Internet Sexism

UselessTalk was the name of the group on Facebook, I should’ve already known. My friend who thought the memes were funny added me to it. I didn’t think much of it at the time. I noticed that I had many of my friends from facebook on that group and alot of other aquaintances from the same Delhi circle of cool people as these friends.

For the 15 days I was on the group I’d wake up every morning to a slightly sexist meme, I’d get notifications straight to my phone if it was a ‘friend’ who had posted. On one day I saw a meme posted by my friend’s ex boyfriend that said ‘would you slap your ex for a million dollars’, to which he wrote, I’d do it for free. I commented that this was posted in bad taste, my exact comment was ‘This is posted in bad taste. Shame’ to which I got a barrage of comments stating — i have no taste or I have no sense of humour, by men on that group.

I was attacked and shamed and called feminazi and told that i have no sense of humour and i should be like some of the other cool girls on the group who were as sexist as themselves. Also a reminder, that all these people were only ‘sexist on the internet and not so irl’.

I wondered if this could be right. I am still amazed at how i know that the answer is a strong no. In Delhi, the rape capital of the world, sexist humour and humour that normalizes violence only serves to perpetuate the existing mentality where the inequality between the sexes is exemplified and perpetuated, trivialized as humour and translates into regular everyday sexism and rape culture. How can people still allow for jokes at the expense of women, 50% of the population in a country where the gender parity index is only a dismal 0.48 — which means that India ranks poorly in terms of gender inequality (North America is 0.74 and Western Europe is 0.71, which is to say that even these regions do not have perfect gender equality). In terms of ‘political voice’ and ‘physical security’ India’s standing is in the dangerously low category.

The internet is as public a space as is the street. And harrasment on the internet is real, yet another medium where my freedom to speak my mind will open doors to random men hurling internet abuses at me, some letcherous people sending me friend requests and basically, my exiting the group where as that group should have been shut down as perpetuating ideas and stereotypes that are offensive and harmful to a social group — i.e. women.

The flipside to the gender parity index is that if that gap was filled by filling the gap at the workplace India’s GDP — even if we are to look at humans in the neoliberal framework as essentially labour and development as growth, we could be adding 60% to our annual GDP. Say WHAAAAA?

Superpower we could be. Stupid we are. Society needs to get out of the way of progress of people and our country at large by just recognizing issue that debilitate the growth of individual beings by being sexist, raceist, casteist. We need to find more programs to help each other and to assist each other’s growth stories rather than tugging at the foundation.