a ‘woman’, don’t you know? Where’s the issue of repentance here! All by myself, I was leading an incomplete life, don’t you still understand how necessary it was for me to ‘ask’ you for it? Leave guilt and remorse for lesser mortals like me. There are many other feelings that should occupy a higher position in your life, your ‘necessities’ being the foremost.

The society where both you and I reside would no doubt support you. The police stations, where the thought of lodging a complaint against you might have occurred in some over-courageous part of my brain, are filled with your brethren after all. I go as a victim, but they make me a criminal. Their words prove to me how similar all you scum are. Pardon my transgression. Calling you names is blasphemous; something that I can’t even dream of in my worst nightmares. How can I show my face in public, otherwise! Forgive me my sin. I can’t launch a crusade against my saviour. You are the reason I was ushered into womanhood.

My shrieks of pain never made you look at my face, not even once. My shudders lost their way into your moans. And then, your job done, you got up and left me there. Of course, you thought all along that I was asking for it. In this maddening pace of life, I never realised that the time was such that a dress could ‘provoke’ someone. The realisation never struck me that I have begun ‘asking’ for it now. It’s not your fault.

The fault is mine. I should have recreated a scene out of a medieval horror story and hurt you where it hurts most. Left you wallowing in the sorrow by depriving you of your most prized possession, when you had the audacity to think that I was ‘available’ to you. The fault, then, would have been acceptable. I wouldn’t have been bothered by incessant questions from myself as to ‘where was my fault’. Getting raped wasn’t a crime that I had committed. That territory is yours, and yours alone.

Tell that to all those who call me those obnoxious names. Shout it out to all of them who say that I had ‘asked’ for it. Drill it into their heads that my clothes did nothing to prod you in the wrong place. Explain to them that I never ‘ask’ for it. They have stopped listening to me now. They now turn a deaf ear to my pleadings. May be it’s time you stood up for your own ‘fault’. May be it is time for you to prove your ‘manhood’. It doesn’t lie in your virility. It lies in your guts, in your courage to embrace your fault as ‘yours’.