It’s good to know that whatever happens, whatever the conditions, whether it rains or sizzles, at midnight and at noon, whether things are going well or badly, in peace and war, in poverty and plenty, whether there are too few women or too many, the result is always the same – women are treated like dirt. Women are grabbed, pushed around, sold and bought, beaten and killed, raped and enslaved, exploited and used, thrown away and swapped around. Women are treated like livestock, like farm machinery, like incubators, like any old possession except worse because they have to be broken and forced and violently bent to the will of other people. Incubators and ploughs don’t argue, but women – well, you never know. However hard you’ve hit them, for however long, you just never know when they’re going to open their mouths.

They have a good system going in India, don’t they. First step: devalue women; second step: create a dowry system and then keep making it more and more exorbitant, so that every female born means her parents will have to spend more money than they have for her dowry; third step, selective abortion of females; fourth step, drastic decline in the female population and imbalance between females and males so that males have a much harder time finding mates. And bob’s your uncle! You’ve set up a new hell on earth for women. Kaloo kalay.

Anwari Khatoon came visiting a relative in the northern Indian state of Haryana eight months ago, but ended up getting married against her will to a local man with six children from a previous marriage. A man from her village in eastern Jharkhand state had accompanied the 22-year-old woman on her journey to Haryana. When she arrived in the village, Anwari found the man and her relative pressuring her to marry the man with six children, a middle-aged truck driver. Her new husband paid 10,000 rupees ($220) to the man who brought her to the village. “Can a young, single girl get married to a father of six willingly?” asks Anwari.

Well that’s an interesting way to make a living. Accompany a woman from your village to another village, and when you get there sell her (though she isn’t actually yours to sell, but no matter) to some guy and pocket ten thousand rupees. Not bad. Money for jam. You get a nice trip to a distant village as well – what larks!

Since there aren’t enough local women to marry, Haryana’s men pay touts to bring women for them to marry and to work on their farms. Social activists reckon most of these women end up being used as sex slaves and then resold to other men in what looks like a flourishing market in trafficking of women…Social activists say Haryana exemplifies the vicious cycle of exploitation of women and represents a society which does not respect women.

Yeah, that sounds right. Paying kidnappers to bring women for them ‘to marry and to work on their farms’ does sound like a sign of a society which does not respect women. It’s pretty clear what those women are for – sex, and farm work. It’s quite a good deal, isn’t it – a twofer. You pay ten thousand rupees and you get a thing you can poke whenever you want to, and when you’re not poking her, she’ll work on your farm. What a tool! It puts the Veg-O-Matic to shame. Talk about design – it’s just the right length, it’s about the right temperature, it has two legs with a hole between, and it has arms and hands that can do farm work. Cheap at the price! Too bad it has a part that can talk, of course, but a good punch will usually fix that.