An Open Letter to Salman Khan

Salman Khan has been into the news after making controversial comments about his hard work for the film Sultan comparing himself to a raped woman. He has been receiving lot of heat from the people across the country and the actor received a strong letter from a woman and it has been unveiled through famous leading magazine India Today. It reads:

Dear bhai,

It must be exhausting being a celebrity - hectic schedules, public scrutiny, intensive workouts and unpredictable lifestyles. Is it worth all the money and fame? From your latest comments it seems like it really isn't.

Because seriously, you should give up anything that makes you feel like a 'raped woman'. As a woman I know that kind of trauma is hard to live or deal with.

You see, during rape a foreign object forces its way into our body, despite our screams and desperate 'no's. As pleas go unheard, our unprepared body rebels, hurts, and even bleeds. We fight until adrenaline supports us, and when we can't resist our rapist anymore, a darkness invades our minds. We feel our heartbeat pounding in our brain, our body becomes too numb to feel any pain and we count each second until our rapist finishes what he started.

Sometimes our rapists choose to find us at more vulnerable times - when we're asleep or intoxicated. We wake up with bruises, pain and no idea of the things that were done to us, but an acute awareness that someone used our body like a piece of toilet paper.

We try hard to remain strong, but reality haunts us for the rest of our lives.

You know how mean people can be. They call us the black sheep of the family, tell us we deserved it for being independent and living a modern lifestyle. Sometimes they call us liars - manipulative bitches trying to ruin a wonderful man. Others remind us our rapist didn't really mean it, being the innately good guy he is.

Even our families abandon us sometimes. They kill us for honour. They try and restrict our already regressed lives. They even ask us to stay mum and make sure no one finds out. They call us an embarrassment for allowing a man to become our rapist.

Pushed into an abyss of shame, we begin to hate ourselves. We reject our own bodies because they don't seem ours anymore. We live in disgust and believe we're better off dead. Some of us find help, but many of us spend the rest of our lives in depression and self-hate. Often we cut ourselves and sometimes even take our lives.

If you mean the gruelling muscle pain from a demanding workout for a potentially blockbuster movie makes you feel this disgusting, you really should quit it. You may be earning Rs 100 crore, but no amount of money is worth the trauma.

I'm sorry that we outraging feminists are reading too much into two nonchalantly spoken words. What do we know? We're just trying to fight the sky-rocketing rate of sexual crimes in India.

Did you know that 32,077 rape cases were reported in the country in 2015? We think it's because of our misogynistic society, an inherent apathy towards women and lack of comprehension about the concept of consent. We're trying to educate people about the profound effects of sexual abuse.

Maybe you could help us, since you say you now have experience?

Please don't ignore my plea for help in this sea of outrage. We actually have the gall to believe such statements are careless and trivialise sexual crimes. We are naive enough to think that comparing rape to any other experience is unfair and desensitises the crime.

We are scared some of your fans might meet a rape survivor and be like "what's the big deal? I just did a back-breaking work out, I feel raped too."

But again, what do we know? We were never forced to train like wrestlers for a movie and a meagre sum of Rs 100 crores.

Seriously bhai, stop what you're doing, no one deserves to 'feel like a raped woman'.

Yours truly,

A sympathetic woman

Source: India Today