Pretty pictures Ugly results

Is there anything as enticingly beautiful as a nude female form? When done right it can evoke passion, wonder, and excitement, but so often the dark side is that the display of the female form leads to the objectivication of women and the result can be deadly. We look at those images and the woman in question is violated. Normally it doesn't seem to hurt anyone and the hurt is abstract, but the view of woman as a thing and not a  person has consequence.

In Dehli a young girl was repeatedly raped. While porn may or may not have been at play in the background, certainly the view of a woman as a thing to be used was. Ironic that in a country which values life to the extreme, human life is so cheap.

Women are people too and any action that we take as humans which diminishes women as less than human, as less than deserving a decent life, any pattern of behavior which encourages bad behavior to another must be stopped, and now.

OK, reality check. Everything I said above is true. There is just one problem, there is nothing wrong with admiring the human form. The problem comes when she (or he) becomes it or a part of her/his-self. When we reduce people to their parts we walk over the line  that creates behavior problems. An admiration for the human form, and the wonderful person who is that form, is healthy and necessary for the survival of the species. Violence to that form, to that person, is an abomination and a sacrilege. What happened in Dehli, what happens in rape, is not sex, it is not reproduction, it is simply violence to all of us and a thing to be punished severely.

It tests the limits of our civilization to consider such punishment. How can we fashion a punishment that meets the evil of the crime? Part of us thinks an iron bar jammed unceremoniously up the rectum of each perpetrator as they did to her would be a good start, but like all retribution it would lower us to their level. Mercy is unthinkable - I leave the conundrum to one wiser than myself.