Nasty, Brutish and Short

Whether you are a teenager living in North, South, East or West India, you are expected to stick to a certain normative script of masculinity

- Vineetha Mokkil

RAHUL*, a17-year-old student from Kolkata, used to spend time on social media platforms. He would scroll through posts, forget about them, and go live his life. But that was before he stumbled on content generated by a bunch of self-proclaimed men's rights influencers. The influencers were on a mission to turn young boys like Rahul into alpha males—'real' men—who own the world. Winners, not wimps. All women, according to the influencers, were manipulative gold diggers. A 'real' man's job was to show them their place, to teach them to follow orders. The more Rahul consumed their warped worldview, the more he changed. At home, he started to sneer at his sister's academic achievements. At school, he would mock his female classmates, "Why bother to study and find a job? You girls will just marry rich." When a teacher overheard him saying that women should not be leaders because "they just create drama", disciplinary action was initiated against him.

About six months ago, a top-ranked IB school in Bandra suspended eight male students for their WhatsApp chats about planning to rape their female classmates. The chats—made public by the mothers of the girls and published in a local daily—included talk about rape, one-night stands, homophobic slurs, and body-shaming of their female classmates. In another corner of Mumbai, Ruchira* (41), a working mother, discovered nude pictures of women on her 14-year-old son's computer by accident one day. "For a moment, I made peace with it," she says. "It's normal for kids his age to watch porn." But when she scanned his search history, she found several searches on "how to tame women" and a stash of abusive content too. She was shocked. Had her son harmed any girls? Was he planning to do so? His teachers called him “kind and helpful”. He had plenty of friends and was popular at school. But what if nobody really knew what was going on in his head?