Death And Rape Threats For Posting Hilarious Critiques Of The Govt

Posted by Dyuti Sudipta

[Trigger Warning: Rape & Death Threats]

After being hit in my eyes and ears and wallet and career by news of repeated mob lynching, beatings of Dalits, GST, demonetization, and continuous fund cuts in the education and health sector, one fine day I decided to gift myself with a little bit of humour, satire, wit and fun.

So I started this thread under the hashtag #SextInTheTimeOfNDA where I posted around 20 updates criticizing the anti people policies that the government is taking. Sext is a combination word, derived from sex and text, something we often call sex chat, that often precedes the actual sexual encounters in a great number of cases across the globe.

I ended the series with a screenshot of a Whatsapp forward that asked Hindu women to take their God’s name while climaxing like the women of other religions. The screenshot was not written by me. I found it on RoflGandhi’s Twitter handle, it was originally posted by a Handle named Super Commando Dhruv, named after the famous comic character. The reason I posted was to point fingers at how idiotically the right-wing propaganda machinery works. My mistake was that I overestimated people’s intelligence. So of course that post was picked up out of context, and hell broke loose.

People who are my father’s age are tagging me into derogatory posts, asking their friends to abuse me, rape me, mutilate my genitalia, insert iron rods inside me. People are mentioning me in comments and then replying graphically detailed sexual threats in those comments, people are calling me an attention seeker, publicity whore, who is doing everything so that it’s easier for her to get customers.

the same people who cry over Nirbhaya are discussing doing the same things to me.

They are presuming how many men I have slept with, the depth and width of my vagina, whether I am tight enough to please them, if my mother was a prostitute, if my father has raped my mother, they are sharing ideas if shutting my mouth up by forcing their penises into my mouth, they want to insert rods into my vagina, they want every nerve on my intimate area to writhe with pain.

And all of what I just said is real, I have screenshots to suffice.

A right-leaning journalist has been repeatedly tagging me in maligning posts trying to prove what all I did was for publicity, to gain likes, he even found one of my post with 46 likes to show how I did it to get likes above 500. From his friend list people started the abuse, people started taking screenshots of my profile, my inbox is filled with rape threats and abuses. Half the posts that I am tagged in are abuses.

Irrespective of what women say on social media, if it’s outside the domain reserved for her by patriarchy, she is abused.

And holy mother of irony – this journalist calls me anti women while the group of his friends are calling me names right under his nose while he does nothing to stop it! The way Narendra Modi is on the surface scolding the mob-lynchers with strong support for them under the surface, this person is doing exact the same for these social media lynchers.

Irrespective of what women say on social media, as long as it’s outside the domain reserved for her by patriarchy, she is faced with a huge amount of abuse and name calling. One thing that we need to take note of is that irrespective of the context, the abuse is disturbingly similar – posted by men, centered around shaming, mutilating and hurting the female body, female sex, female sexuality, female desires. It is an outburst of the hidden violent misogynist fantasies of men.

Also Read: Online Abuse And The Misappropriated Tool of “Free Speech”

This is not my first time facing trolls. The only thing that is unprecedented is the intensity. The sheer amount of hatred dripping from each of their words, people unanimously agreeing on a woman, a fellow human being, to be subjected to torturous treatment says so much about the country we have become.

What’s worse is that last night, I found myself suspended from Facebook for three days despite being the victim of targeted abuse and harassment, for apparently violating their “Community Standards”.

Violence on the name of religion, caste, gender, political belief by the majority has been normalized. So normalized that the same people who would probably cry over Nirbhaya are agreeing to do the same things to me, to subject me to the same pain because I don’t fit their idea of an ideal woman.

I refuse to be that woman of their idea.

An ideal woman should be voiceless against them, she should let them do what they want to, she should not shout when they hurt her, she should cover her face to hide the bruises they gave her, she should let them have her body but solely for their pleasure, her pleasure, her individuality, her rights, her desires should be unspoken of.

I refuse to be that woman of their idea. I am not that woman, I will never be. I will be what I am, an atheist, Marxist feminist, bisexual woman. And no matter how hard you try, I am not going to stop being that.