Padma Lakshmi’s Revelation About Her Rape Is Important

The news about Padma Lakshmi’s revelation of her rape as a 16-year-old by her 23-year-old boyfriend reached me at the moment when a friend in her late 30’s was confiding in me about her inability to have sex, because penetration still feels like a shock, evoking some nascent regressive childhood conditioning. Here they were, two different conversations with different degrees of severity, both ones that we refuse to have.

Lakshmi’s opinion piece in The New York Times was a reaction to Trump’s tweet last Friday regarding Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh for attempted rape, in which he stated that if the allegations were true, she would have filed a report years ago. And that’s where Lakshmi’s story is particularly important. Because it highlights that a successful model, author, television personality and producer can find that while there was “no language in the 1980s for date rape” it’s still tough to find the words today.

The confession that Lakshmi (who was born in Chennai, India) wrote about, especially on her taking 30 years to be able to talk about it or even label it as rape, is particularly relevant. In a global space, irrespective of how regressive or progressive a society appears, or how subtle or obvious the patriarchy, while there are educated, urban women still coming to terms with pleasuring our vaginas, any conversation, at any point of time, at any age, is an important one.

Let’s start by reading this article