It’s Men’s Health Awareness Month, and we thought it was a good time to ask why, in 2025, men are still using the Internet to abuse and attack women who deviate from the traditional norms of ‘what a woman should behave like’
The 1 per cent of online harassment that Sohini Bhattacharya has been consistently facing. Imaging/pramod mahajan
The night the threats began, Sohini Bhattacharya hadn’t posted anything provocative. She had shared a tender moment from her wedding — she and her husband tying mangalsutra bracelets instead of necklaces. A small gesture of equality, you may say. The comments that followed were vicious. “I hope the man gets pregnant,” “Simp,” “Is your husband getting pegged by you?”
Bhattacharya creates women’s health content, using makeup as a gentle entry point into heavy subjects. The more she challenged cultural myths, the uglier the reactions grew. A video on the history of the blouse brought a wave of slurs. “People made horrible comments. Called me r**di, so many Bengali slurs as well since I am a Bengali,” she says. One message read, “Tumhare jaise humare yaha hote toh ab tak gaadh diye jate (If women like you existed where I’m from, you’d be buried alive).” Even saying these words made her cringe at herself. But her online abusers weren’t cringing.
The pattern was unmistakable. Every time a video went viral, especially when she questioned tradition, the abuse intensified. “If women speak against cultural norms, men flood our comments saying things like ‘If you show ownership by sindoor then r**dibaazi kaise karoge’ (... how will you wh**e around) or ‘maa ch*d denge’ (I’ll f*** your mother).”
What rattles her is the selective outrage. “I haven’t seen men filing FIRs against those who say r**di. Only against the influencer who used the slur in a hashtag,” she says. She filed her own cybercrime complaint ten days ago with no update since. Meta told her an offender’s account was removed, but it stayed active. “Is Meta lying? I don’t know.”
Sohini Bhattacharya, Aman Pandey, Aakanksha Sadekar and Akash Gandas
The abuse often leaned on cultural identity. “People with bios like ‘Jai Shree Ram’ commented r**di,” she says. It took an emotional toll. “I cried so much earlier. Now I’ve accepted this will keep happening unless laws and platforms change.” This hostility isn’t limited to big creators. It finds women regardless of their scale.
Aakanksha Sadekar has just 460 followers. “Being a woman with a voice online makes you a target,” she says. She wasn’t critiquing patriarchy. She was celebrating buying her first home in the UK on X. Her tribute to the women before her was met with belittlement. “This is basic,” “What’s the big deal?” These came from educated men. “Not one congratulated me,” she says. Instead, they warned she would “die alone without a husband.” The tone wasn’t explicit gaali, but deeply cutting.
It would seem that men react to women’s autonomy, whether cultural, intellectual, or financial, with disproportionate fury. The past few years have been a pressure cooker for young men, steeped in online spaces where masculinity swings between swagger and despair. During the pandemic, UN Women recorded a 168 per cent surge in abusive posts across South Asia, and the hostility never ebbed. The 2020 State of the World’s Girls report found that 58 per cent had experienced online harassment across 22 countries, an astonishingly global consistency. But this isn’t a simple “men vs women” narrative. A digitally saturated cohort of insecure, reactive young men is performing for an imagined male audience. Their behaviour demands explanation, which is where the experts enter.
Tara Kaushal has spent years tracing the circuitry of how power, fear, and sexuality knot together to create violence. Her book, Why Men Rape, argues that misogyny isn’t a glitch in the system; it’s the system humming as designed. When she looks at the recent online eruption around the r***i slur, she sees continuity rather than surprise.
“We’ve always known that we will use gender-based slurs against women,” she says. “A lot of it is around their sexuality — how much they sleep around, what they do with their lives and bodies.” The internet didn’t invent misogyny; it turbocharged it. “This is a story as old as time, simultaneously bringing shame to female sexuality to try and control it, while also wanting it. It’s paradoxical,” she explains.
Men have been treated as the better, superior gender since generations and this ideology continues to persist today. “The internet lets women feel empowered. Men can’t handle the gap between their lives and their fathers’ lives,” Kaushal says. The internet’s very architecture of visibility for women, consequence-free expression for men is sparking a collision. She sees anonymity not as a mask but as an amplifier. “It allows men to say and do what they’d never reveal otherwise. It gives rein to desires shaped by a society that still tolerates these attitudes.”
“Slurs and abuse have always been a language of power,” Roxanne Pereira, a counselling psychologist says. “It gives a momentary sense of feeling good, strong, in control and it reinforces hierarchy by ‘putting a woman in her place.’” And beneath it all, she says, is peer pressure. “If I don’t prescribe to what my peers are doing, I could be ostracised.”
Creator and businessman Akash Gandas doesn’t see himself as part of a backlash. He sees himself as a corrective force; a man standing up to what he believes is a rising wave of women “bullying” men online. His certainty is firm in its conviction that the pendulum has swung too far in women’s favour. His journey into content began by helping a friend. “I had a friend who was targeted by a woman influencer,” he says. “She posted about things he supposedly did on a date, which were not true. I made the account to reveal things she did with my friend.” That account then became a channel. “Slowly more people came out to me with their experiences and so I kept posting reels, making people aware of women like her [the influencer] who bully men.” The woman made her account private soon after.
Gandas believes a certain type of woman exploits “weak men who have a good family background”, often for money or dates. “They are discreet. Their pages should be banned,” he says. There’s a strong sense of imbalance in how he sees consequence. “I am a man — if I did the same thing, then people would beat me up with shoes.” His Instagram account holds hundreds of reels on women influencers, focused on “outing” them.
He says he is not a feminist, but respects women. “Feminism is basically manmaani karna (... being arbitrary),” he says. Women questioning traditions like changing surnames after marriage, Karva Chauth fasting by wives for husbands, patriarchal expectations, are, for him, destabilising behaviour. “I think our tradition process is not something you should counter.”
His anxieties centre on who can accuse whom, who can be believed, who can be socially destroyed. Women posting videos about men feels like a threat to men’s security. “Why are they revealing faces? If a man does this, then what image remains of a woman? She won’t be able to walk out of the house.”
Gandas insists he isn’t a misogynist. “Whenever I have to make decisions, I consult all the women in my house,” he says. And in his worldview, the problem is symmetry, not patriarchy. “Sure men do commit crimes but ladkiyaan bhi kam nahin (women are no less).” His voice represents what festers in the male corners of the Internet — a layer of defensiveness over a belief that masculinity is now under siege. And Aman Pandey is the perfect juxtaposition to Gandas.
Pandey moves through the digital arena with a practiced awareness; years of political engagement has trained him to watch misdirected grievances flow in real time. His content isn’t about gender wars; it’s about accountability. Yet that puts him directly in the crosshairs of men who feel, as he puts it, “already frustrated with society”. “What it actually looks like,” he says, “is trying to deviate attention because they don’t want to lose their own privileges.”
For him, the “not all men” refrain echoes this defensiveness. “In a political situation between the oppressor and oppressed, generalising the oppressor is not wrong,” he says, because every woman he knows has experienced some form of abuse, online or offline. When he’s trolled, it reveals something deeper. Men accuse him of wearing nail polish “performatively,” or call him “gay or effeminate.” To him, it’s a window into male insecurity. “It boils up like a volcano,” he explains, until it spills outward as harassment. Rage, in his view, is less ideology than fear masquerading as bravado, a symptom of men who feel the ground shifting beneath them.
And the broader social climate is pouring fuel on it. “We have had generations of work to make women empowered, but we have not prepared the men to deal with these empowered women,” Kaushal says. “It puts men under a lot of pressure.”
Some men feel accused, others abandoned, many are simply performing for a male audience. The hostility is a signal. Something in male identity is loosening, cracking, reshaping under the heat of new expectations. Social platforms compress this shift. And in that pressure, there’s the possibility that men can learn to build gentler forms of strength.
‘Women are often easy targets for men’
Meher Suri, consultant with Men Against Violence and Abuse (MAVA) and the Ramalingaswami Centre on Equity and Social Determinants of Health, says, “What I witness underneath the aggression is usually not hate. It’s a mix of shame, fear, and a feeling of being left behind. Many boys are taught to convert sadness or jealousy into anger because anger feels more masculine. Online, the woman becomes just an avatar and many men treat trolling as a performance for other men, for their own fragile sense of self, and only incidentally, for the woman they target. However, change begins when we start with their feelings, not with labels, where men get spaces to admit fear and heartbreak, and when accountability is paired with compassion. Men do need spaces with other men where they can talk honestly about heartbreak, joblessness, family pressure, body image, and sexual anxiety. We need far more visible examples of men who are gentle, funny, self-aware, sexually respectful, and still “cool” . If the charismatic male figures online are those who mock women, boys will follow that.”
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