ON MY early days in India, in the mid 1970s, I was talking to a couple of guys my own age and mentioned my girlfriend that I had left behind in England.
They were curious about her and asked if she might visit me in India.
One of them - dead cheeky - asked me if I would have sex with her if she came to visit me.
I said I hoped so. Very likely I would.
Then he said, “Do you think she would have sex with me too?”
Young Hindu men like him did not have sex with girls before marriage.
His family would choose a wife for him and she would be the only partner he would have for the rest of his life.
His thinking, essentially, was that if a young woman was happy to have sex with me, she was like someone he had never known. He was mystified.
The conversation then turned to how his family and friends would regard the relationship I had.
He said, “They would say you don’t respect your sister.”
I said, “What has it got to do with my sister?”
“Well, if you will have sex with a girl then you can’t complain if a man has sex with your sister.”
I said, “But I wouldn’t anyway. That’s up to my sister. It’s none of my business.”
This was all strange to him.
Then I thought about it and recalled that my mother and my former teachers and neighbours in Ireland would similarly have regarded my English girlfriend as morally alien to them.
I had grown up in a Catholic culture which punished unmarried women who broke the rules.
Those who got pregnant were often disowned by their families, some of them to be virtually imprisoned in Magdalene laundries.
When I had got into a relationship with my English girlfriend I thought I was at the very height of liberal cool culture, because it was so much freer than relationships I’d had in Ireland.
Often after school she would visit the Family Planning Clinic in her school uniform to pick up her next batch of pills.
Ireland was liberalising at that time, but I was conscious of having crossed a cultural bridge not much shorter than the one I was directing my Indian friend towards.
I was thinking about this in the context of the discussion in the media about ‘grooming gangs’ and whether cultural background makes some men more likely to rape young white women or not.
I don’t think they do. My young Indian friends might have been dreaming of a day when they could have sex with a woman, might have been eager to get married since that was the key to it.
But they would no more have seriously considered raping a woman than robbing a bank.
They were part of one culture that regulated relationships tightly and there are others.
Patriarchal family structures don’t want daughters and granddaughters bringing children into the family by men who have not been vetted.
This is as much about preserving inheritance rights as religious tradition.
Strong ethnic families don’t want their children marrying out and diluting the community.
At worst, cultures like these produce barbarities like ‘honour killing’.
They lose the people who don’t fit in.
Our restrictive Irish culture also produced the confinement and oppression of women, the raping of children by supposedly celibate clergy and even infanticide.
That culture was not so very different from others that throw up similar aberrations.
We are appalled by honour killings in strict Islamic cultures but they shouldn’t be a mystery to us.
They certainly wouldn’t have been a mystery to our parents and grandparents who knew the social rule, that the girl who brought disgrace on the family through pregnancy or an unapproved relationship was thrown out.
I was one of those who would not have stuck by the rules, and it seems to me that that is true of most of my generation. Our great liberator was contraception.
Young people in restrictive cultures have difficult relationships and few friends of the supposedly opposite sex. Often, like our own forebears, they have sex for the first time on their wedding night.
Where the marriage is arranged they may have sex before really getting to know each other.
I don’t think it is that constraint that makes some men rapists. Yet anxiety in England over rape gangs is tilting towards a racist generalisation that young women are in greater danger from Muslims than from English men.
Yet women tell us they are afraid of all men when they walk alone at night.
Another fear about Islam is not just that the men are frustrated by the denial of relationships before marriage, but that they mistake the openness of western society for a general invitation.
Those of us raised to believe that sex before marriage was a sin were surprised by freedom, even made fools of ourselves by blundering in over-enthusiastically.
It didn’t turn most of us into scheming groomers and rapists.
We Irish should be able to look back and say, yes we had a warped culture too but you can’t judge everyone by it.
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