Relationships Talk

Police in the Indian city of Mumbai have arrested a 20-year-old woman for marrying a 17-year-old boy.

The woman and the couple’s five-month-old daughter have been in prison for the past fortnight.

She was arrested after the teenager’s mother lodged a police complaint. She has been charged under the stringent child sex abuse act.

The woman says their relationship is consensual, and also contests the claim that her husband is underage.

Although the age of consent for sex in India for all genders is 18, the legal age for marriage is 18 years for women and 21 years for men.

So in this case, police have also charged the woman under the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act.

The BBC’s Geeta Pandey in Delhi says it’s a rare case where a woman has been arrested for marrying an underage man. There are many instances where young men in consensual relationships have been arrested after complaints from the parents of girls who are less than 18 years of age.

The teenager’s mother registered a complaint with the police in December last year accusing the woman and her family of kidnapping her son and forcing him into marriage, a Mumbai police official told BBC Hindi.

He said they carried out the arrest after a thorough inquiry and taking legal advice because the accused was a woman.

In the complaint, the mother also said that her son had been in contact with the woman for two years and that she had threatened to kill herself if he stopped meeting her.

The woman has filed a bail petition where she has claimed that her husband is over 18 and that their relationship is consensual, according to Indian media reports.

She says that he has two sisters aged 20 and 18 so it’s not possible for him to be 17 years and eight months old.

(Pixabay)Left-wing feminists and right-wing traditionalists miss the mark on the tradeoffs of marriage, family, and work.

Dennis Prager’s latest syndicated column features a 50-year-old woman who called in to his radio show to express regret over having prioritized her career over finding a spouse. Here’s part of her warning to women in their 20s:

Do not follow the path that I followed. You are leading yourself to a life of loneliness. All of your friends will be getting married and having children, and you’re working to compete in the world, and what you’re doing is competing with men. Men don’t like competitors. Men want a partner. It took me until my late 40s to realize this.

This woman’s experience provokes sympathy, but her advice exemplifies a damaging right-wing overreaction to third-wave feminism’s rejection of marriage and family. Far from being pro-family, it presents a false dichotomy between happy marriages and fulfilling work.

Not every woman successful in the workplace will inevitably end up lonely simply because some women do. Not every woman who finds meaning in her career will avoid relationships and become a competitor with the men around her. Not every man is threatened by successful women who care about their work — and men worth marrying certainly won’t be.

Not only do Prager and his listener represent a certain stripe of traditionalist conservative, but they’re joined in this harmful worldview by a growing subset of “men’s rights activists” who supplement these right-wing arguments with open misogyny. Both groups expound the dogma that, for women, successful careers and flourishing families are mutually exclusive propositions. Women have to pick one, we’re told, and it’d better be the right one, so choose carefully at the risk of becoming an old maid.

But the fact that there are obvious tradeoffs between career and family does not mean that women (or men, for that matter) face a binary choice between the two.

What’s more, these arguments are nearly always directed solely at women. There is no accompanying genre from this branch of the Right encouraging young men to ease up on working 14-hour days and stockpiling savings for ten years after college so they can grasp at elusive “financial security” before even contemplating a serious relationship. Feminists, for all their faults, rightly chafe against this thinly veiled form of sexism.

But the Left’s response is wrong as well. Fed by radical-feminist ideology, much of mainstream society has bought into the notion that women having to balance family and careers in a way that men don’t is a form of fundamental oppression. Progressive feminists insist this is the fruit of systemic male privilege, furthered by the government’s failure to ameliorate the injustice.

The feminist solution, at least in recent years, has taken the form of Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” model. These are progressive career women like Prager’s listener once was, women who postpone marriage and family and give themselves to their work, making their decision based on their belief in the sad reality that women still can’t “have it all.” They’re told they have to choose one, so they do; sometimes they regret their choice.

Both sides of this gaping chasm totally miss the mark. The reality is that no one can have it all — that’s just life, and that’s okay. Accepting this reality in no way means that women can’t have fulfilling work and a happy marriage and well-adjusted children. In fact, acknowledging that no one can have it all would foster a society that encourages each person to find the best available balance.

No amount of moralizing from either side, whether right-wing lectures directed at career-minded women or feminist diatribes against women who choose to stay home, will help young people assess the tradeoffs inherent in building a fulfilling life.

These arguments at the progressive and conservative extremes each stem from their own false premise. Many traditionalists (not to mention less savory characters like the pick-up artists and “incels” who populate the Internet’s darker corners) insist that women who don’t heed their warnings are ignoring human biology at their peril. Feminists, meanwhile, insist that biology is oppressive and should be transcended through the use of contraception and abortion; their solution to intrinsic gender disparities is to make women more like men.

Those who accept Prager’s view insist that we accept harsh reality, but their argument isn’t realistic at all. In the real world, blanket commands such as “Find someone in your 20s. That’s when you’re still very cute,” as Prager’s caller insists, have little bearing on daily life. Not everyone can find a spouse early, and not everyone who gets married later in life does so as the result of having been buried in a career.

Pro-marriage arguments are a necessary corrective to the progressive Left’s pervasive anti-family worldview, but this kind of overly broad advice is not the solution. Each person faces unique circumstances that limit choices and affect outcomes, and in many cases, there’s nothing lamentable about those disparities. There’s no “one-size-fits-all” model for juggling family and work; suggesting that you can have only one or the other is highly detrimental.

When it comes to finding the right balance, men and women face different tradeoffs, and this is where feminists are right to note the unique challenges of female biological reality. Choosing a high-power, time-consuming career instead of marriage, as Prager’s listener did, can understandably lead to regret. Her experience is a useful warning.

But it’s not an argument for viewing work and family life as a dichotomy. Many women have flourishing marriages, happy children, and meaningful careers — not without tradeoffs, but without forfeiting the unique fulfillment that comes from all three. For pro-family conservatives, that should be the goal.

If there are three things I’m known for here at MIT Technology Review, it’s my love of 3D printing, my science fashion, and my nerd cred (the latter is quite a claim here at MIT, where nerd cred is universally high).

So when it came to planning my wedding, the traditional route was definitely not for me. I have a mechanical engineering background and have owned a desktop 3D printer for the past three years, so the chance to combine my passion for manufacturing with a huge life milestone was too tempting to pass up. That meant infusing 3D printing into the day everywhere I could.

For those unfamiliar with how most desktop 3D printers work, it involves melting down rolls of plastic filament at high temperatures. The machine moves around in a pattern laid out according to a model that was designed on a computer, extruding plastic in a process similar to that used in a glue gun. It puts down thin layers, one at a time, to build the shape. The technology helps both manufacturers and at-home makers construct intricate creations.

Whenever there was a choice between making and buying something, I went for the 3D-printing option. I printed my headband, the bouquets for me and my bridesmaids, all the table numbers, the cake topper, the floral cake decorations, and the flower girl’s necklace. All this was carried out on my two desktop printers, Mini and Flash (yes, I have named my printers).

Like many other DIY and hobbyist projects, it allowed for a deep connection to the things I created. 3D-printed items have a personal touch you don’t get from purchasing something at the store.

While the technology hasn’t become as widespread as it was hyped to be about five or 10 years ago—3D printers aren’t in every home quite yet—manufacturers and a community of makers are continuing to support its growth. According to the 2018 Wohlers Report, the industrial additive-manufacturing industry grew 21% in 2017.

And the growing maker community is big on sharing: sharing advice, final products, and especially 3D models. Many websites like GrabCAD, Thingiverse, MyMiniFactory, and Pinshape  allow makers to publish the models of their creations for others to download, print, and remix as well.

I pulled the models of the tulips for the bouquets and cake decorations, and the Lego Minifig cake toppers, off Thingiverse. I adapted this model of a leaf created and uploaded by 3D-printer company Makerbot to make my headband. Lastly, I designed the flower girl’s necklace and all my table numbers from scratch in engineering modeling software, SolidWorks.

So really, while I may have 3D-printed everything, many parts of the maker community came together to support my wedding. And in turn, I’m contributing back by uploading my table numbers and remixed leaf model to Thingiverse as well. If you have a wedding coming up, I would be honored if you would use the table numbers as part of your centerpiece (you can download them here).

The project that took the largest amount of time was the bouquets (don’t worry, I didn’t throw mine—I didn’t want to risk knocking out one of my friends with a big spiky plastic ball). I printed all the approximately 200 flowers individually on my machines with blue and glow-in-the-dark plastic filament. In all I spent more than 100 hours, over the course of many months, pumping out flowers whenever I could after work and on weekends. I then arranged them on styrofoam balls using traditional floral-arranging pins and glue.

While newer, more expensive printers could have probably completed all my projects faster, I was working with machines priced around the $900-$1,300 mark that I purchased about two and three years ago. But I believe I’m speaking for many others in the maker community when I say making is not all about speed and efficiency. It’s about what you have the power to accomplish with your own tools and talents.

And the final product was more than worth all that effort. I received compliments throughout the night on my bouquet from family members, many of whom had followed along on Instagram as it took shape. Engaged friends were even saying they might steal a few ideas for their own ceremony. Other guests were shocked to find out my headband was 3D-printed, saying they assumed I’d bought it.

Mark Pariani

I can’t leave out another motivation of DIYing the wedding, which was saving money. Keeping costs low wherever we could was a top priority for us as a young couple. Since I already own two 3D printers, making these things required only a small investment: in total I spent around $75 on all the bouquets. When you consider that the average cost of a bride’s bouquet alone is about $150, and each additional bridesmaid arrangement is about $75 more, that’s a bargain. 3D printing still may not be cheap enough to put up a huge fight against traditional mass production, but when it comes to wedding costs, it actually starts to look like a good deal.

For me and my fiancé, 3D printing also brought a chance to customize our celebration to our personalities. We are both makers at heart. By focusing on 3D printing, I was able to custom-design our wedding and create a physical representation of what we plan to do next: make a life together.