Back in the ’90s, when social media was not a part of our imagination, email was new and exciting, chatrooms were our first lesson in what it meant to be a woman in public. There was a girl in my class who was smart, academically sharp, and a little quirky. She chewed through her pens and pencils; her fingers, face, and even her uniform were often stained with ink and lead. As far as I remember, she was sometimes teased for being “unkempt”, but she wasn’t bullied. In my all-girls school, if your grades were good, the other girls respected you.
We were friends for a while. Then we went to different colleges and lost touch, except we lived in a small town, and in small towns, it isn’t easy to disappear entirely. You always heard things about people you once knew, filtered through others who knew them now. Somewhere in my second year of college, I heard that she’d had a meltdown, that she’d been put on medication. Someone said she had been institutionalised for a while. In 2006, we didn’t have the language for mental health. I was a depressed kid myself, without the vocabulary for it, and so, I think, was she. The rumour mill worked overtime.
To some, she was weird; to others, she was mad. One conversation with a mutual acquaintance remains etched in my memory. It was our final year, placement season. Companies were visiting campuses, and this girl got placed. To me, this was never surprising. She had always been academically sharp. But in her college, where she was known as the mad, psychotic weirdo; it didn’t make sense to people. How could she be hired when several others weren’t?
She threw a fit, the acquaintance told me. She tried to coax the hiring committee. Probably offered things. That’s why she got the job. She wasn’t recruited immediately, you know. She used tactics.
By then, I had heard too many stories. My small-town, partially informed brain had made up its mind. When I ran into her once in Delhi and she tried to reconnect, I didn’t know what to do. So I did nothing. I didn’t ask how she was, I didn’t ask if she was well. I didn’t give myself the luxury to care. I, instead, gave her the wrong phone number and hoped she would never try to find me on social media.
She went through turmoil. Her mental health was visibly fragile. Her marriage collapsed. The rumours about her behaviour followed her everywhere. I don’t know if this girl was bullied in college for being different or if her fragility was a result of the harassment she probably faced. And I don’t know where this girl, now a woman, is today.
I found myself thinking of her while reading Lisa Miller’s interview with Kristin Cabot, months after a private moment with her boss at a Coldplay concert, accidentally caught on camera, was turned into a public spectacle that dismantled her life. After waiting in silence, hoping the storm would pass, Kristin eventually spoke, because it didn’t.
The piece details what followed: Not curiosity, but punishment. Cabot was subjected to relentless shaming, humiliation, and death threats, over 60 of them. Memes proliferated. Mockery videos circulated. Even corporate advertising found a way to capitalise on her humiliation. Gwyneth Paltrow, an actor, a woman, and the ex-wife of Chris Martin, appeared in a knowingly “smart and cocky” campaign for Astronomer, Kristin’s former employer. Almost all of this came at the cost of a single woman.
Why did I think of my former friend while reading this? Because it took me years to understand what was really happening, not just to her, but around her. How a woman’s divergence from the norm becomes a story others feel entitled to complete. The details change; the scale expands. But the mechanism remains remarkably consistent. How quickly a woman’s life becomes a public text, and how little evidence is required for others to begin reading her with suspicion.
Cabot was already separated from her husband. But even that detail is beside the point. Even if she had been “cheating”, what moral logic permits strangers to punish her, to harass her, threaten her, to call her ugly. To comment on her looks. To question her work ethic. To say she slept her way to the top. The same way my classmate was supposed to have done to secure her placement.
This impulse to comment on and partake in a woman’s life is not a new invention. It was there in my time. It was there in my mother’s time and her mother’s. Social media may have refined and accelerated it, but the public sphere has always been a court without rules, where women are tried in real time and sentenced by consensus. I think of the girl I failed, and of Kristin Cabot, and I wonder how many women learn early that visibility is conditional, that success is suspect, that being seen at all carries risk. I wonder how often we mistake our right to look, comment, judge for a moral obligation, forgetting that behind every spectacle is a person, already paying a price we will never be asked to bear.
For our collective voyeuristic pleasures, women continue to pay the price. Every day.
Indurkar is a writer, editor, and poet from Jabalpur
For our collective voyeuristic pleasures, women continue to pay the price. Every day. (Image source: @musicnewsfactpl/X)
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