Instagram failed to pass the mic, Clubhouse is club of creeps
When I think of all the breakthroughs of the last decade, ever-evolving social media has to be on top. The entire world is truly living in the small box now, where information is like a wildfire. And I won’t deny how it has generated all the new forms of careers while making few others more accessible. Women are among the top who have had a major benefit out of it. My cousin, for instance, is crafty and she manages to be financially independent by selling her art on the Facebook marketplace. One of my friends, despite being from a small town, has managed to get the ‘influencer’ status with 100k followers and is actively advertising with few brands. There’s a page on the gram, ‘Desi Queer Memes’, who has helped and represented the LGBTQ community of my country. People are realizing that being gay is not funny as shown in loads of homophobic Indian cinema, But at the same time, you can be funny while being gay.
But truly, Social Media is Pandora’s box for women and the LGBTQ community, the troubles are all over the place. I was active on most Social media, mostly to connect with like-minded people, and perhaps that’s the worst crime you can commit on Social Media. There’s not a single day when I didn’t face misogyny. There’s not a single Social Media platform where I didn’t feel that I am treated differently because of my gender. The most recent of all, Clubhouse, which is an invite-only, iOS-exclusive platform, that I assumed to be better than the rest as it just focuses on your words. There’s no video of any sort involved, no DMing people, which would mean no unsolicited dick pictures.
So it seems like a really good platform, right? Except, it isn’t. I decided to listen to a room that had one of the famous left comedians in India and they were asking if anyone from the audience wanted to converse. I raised my hand, and they let some people in, except all the new people were either women who had a display picture and were pretty according to traditional Indian standards of beauty or someone they already knew. Just to experiment further, I put up a picture in my account and post that, I was never denied to speak in any room. Funniest of all, I was allowed to speak in an Iranian room about atrocities of the US in Iran, despite clearly mentioning in my profile that I am Indian. I had 0 credibilities on the topic and nothing to contribute. Some of you may argue that this is uplifting women and giving them a stage to speak. Passing the mic, you know. Except it isn’t that.
Despite being added as a speaker, I was barely able to express myself without a guy interrupting me. But even that’s fine considering you have to accept a considerable nuance when 15 people are speaking. What was unacceptable to me was how these ‘woke’ & feminist men of my country shared the stage with a guy with MeToo allegations a few years back. I would still have been fine with them discussing the casual topics, because ‘innocent until proven guilty. But what I could not digest was how they casually joked about the entire allegation episode. Very casual victim shaming and discrediting an entire movement of the values they hold themselves. And the saddest part of all, many women were in the speakers’ team, laughing and supporting this entire episode.
I don’t blame the women, I blame the club, I blame the society, I blame the men who have made us feel that if they are giving us something (Speaker status here), we have to give something back (laughing at their not-funny misogynist one-liners). There’s a famous joke in my country, ‘if you’re Indian enough, every social platform is Tinder (an online dating platform).’ It’s one of those jokes that aren’t funny but the cruel realities of the world. Be it Reddit, Quora, or even LinkedIn, Indian men have not spared women anywhere from their ‘Bob vegena’ spams. Hundreds of women report receiving date requests, marriage proposals, intimate pictures on LinkedIn on a daily basis. Imagine how hard it is being a woman, you not only have to tolerate the sexist work environment, fight against the system for equal pay, have your opinions invalidated every day, but even the job search is a traumatic experience in itself.
The problematic aspects of social media are not even that deep-rooted that you have to go about looking for them, they are just there. They are apparent, almost hard to ignore. I can’t scroll around TikTok and Reels without missing the random abusive content, where a guy is throwing acid on his ex, the wife is washing off feet of her husband and drinking the dirty water, rape threats, random remarks on her body, race, etc. The owners of these platforms ask you to report, Well, I have reported. Everyone around me has reported. Yet, there have rarely been any actions. Their policies are so weird that I have had my social media handles restricted for commenting ‘All men!’ while the guys who sent me dick pictures are still active, sending me requests from their new fake profiles.
And while most of us are assuming that these problems are virtual, that a picture of male genital or a virtual rape threat from a guy 100kms across is not going to affect my real life, I can’t help myself to ignore the reports I read daily. “Woman raped by her Facebook friend”, “Instagram follower harassed a minor to the extent that she committed suicide”, and the long list. The infamous “Bois Locker Room’’ episode makes me wonder whether the ‘nice’ guy I am with is actually a ‘nice’ guy.
This isn’t a very hard problem to solve, but no one wants to solve it. The policies of these platforms are crafted intentionally in such a way that you can never win. Why, you may ask, simply because it is not profitable. These companies enable your stalker and make a profit from them. There were these new ‘social media’ that lets you connect with people you shared a common location with, even if the duration was less than a few minutes. As if stalking was not already romanticized enough in this country. Stalking sells because it is profitable. Bullying is profitable.
So, the next time you think that social media is here to empower us, please think again. Because it isn’t empowering us, it isn’t giving a mic to us. Whatever little we have gained from social media, all the good prospects that you can think of gram, are hacks. We are the loopholes in the system, while the system is enabling the bully, the harasser, the stalker, the rapist, and the murderer. I am not asking you to quit the media, I am asking you to find better hacks, to beat them by their rules, to make money off them. Let’s go comment on Zuckerberg’s page, “All f**in m*n”.
