The phenomenology of rape

BY SEGUN IGE
More often than not definitions cannot be captured in one fell swoop. But of course, sense relations in a sense provides, albeit ideologically, meanings to certain phenomena. Indeed, I found it a little mindboggling making out what rape could mean. And then I was caught in a flight of fancy, or should I say a spark of light ran through my mind; Rough Acrobatic Penetrating Exchange. Even as I write now I find it rather ruffling pinpointing what each of those formatives formulates. Put together, one may well have come by that rape does cast a slightly extremely rough intersexual exchange – yes, between (in this case) bisexually dissimilar ‘process-participants’ in a ‘cooperative principle’. Of course, I still take sides with acrobatic and penetrating, as they are apparently cast away in that expressive intuition.

In the so-called most civilized countries, rape, it seems, is very much significantly alarming, even abashing. And in particular, the US is grossly given to this humanitarian catastrophe in so much that presumably every 6.2 million girls are carnally and callously raped, infernally, by incontinent men who have got troubling genes and hormones in their anatomical ‘reproductive roughshod’ and their almost-looking rather ugly unguarded ‘pencil-and-ball’ ‘putative knock’ in the lumber-and-caudal vertebrae, and to be sure, more 1.6 million girls die prematurely. In February 2013, Aljazeera’s opinionist, Rebecca Solnit, roughly succinctly provides, in general, the different types of rape in her article “A rape a minute, a thousand corpses a year” and advises him or her to “Take your pick”: the commonplace streetly “gang-rape”, the “bus rape”, the “campus rape”, and if we may include, the ‘marital rape’ and/or ‘home rape’.
In Nigeria, the phenomenon is increasingly becoming everyday ‘do-or-die’. “A 24-year-old rape victim in Kaduna State … allegedly raped by her landlord, said on Friday she regretted collecting N2, 000 to keep quiet about the incident,” says the ‘Metro Plus’ of The Punch. To me, that attributed assertion presupposes, in particular, that there is a link between poverty and rape. Typically, the pain and shame of poverty makes women on the receiving end of filthy lucre – from unconscionable penetrating perpetrators – for their buccal cavity and stomach infrastructure. Biblically speaking, the love of money is the root of all evil, which when wo(men) covet after have erred from the faith of faithful living, thus piercing themselves with many pernicious and hurtful discombobulating repercussions. And since money answereth all things, I do know that every seemingly possible means would have proved ‘unanswering’ for the quite old woman, thus self-preservation becomes the first law of her nature, by “fire by tulas”.
Be that as it may, Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock” informs the carnal or the critical mind of the opportunism and adventurism of pleasure power. The ‘husband-love-your-wife’ doctrinal practice is, in fact, becoming husband-lust-your-wife, now and then, that we see couples murmuring and grumbling and complaining of “rape” in pleasure space. It does take me aback when I hear a particular couple, a stone’s throw away from my own face-me-I-face-you apartment, yearning and yelling (most probably the wife, I suppose) – perhaps as the husband tries to “rightfully” yank off the “lock of her password”; groanings like “fimisile fimisile fimisile!” (that is, “leave me; leave me; leave me (alone)!”) and “oki gbo ron!” (“you’re so stubborn-hearted!”) put me off. And so I become rather pitiful for the ‘wailing and travailing’ woman crackedown by her randy he-goat husband, and the man himself – I just feel that he’s had enough, after all, with a daughter and a son. Yes, the woman should be willing and obedient to give in her body and not under some form of duress or other, if the marriage would remain honourable and the bed undefiled. That’s at home; what I called ‘home rape’.

Now, how about campus rape? Again and again, the ‘so-called’ ‘deepfakes’ of BBC African Eye unleashing the somewhat uninvestigative, if it was, “sexual harassment” of Dr. Boniface Igbeneghu of the Department of European Languages, Faculty of Arts, University of Lagos, etc., etc, etc.? The dimensionality of such “investigative journalism,” it might be argued, uncharacteristically unveils the untrustworthiness of “clean” investigation and interrogation. And immediately, the lecturer’s office was “sealed by the Management of University of Lagos”. It beggars belief, then, that a university lecturer should sacrifice his or her years of acquisition and learning at the altar of rape. Professor Douglas Anele, of the Department of Philosophy, University of Lagos, seems to be reading my mind when he critically submits in Sunday Vanguard, October 20, 2019 that: “Clearly, Dr. Igbeneghu and others ought to have realised the inherent dangers of using their academic status to create the wrong impression about university teachers in general”. Even more important, he states that “it is definitely ungentlemanly and unwise to pressurise an unwilling girl who is not your close friend to kiss or have body contact with you”. And the female students themselves! Can we ultimately say they are “runs girls”, “closet commercial workers”, or “repackaged overused bodies walking on two legs without substance inside”, as Anele tellingly describes them in his “Sex-for-grades, sting operation, and everything in-between” paper? In part, I quite take Anele on that somewhat putative assertion, particularly with regard to the very latter. That “a significant number of girls in our universities are not even worth the trouble of very close friendship or romantic affair” presupposes that relationships or friendships with lecturers are not extremely evil, after all, but, in fact, they can be “shameful and inherenly unclean” if the line of carnal gratification is not determinedly delimited or drawn. It’s a shame that the so-called born-with-a-silver-spoon children, or the usually would-not-want-to-read ones, should unashamedly sacrifice their bodies or boobs or backsides for… for… for marks! I pity those female students who put on very revealing skinny jeans or leggings barely having panties; wear expensively huge unshamefaced makeups; and almost totally nudely dressed in highfalutin apparels, thereby advertising their perishable “products” to their “patronage”. Nevertheless, there are a very few male students who are stupefied by the premonitions that belie them if they could fail to have some intercourse with the female lecturers. As such, the very vocabulary of hate against the rape of fairly or quite or rather old females may well include the males in one way or another.

Perhaps far most importantly, what the h*** makes fathers rape their apparently beautiful daughters? No, it shouldn’t be! I protest against their doing that brazen act. Is it that those daughters of theirs are so overwhelmingly attractive that they get carried away or that they are overcome by the beauty power because of its itchiness? Well, maybe it be physiologically argued that certain females are attracted to males. It then implies that men, and fathers in this case, should try to abstain from all appearance of evil, by very much deliberately distancing themselves from their female children if they appear “sexually attracted” to them. More particularly, male-to-female children interaction should be delimitated by parents. By and large, sex education is important, for it helps in the curbing of rape that’s gone so viral both locally and globally.

Ige can be reached via: [email protected]