It’s a crime in India for a man to have sex with a woman against her will – unless he’s her husband. Condoning forced sex in a marriage stems from a conservative view that sex is an entitlement in marriage and by definition doesn’t involve force.
It needed a 16-year-old, Simar Singh, to question this perverse argument through The Legal Rapist, a spoken-word poem. He takes the standard questions head-on: “How could it be rape if we were married? How could he be jailed for loving his wife?”
Narrated from a wife’s perspective, the poem explains how a “homemaker” can consider herself equal to her working husband even though the work they do may be different.
The “loving” husband, however, doesn’t perceive the relationship in the same way – his wife’s decisions and choices barely count. Not in the house, and certainly not in bed.
The performance is powerful in its attempt to reveal the horror of being raped, but wait for the interesting link it draws between marital rape and harassment at the workplace.
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