Let me drag in Immanuel Kant—his categorical imperative, that old gem. Kant says a moral law is real only if you can imagine everyone doing it universally. So if I justify theft, I have to live in a world where everyone steals. My life and property would always be at risk; society destabilizes. Theft and murder are shut out as crimes for this very reason—danger to all, crossing all boundaries: gender, caste, color. But rape? That’s got history warped around it, especially in societies that skew male. Rape is never felt as something “done to men”; it’s always what men “do.” It’s an act claimed, not suffered, and so, deep down, it skips being tagged as a true universal crime—at least in how men see it.
If rape doesn’t get universalized as a crime in the moral sense, it’s because men simply never see themselves as potential victims. And to be clear, I’m not saying this is right—just that this is what the social mechanism looks like. The whole framing of rape as a crime is modern, contemporary, tied to concepts that didn’t always exist: choice, consent, liberty. Those are very recent introductions into human rights, and for women? Even more recent, almost an afterthought, layered long after men got a taste of them.
Now, here’s the heart: even those ideas—liberty, consent, choice—weren’t always built for women. For most of history, nobody handed women those cards. If rape is a violation of choice, personal consent, liberty, well—those were never considered inherent to women to begin with. So, stacked against Kant’s rule, rape flunks the universality test; liberty and consent arrive too late for justice to catch up.
That’s why, in my argument, most male rapists don’t see what they did as a crime; they see an act, not a transgression. Why? Because the philosophical, legal, and social groundwork never handled rape as it handles murder or theft. It’s not that complicated—they did it, but didn’t feel it was wrong, because the culture never really framed it as such. I haven’t dug deep into psychological research here, but the simple answer is: it wasn’t labelled a crime.
So, let’s get even more specific—“modesty.” Law talks about women’s modesty, but even that concept is warped. Modesty is harnessed to chastity and purity, like a woman’s honor is family property. It’s a rotten framing. Modesty shouldn’t be tied to sex or virginity. Under Indian law, modesty for men basically doesn’t exist the way it does for women, and frankly, even for women, it’s a narrow, unfair focus.
There’s a famous judicial moment—a judge tried to define modesty in terms of sex. Anything that violates a woman’s sexual purity, chastity, is an attack on modesty. But that just turns women into vessels of family honor, instead of seeing them as individuals. It’s limiting and cruel, making women objects, not subjects. Modesty needs rethinking, wider scope: see the woman first as human, second as any trope of honor or purity.
Why isn’t rape of men recognized as a crime, in India or most of the world? Simple: men aren’t given the conceptual space for modesty. Before even considering if men can be raped, society needs to admit men have liberty and consent, but it never did. That’s inherited from male-dominated narratives—men can’t be objects, only agents. If men could understand consent, maybe they wouldn’t rape, maybe they’d realize they can be raped. But they don’t, and without that, justice skips them, too.
Exploring Modesty abit more,Under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita Section 79, it’s a crime to use any word, gesture, or act intended to insult the modesty of a woman.
That’s necessary.
But here’s what the law quietly assumes:
Only women have modesty.
Back in Raju Pandurang Mahale v. State of Maharashtra (2004), the Supreme Court observed that:
“The essence of a woman’s modesty is her sex.”
That one line shaped the way our legal system sees modesty—not as a human trait, but as something biologically exclusive to women.
But what if a man’s consent is violated in the same way?
What if someone peeps at him while he’s changing, records him in a vulnerable state, or touches him without permission?
Where is his protection?
There isn’t any.
I’m not saying let’s jump straight to making male rape a criminal offence. I get that we aren’t socially ready for that. But this?
This basic recognition that men, too, can be violated, that their modesty can be insulted—isn’t that a fair starting point?
Because the truth is: if the law doesn’t even acknowledge that you can be wronged, it definitely won’t protect you when you are.
This isn’t about diminishing what women go through. It’s not a competition of pain.
It’s about expanding justice, not shifting it.
Men are expected to “take it,” laugh it off, or feel flattered when their space is crossed. But that’s not strength—that’s silence enforced by shame.
So let’s change the framing.
Modesty is not about your sex. It’s about your personhood. And any violation of that should be recognised, regardless of gender.
That’s not radical. That’s fair.
Summing it up: Kant’s universality fails for rape, because men don’t see themselves as victims; liberty and consent are new, given to women even later. Men don’t see rape as a crime, neither as perpetrators nor potential victims. The very seed that produced the tragedy of women’s rape also blocks men’s rape from being a crime. Karma, in a way, loops back.
Even when rape is recognized as a crime, it’s through a lens of modesty—a woman’s honor, not her individual self. Kant’s logic can’t fix this until it universalizes personhood, not just specific privileges. We need to see each person as a possible victim, as a possible agent of consent and liberty, not a vessel for family pride or societal function.
That’s the raw observation. No gospel, no diary entry, just one philosophical rant on why men rape, and why, for most of history, rape hasn’t been a crime—certainly not for men.
To further summarise this kants categorical imperative fails first when man and woman are not recognised as equal. Woman often treated as object or property and man as owner this very arrangment led to first easy disnullment of woman right from every start and this context of unrecognition of rape as crime and woman right is the very summary for this whole observation.
One can argue that rape was so called right of man over a woman which was only a property carrying family honor and through history property has only been a subject of expoliation and plunder, and woman being an object was no different or even worse. Such a so called right is very reason of the violation of man’s right against the very unrecognised crime called rape, now unrecognised in contemporary world, subjugated as a privilege by the same man who was born and brought in this privilege to distinguish property as subject and woman as object.
