By Manasi Nene
“Divorce agiduchinu konjam kooda kavala Illa.. shameless creature Don’t u have any feelings.. stone hearted… roaming with guys each and every day… Without any shame”
“Y cant keep ur skin under ur clothes……..every profession has its dignity……bt y to expose one self…
its so disguisting..amala”
“You have some public responsibilities also Amala. Take the pictures and see yourself but dont circulate publicly. Are you using the inner fire to burn everything outside?”
“U r too Seductive .. U r ma Secret Crush .. Dunno y u sharng this kinda pics here nu .. u r just degrading urself by postng dis kinda pic, u’d an image once bt nw aftr seeing dis kinda f pic, ppl startd seeing u as “Sunny leone, poonam pandey” ..”
These are only a few of the comments on Amala Paul’s Facebook picture, where she is posing in a black top. And, she is no stranger to industry sexism.
“I survived because the fire inside me burned brighter than the fire around me,” she writes in the captions on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, possibly a veiled reference to all the negativity surrounding her career when she wanted to continue working as a married woman, and now, as a divorced woman. Today, it seems like women must listen to the most conservative of men, vis-a-vis their dressing sense, in order to avoid criticism and negativity. Just ask Deepika Padukone, Priyanka Chopra, Fatima Sana Shaikh, and every other woman who happens to be in the public eye.
What’s constant in all these cases, is the trolls’ sense of entitlement over what a woman can and cannot wear. I went to a well-known junior college in Pune where we were told not to wear sleeveless shirts or shorts because that showed too much skin; but that didn’t stop us from getting harassed. This is nothing different. It seems to happen everywhere all the time – Amber Rose and Pierce Morgan also just got into an altercation on Twitter, because he told her to “put it away” after she posted a photograph of herself in a bikini top, sunglasses and coat. As Sowmya Rajendran wrote for The News Minute, we’re comfortable enough watching women bare it all on the big screen, which is almost always designed for the male gaze. Why are we so uncomfortable, then, when women decide to reclaim our bodies in our personal spaces?
If she is trolling men back, we love it, and it isn’t even the first time she would have done something like this. In a world where nobody can deal with women who are comfortable about their bodies, fireworks and fights are to be expected. With so many women fighting back against sexism and body-shaming – Priyanka Chopra knows how to give it back to the trolls as does Deepika Padukone – we can only move forward from here.