• Five Stars, No Further Questions - Loved the book enough that any minor flaw became irrelevant to the experience. It is a favourite, an enthusiastic recommendation, and probably something I will bring up without being asked.

• Nearly Perfect - The book came very close to becoming a favourite, but one noticeable issue held it back. I still had an excellent time reading it. Please do not let the disproportionately long complaint in the review convince you otherwise.

• Fine Is a Complete Sentence - The book had enough to keep me reading, though not enough to leave a lasting impression.

• We Need to Talk - Somewhere inside this book was an idea I might have enjoyed. Unfortunately, I had to drag myself through everything surrounding it to find out.

All ratings reflect my own experience rather than a universal verdict on the book. I rarely rate books one star because I usually stop reading before things get that far.

Nearly Perfect

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

When I posted that I was reading this book, people responded with the kind of enthusiasm that immediately raises expectations. Great read. Favourite book. Loved it. All of that.

So it was no wonder I went in expecting something special. And for the most part, it was.

The story is about forty women imprisoned in an underground bunker, watched by male guards who never speak to them or explain anything. The narrator is the youngest, known as the child, and she has no memory of any life before captivity. When the guards suddenly leave, the women escape into a world that gives them no more answers than the bunker did.

The thing I loved the most was how completely Harpman places us inside the protagonist’s mind. We are curious when she is curious. We are confused when she is confused. We start asking the same questions she asks, and because she has no frame of reference, we lose ours too. Few books manage that level of closeness, where you feel like you are growing alongside the character instead of simply watching her grow.

My only issue was the lack of answers. We never find out how the women got into the bunker, who put them there, or what exactly happened to the world.

I understand why Harpman does that. The protagonist spends her entire life without answers, so it makes sense that we are not handed them either. I admire it as a choice and I even think it makes the book more powerful. But I am also the kind of reader who wants one solid piece of ground by the end (This is the same issue I had with The Hounding).

So yes, this was a great read and, yes, it gave me a lot to think about, but it also left me with way too many questions I just could not let go of

The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis

I picked this up because of a Goodreads challenge, but a novel about five orphaned sisters in an eighteenth-century village who may or may not be turning into dogs was never going to remain unread for long. The premise alone had me seated.

My favourite part of the book was Little Nettlebed itself. The village has an eerie cosiness that the novel sustains beautifully, even as increasingly strange things begin to intrude upon everyday life. Unfamiliar creatures wash up on the shore. Indistinct figures appear at the edges of people’s vision. Nothing feels entirely impossible there, yet nothing can be trusted either.

The Mansfield sisters sit at the centre of the story, but the book never allows us to get close enough to truly know them. Their story is pieced together through the villagers: what they claim to have witnessed, what they heard from someone else, and what they had already decided to believe. The sisters gradually become less like people and more like a story the village tells itself. And that choice makes the book far more unsettling than a straightforward transformation tale would have been because the horror lies not only in the possibility that the girls are changing, but also in how eagerly everyone around them begins constructing a version of events.

And once the village decides the sisters are unnatural, almost anything can be made to support that belief.

The only reason I’m deducting a star is the ending. I usually enjoy ambiguity. I like finishing a book with several possibilities still circling in my head, especially when I can sense that the author knows the answer even if they have chosen not to reveal it.

Here, however, the ending felt so open that I could not tell whether the book was leaning toward any explanation at all. And while I did not need everything to be neatly resolved, I did want to feel that some hidden truth existed beneath the uncertainty.

Instead, every interpretation seemed equally possible, and that left me less intrigued than irritated.

Still, I loved the experience of reading it. The atmosphere, the village, the sisters, the rumours, the horror, all of it worked for me. I can absolutely see myself bumping it up to five stars when I reread it.

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

This book had been following me around the internet for months, usually described in the breathless language reserved for future classics. Then Anne Hathaway signed on to star in and produce the adaptation, so yes, I took the hint.

For a good portion of the book, I was convinced this would be a five-star read.

Natalie is a brilliant portrayal of the tradwife influencer as a fraud. Her entire public identity rests on faith, homemaking, marital obedience and the supposed fulfilment of serving her husband, yet very little about the life she actually leads feels sincere. She is fiercely ambitious and controlling. She condemns other women while exercising the very independence she insists women should surrender.

The explanation behind her “travelling back in time” to 1855 was where the book lost its star. I had been waiting for some strange, fantastical reveal that would make the whole thing snap into place. Instead, the explanation reduced too much of her behaviour to an individual psychological crisis.

And once Natalie began to seem like an unusual case rather than the logical product of the world she had chosen to promote, the critique became less powerful. Her beliefs could be dismissed as symptoms of her unravelling rather than examined as ideas that remain dangerous even when held by someone perfectly lucid.

I would not recommend this to everyone, but I had a good time reading it. I just wish the ending had trusted the critique the book had already spent so much time building.

Fine Is a Complete Sentence

The Caretaker by Marcus Kliewer

I went into this with dangerous levels of faith because Marcus Kliewer wrote We Used to Live Here, and I loved that book enough for it to make it to my top ten books of 2025 (Look at me setting myself up for disappointment).

The story follows Macy, who takes a house-sitting job in the middle of nowhere after her father’s death leaves her financially desperate and responsible for her younger sister, Jemma. She is given a set of rules, or rites, she has to follow for three days while she looks after the place. Simple enough.

Except Macy is terrible at this.

Now, I don’t mind characters making mistakes in horror. In fact, I want them to make mistakes because if they do not, the story ends before anything interesting can happen. But Macy’s choices gradually stopped resembling believable human error and began feeling like the plot repeatedly pushing her toward failure. And once it became obvious that she would mishandle nearly every instruction she received, I was no longer wondering whether something would go wrong. I was just waiting to see which extremely avoidable mistake she would make next.

The premise also reminded me immediately of a creepypasta I read on the Scary For Kids website when I was around eleven or twelve. Kliewer’s version obviously does more, with the rules being more elaborate and the consequences being more serious, but…it just wasn’t enough.

I probably could have overlooked that resemblance had I enjoyed spending time inside Macy’s head, but that wasn’t the case either.

I also didn’t buy her relationship with Jemma. I understood what the book wanted their dynamic to be, but it never felt real to me. The dialogue did not have the messy, lived-in quality of siblings who have grown up hurting and needing each other. It felt too exaggerated, almost like a sketch of a sister relationship rather than an actual one.

For most of the book, I was certain this would receive two stars, which is usually the lowest rating I give anything I manage to finish. Then the ending pulled off something interesting enough to make me reconsider. It did not redeem the entire book, but it gave the final stretch an energy and purpose that much of the earlier story had been missing.

Superbia by Colette Rhodes

I had actually intended to read Superbia first, but once I realised it was the second book in the Shades of Sin series, I decided to do the responsible reader thing and picked up Luxuria instead (A mistake I’ll be talking about in the next section).

Superbia follows Astrid, my favourite character from Book 1, a Hunter raised to kill Shades, and Soren, a Shade who is very much the enemy she has been taught to hate. (This is very much enemies-to-lovers. More specifically, grumpy x more grumpy.)

I loved Astrid because she has that eldest daughter quality where you can practically hear her sighing before solving everyone else’s problems.

Soren, meanwhile, confirmed something I had already started suspecting after Luxuria: Rhodes likes writing heroes who are down bad. Even when they are pretending otherwise, they are usually attracted to the FMC very early on in the book. And I love that for myself. Give me a man falling first while the woman is still standing there with a knife and an attitude problem and watch me eat it up every single time. That right there is a system I support with my whole heart.

While I liked the banter between the two and enjoyed the way their relationship developed, none of it felt especially fresh. The plot follows the usual paranormal romance route: enemies, attraction, distrust, forced proximity, bigger conflict, feelings no one wants to admit, etc.

Then there is the Bride/Mate problem. The way Luxuria builds into Superbia felt very similar to the way Bride builds into Mate, and I couldn’t ignore it as much as I wanted to.

Still, the book gave me the beats I expected, and while those beats were enjoyable, they did not turn into anything more memorable for me.

Morning Glory Milking Farm by C.M. Nascosta

I wish I could say I picked this up for noble literary reasons, but I cannot lie in public like that. I had the judgment ready even before I starting reading and I was mentally prepared to come here and say, “Well, that was certainly a book.”

Then C.M. Nascosta had the audacity to know what she was doing.

The book is set in a world where humans and monsters coexist, and Violet takes a job as a “milking technician” at a pharmaceutical facility where minotaur semen is collected because it has value in producing erectile dysfunction or potency medication for human men. (Yes, the title is extremely literal.)

This could so easily have become one long joke. The title alone sounds like something you read on a dare. But Nascosta writes it with such sincerity that the absurdity starts becoming ordinary inside the world of the book.

Violet especially is what keeps the whole thing from tipping into parody. She reacts to her job with a mix of professionalism and private panic that feels much funnier than over-the-top disbelief would have been.

Rourke also had more to him than I expected. He could’ve easily been reduced to fantasy fodder but Nascosta actually gives him a personality (and thank god for that).

The spice was just right, too. Not too little nor so much that the characters disappeared underneath it

I don’t think I’ve read anything like this before, and I’m fairly certain I never will again (probably for the best). But as far as strange monster romance goes, this was handled with far more skill than I expected.

We Need to Talk

Luxuria by Colette Rhodes

It had been a while since I read monster romance, and I was craving one badly enough to go through Reddit threads and have the next read picked for me.

Ophelia, a human, becomes the bride of Allerick, the king of the Shades, a monster species that feeds on fear. Of course, as this kind of story often goes, her reaction to him is very much not fear in the way he expects (This is an extremely smutty book, in case anyone briefly thought I had wandered into wholesome monster romance.)

The problem is that I had already read Bride by Ali Hazelwood, and once I noticed how similar the two stories were, I could not unnotice it (Luxuria came out before Bride btw). Maybe this is a common monster-romance storyline. Maybe “human woman gets traded into monster marriage for peace negotiations and then discovers biting is hot” is simply one of the foundational tropes of the genre. I don’t know. I haven’t read enough monster romance to make a statement. Either way, it affected the reading experience.

I couldn’t enjoy Luxuria fully because I kept thinking about Bride. And worse, reading Luxuria also made Bride lose a little of its charm for me.

The Seventh Veil of Salome by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

I wanted to like this so badly. I read Mexican Gothic by the author nearly four years ago, and it was easily one of the best horror novels I read that year. I’d bought the paperback of this almost a year ago in Chennai, so it had been sitting around long enough to make me feel like I should finally get to it.

And getting to it I did. Liking it, I did not.

I usually don’t gravitate towards novels set in Old Hollywood. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo remains the exception, and I think some part of me hoped this would offer a similar sense of behind-the-scenes glamour and emotional drama. (Spoiler alert: it did not.) The setting never really came alive enough for me to feel transported, and the sheer number of perspectives made the story feel scattered. Too much time was spent with characters I had no interest in following, so every shift in perspective pulled me further away from the parts that might have held my attention.

I also didn’t know much about Salome going in, and the book didn’t make her world easy to enter. I spent a surprising amount of time looking up the biblical story, the historical figures being referenced and the period surrounding the film production and, usually, that sort of research makes me more excited about a book. This time, though, it felt like I was doing homework to create an interest the novel had failed to generate on its own.

I reached the end mainly because the book had already been sitting unread for a year and I refused to let it defeat me twice. I doubt I will reach for another Silvia Moreno-Garcia book anytime soon.

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

Every now and then, I ask my boyfriend to pick a book for me from my TBR. So far, he has picked five books and I have either ended up DNF’ing or hating them.

Today, I am pleased to announce that Automatic Noodle continues this tradition (Sorry, Mithran.)

I don’t read a lot of science fiction, and when I do, I’m very picky about it. This one got a chance because it was marketed as a cozy little story about community, identity, food, and survival. (Also, I am very easy to manipulate when noodles are involved.)

The book follows a group of abandoned robots who wake up in a ghost kitchen in postwar San Francisco and decide to make a life for themselves by opening a hand-pulled noodle shop.

I could see the vision. I really could.

That vision began glitching almost immediately.

Because what do you mean San Francisco is its own country now and is at war with the USA? What do you mean humans are living alongside robots who are recognised citizens with civil rights? WHAT DO YOU MEAN PEOPLE ARE BEING ROBOPHOBIC?

Listen, I usually enjoy bizarre settings, but the part about robots having civil rights made me short-circuit (see what I did there?). Maybe it is because of the direction the world is going in right now, but I could not even enjoy this as absurd speculation. I am only half joking when I say I can absolutely imagine people advocating for robot rights.

The biggest point of frustration, though, for me was that the book promised noodles and then kept giving me robot politics. I wanted food. I wanted the warmth of a kitchen, the labour of making noodles, the comfort of people gathering around a meal. Instead, so much of the novella was spent on the war, robot parts, robot functioning, robot rights, robot identity, and the logistics of being a robot in this version of California.

The book also tries to comment on several social issues through robots, and while I understood what it was doing, I just couldn’t take it seriously. Every time the book wanted me to feel something about robot identity, robot citizenship, or robot sexuality, I was sitting there like, what do you mean the robot is bisexual?

I think it could have been a fun read if it had leaned harder into the restaurant part and less into making the robots carry every possible allegory.

P.S. My search for a five-star read remains unsuccessful. I am now taking recommendations for next month and I promise to thank you if I love it and lovingly accuse you of wasting my time if I do not.

Note: My essays will always be free to read. If you’d like to support the time and care that go into writing them buy me a coffee ☕

As a child, I maintained a long and frequently updated list of things that might bring about my end. The dark was at the top, though technically it was not the darkness itself but its denizens that I could easily conjure up in my imagination due to the sheer number of horror movies that I used to watch through the gaps between my fingers, and the countless afternoons I spent reading scary stories.

This was followed by my fear of the sea. On calm days, it was only water, blue and glittering, crowded with boats and sunlight. But there were also days when the wind turned violent and the waves began folding over one another, grey and furious. I would watch from a distance as the beach vanished under these waves, unable to comprehend how the same water that appeared so harmless in the morning could now appear ravenous.

I was also terrified of insects that could fly. Crawling seemed bad enough without granting them access to the air. Centipedes and millipedes remain the exception to whatever bravery adulthood has given me against the creepy crawlies. The appearance of either nearby is enough to reduce me to tears in seconds.

As I grew older, fear stopped crawling out from under things. It no longer waited behind doors or moved across bathroom walls but began arriving through examination results and admission portals. First, I was afraid I would not get into a good college. Then I worried that I would not make it into the right university for my postgraduate degree. Later came placement season, with its pressed shirts and ill fitting blazers.

I believed that every disappointment pulled another one right on its coattails. If I didn’t get into the right college, I’d probably get the wrong job. Then I’d work there too long and one day look up to realize this was my life now (I excelled at extrapolating one rejection out for the next two decades, if it isn’t evident enough)

None of that panic prevented me from dealing with any of it well, mind you. I refreshed application portals until my eyes hurt. If I didn’t hear back in the time I deemed appropriate, I just assumed the decision had been made without me in mind. I cried into pillows and made bargains with gods I hardly remembered when things were going well.

Still, life went on and, eventually, the things I had once treated as the end of my future became anecdotes I could regale people with between mouthfuls at dinner.

None of this is to suggest that I am fearless now. I am not, and I doubt I ever will be. My fears have simply grown older with me. They have become more expensive and harder to chase out of the room. They concern time now, and time cannot be delayed by effort or reasoned with until it changes its mind.

Even so, most of my fears leave a little room beyond them. However terrible the imagined event, I can usually picture the life that follows. I can see myself waking the next morning, hurt and altered, but still here. I can imagine learning how to carry what happened.

But there is one fear that contains no such reassurance. I know it will come to pass, no matter how hard I try to delay it, and that knowledge should make it easier to accept, but it does not.

I am terrified of losing my parents.

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I have carried this fear for as long as I can remember but lately it has been rearing its head more often. I feel it most whenever I return home after months away, or when my parents come to stay with me and I see them outside the familiar rooms in which my memory has preserved them.

This time, it was my father’s hands that reminded me how quickly time was passing.

With Amma, I have been allowed to notice ageing gradually. We speak every day when I am in Bangalore, sometimes for hours, and she reports the changes in her body almost as they happen. She tells me how she has to move the phone farther away, these days, when she wants to read something. She talks about her back aching increasingly often and how she has begun forgetting things here and there.

I receive the news of her ageing almost as it happens.

Even then, seeing her in person is different. A video call can show me her face, but it cannot tell me how much smaller she feels when I put my arms around her. It cannot show me the grey gathered at her roots beneath the harsh light of my apartment or the way the skin on her hands has become thinner, allowing the veins beneath it to rise closer to the surface.

Her feet break my heart the most. They seem older than the rest of her. The skin has changed, and the shape of the bones beneath it is more visible now. These are the same feet that moved endlessly through my childhood, crossing rooms to bring me water, standing for hours in the kitchen, appearing beside my bed whenever I called out at night. They are still quick, still restless, but time has begun to show itself on them in ways I cannot pretend not to see.

Papa had somehow escaped my attention.

Until a few days ago, I think a part of me still saw him as the man, from nearly a decade ago who waited outside coaching centres for hours until my classes ended. That man could carry me around on his back if I demanded it and could drive through the sweltering afternoon heat to find whatever I had decided I needed, returning with his shirt damp at the collar and his face flushed from the sun as though the journey had been nothing.

In my head, he was still him. Solid. Tireless. Always waiting somewhere nearby, capable of carrying me home.

We were sitting at the dining table, talking about something I can no longer remember when it happened. He was tapping away at his phone, trying to set a ringtone, when I noticed his hands.

They had become pale. The skin was thinner, gathered faintly over the knuckles and small brown spots had begun appearing across the backs of them, scattered across like marks left behind by years I had somehow failed to see passing.

They did not look like Papa’s hands.

But I knew those hands.

They were Achamma’s. His mother’s.

After she died, Achamma’s hands remained in my memory separately from the rest of her: resting in her lap, moving slowly through my hair as she told me stories, smoothing her saree. I thought I had already said goodbye to those hands.

And yet there they were, resting on the dining table in front of me, inherited by her son.

For the first time, I saw my father not only as my father, but as his mother’s child. I saw the boy he must once have been, and the old man he is slowly becoming.

I wanted to reach across and hold his hands, though I knew he would ask what I was doing and why I was so close to tears. So I sat there and watched him struggle with the phone instead.

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Now, I understand how fear can make a person greedy.

As a child, it was easier to manage. I had only to call out. Amma would switch on the light, and Papa would look behind the curtain or bend down to check beneath the bed.

Nothing truly terrible seemed capable of reaching me while they were nearby.

Now they are the ones I am frightened for, and there is no light I can turn on to expose time as an illusion. I cannot ask Papa to inspect the years ahead and tell me there is nothing hiding there. Amma cannot stand in the doorway until this fear becomes embarrassed by its own imagination and disappears.

So I have become greedy.

I want more years with them, followed by more years after those. I want every visit home to stretch past the date printed on my return ticket. I want to leave knowing with absolute certainty that I can come back months later and find Amma moving briskly through the house and Papa sitting where I expect him to be.

Surely love of this size should count for something.

Surely the fact that I am not ready should matter.

I want time to overlook our family entirely and move on to somebody else, as selfish and cruel as it sounds.

I know for a fact that one day, I will search my memory for details I barely register now. That knowledge follows me through the present.

But memory is a poor reason to look at someone who is alive.

I do not want to keep loving my parents from a future in which they are absent. I want to love them here and now.

Here, where Amma still expects me to answer every call regardless of what I am doing.

Here, where Papa still assumes he can solve a problem after refusing help for an unnecessarily long time.

Here, where I can sit beside them without having to summon them from memory.

I will lose them one day. Nothing I write can make that sentence less cruel.

So I am trying to do the only thing fear cannot do on my behalf: stay.

I stay on the phone after the original conversation has ended and Amma has begun telling me about people I barely remember. I sit at the dining table a little longer instead of carrying my plate away and disappearing into another room. I listen when Papa begins a story I have heard before.

There will be time enough to grieve when grief arrives.

For now, they are here. For now, we still have another ordinary evening.

Note: My essays will always be free to read. If you’d like to support the time and care that goes into writing them buy me a coffee ☕

There is a question that researchers, advocates, psychologists, feminists, criminologists, survivors, and ordinary people have returned to for decades: Why do men rape?

The question is difficult because rape is a crime whose explanations have often served the accused more readily than the harmed. Perpetrators have used explanation itself as a means of evasion, and families, communities, and institutions have too often accepted these evasions, allowing the perpetrator's account to take precedence over the victim's experience.

For that reason, any attempt to understand rape must begin with a firm distinction: explanation is not exoneration. To examine the causes of rape is not to lessen the responsibility of the perpetrator. It is to understand the conditions under which such violence becomes possible. Refusing that may appear, at first, as something done to protect the victim from the indignity of explanation but it has its own consequences. If rape is treated as random, inexplicable, biologically inevitable, or confined to a small category of visibly deviant men, then prevention becomes nearly impossible.

A crime understood only after it occurs can only be responded to after harm has already taken place.

Survivor support, legal reform, medical care, and punishment are all necessary responses, but they largely address the aftermath. They do not, by themselves, explain how a perpetrator reaches the point of committing rape. A preventive account has to move further back. It has to ask what beliefs, social norms, institutional conditions, peer cultures, and patterns of self-justification make rape thinkable before it becomes an act.

The scale of the problem makes the question more than theoretical. The World Health Organization estimates that approximately one in three women worldwide has experienced physical or sexual violence, most often by an intimate partner, a fact that I’ve already mentioned multiple times in previous essays. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey found that nearly one in five women has been raped at some point in her lifetime, as has roughly one in seventy-one men. Across all categories of victims, underreporting remains a central problem, driven by shame, fear of disbelief, retaliation, family pressure, and weak legal systems. As a result, the available figures almost certainly fall short of the reality they attempt to measure.

A phenomenon this widespread cannot be reduced to one cause. The purpose of this essay is therefore to build a layered account of rape, drawing on criminological, psychological, and sociological research. It examines the conditions that surround the act without shifting responsibility away from the perpetrator.

Rape remains a choice, and accountability for that choice belongs to the perpetrator alone.

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Before we can explain rape, we have to be clear about the gap between what rape is and what people are willing to call rape.

The public understanding of rape remains limited. It is still shaped by a specific image: a stranger, a dark place, physical force, and a victim who fights until she is overpowered. This image becomes the template against which other allegations are measured, often without anyone saying so directly. And when an assault does not resemble it, doubt enters quickly. A victim who knew the perpetrator is asked why she trusted him. A victim who drank is asked why she was there. A victim who froze is asked why she did not fight harder. A victim who returned, delayed reporting, spoke to him afterward, or appeared outwardly composed is treated as though her response has weakened the act itself. The violence begins to disappear beneath the questions asked around it. For these reasons and more, the crime is often recategorized as misunderstanding, regret, complicated sex, or anything other than rape.

The legal and clinical understanding of rape is considerably broader. Rape, in most contemporary definitions, is sexual penetration — vaginal, anal, or oral — carried out without the meaningful consent of the other person.

Consent is meaningful when it is freely given, informed, and ongoing. It is absent when the other person is incapacitated by alcohol or drugs, when they are asleep or unconscious, when they are under coercion or threat, when they are a minor, when they are in a position of such unequal power that refusal is practically impossible, or when they simply say no.

The term “sexual assault” is broader and encompasses the broader category of non-consensual sexual contact that does not constitute penetration (This essay largely uses these terms interchangeably while recognizing that the forms, contexts, and dynamics of sexual violence are not monolithic.)

A consent-based understanding therefore cuts through the public obsession with how victims behave. Rape is not measured by the victim’s performance of resistance, but by the perpetrator’s disregard for consent.

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Most rape is committed by someone the victim knows. Research consistently finds that somewhere between seventy and eighty-five percent of sexual assaults are perpetrated by intimate partners, former partners, acquaintances, family members, or authority figures. The stranger with the weapon in the alley is a real but statistically rare case. The far more common case is the partner who continues after she says stop, the friend who interprets her drunkenness as permission, the coach or teacher or employer who uses trust and authority as leverage, the husband who understands his wife’s body as available to him on demand.

Marital rape is one of the strongest examples of institutionalized sexual entitlement. For much of legal history, marriage was treated as a husband’s continuing claim over his wife’s body. Consent was not understood as something that had to exist each time. It was presumed to have been granted through the marriage itself.

In the United Kingdom, marital rape was only definitively criminalized through the 1991 House of Lords ruling in R v R. In the United States, it was not a crime in all fifty states until 1993. In many countries, including India, marital rape remains inadequately recognized or uncriminalized. It is an old patriarchal belief surviving inside modern law, that a wife’s refusal is less real because she is a wife.

Research by Diana Russell found that marital rape is one of the most common forms of sexual assault and is frequently accompanied by physical violence and coercive control. Its psychological aftermath can be as severe as stranger rape because the violation occurs inside the relationship and home where safety was supposed to exist.

The limits of public recognition are also visible in the experiences of male survivors. Men and boys are raped, but their victimization is often erased by the assumptions attached to masculinity. They are expected to want sex, to resist force successfully, and to experience assault by another man as an injury to sexuality rather than as violence. Male survivors are therefore harmed not only by the assault, but by the demand that they deny what happened in order to remain acceptable as men.

Children are made vulnerable through dependence. Child sexual abuse often does not begin with sudden violence, nor does it always rely on visible force. It is built through grooming, secrecy, manipulation, obedience, and the exploitation of a child’s incomplete understanding of what is happening. The abuse in such cases then is harder to recognize because the person causing harm is also someone the child depends on for care and protection.

A similar dynamic appears inside institutions. Schools, workplaces, prisons, hospitals, religious organizations, sports systems, and families often train people to obey authority. Students are expected to respect teachers, employees to accept managerial authority, prisoners to obey guards, patients to trust medical personnel, and religious adherents to defer to spiritual figures. These expectations are not abusive in themselves, but they can be exploited by perpetrators who understand that their role gives them access and credibility. Sexual violence in such contexts is therefore not merely interpersonal. It is made possible by an unequal relationship that the institution has already authorized.

The perpetrators, in the overwhelming majority of cases, are men. This does not mean women never commit the crime. They can and do, including against children. But the gender asymmetry in rape perpetration is one of the most consistent findings in criminological research. The crime is gendered in its commission, even though its victims can be women, men, and children.

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For much of the twentieth century, rape was treated primarily as an individual psychological aberration, the province of the mentally ill, the sexually deviant, the irredeemably broken. This understanding, however well-intentioned, turned out to be empirically wrong. Decades of research have shown that the majority of men who commit rape do not meet clinical criteria for any mental illness, do not see themselves as rapists, and cannot be distinguished from the general male population by standard psychological screening. They are, by every external measure, ordinary.

That said, psychology does illuminate important dimensions of the problem. It helps identify the beliefs and traits that appear more often among perpetrators, including hostility toward women, sexual entitlement, low empathy, and a willingness to minimize harm. These factors do not make rape inevitable, but they help explain why some men become more willing to cross a boundary that others do not.

One of the earliest attempts to understand rape through perpetrator motivation came from clinical psychologist A. Nicholas Groth, who in 1979 published Men Who Rape: The Psychology of the Offender, based on years of working with convicted offenders. Groth proposed that rape could be categorized by the primary motivation driving the assault. His framework divided offenders into three broad categories:

1. Power rapists, the largest category in his sample, were primarily motivated by the desire for control and domination. Sex was the means, not the end, and what they sought was the sense of mastery over another person, often to compensate for feelings of inadequacy or powerlessness in their own lives. The Ariel Castro case can be used to illustrate this category. Castro abducted Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry, and Gina DeJesus, held them captive for years in his Cleveland home. The assaults were inseparable from the captivity itself. Isolation, confinement, surveillance, and repeated rapes worked together as part of a sustained system of control.

2. Anger rapists used sexual violence as a vehicle for expressing rage,often displaced from other sources, such as perceived humiliations, relationship failures, or general resentment toward women. In these cases, rape operated as punishment. The 2012 Delhi gang rape and murder case reflects elements of this category. The assault was marked by extreme brutality, but its violence cannot be understood only as sexual aggression. One of the convicted men later blamed the victim for being out at night and for resisting. The violence was not merely sexual. It carried anger toward a woman who was seen as transgressing social limits and then refusing passivity.

3. Sadistic rapists, the smallest and arguably most dangerous category, derived direct sexual gratification from the suffering of their victims. Paul Bernardo’s case is often placed within this kind of discussion because his crimes combined sexual assault with captivity, torture, and murder. Already known as the Scarborough Rapist, Bernardo was later convicted of first-degree murder in the killings of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French. In this category, suffering is not a by-product but the point, a part of the perpetrator’s arousal.

Groth’s typology has been revised and challenged over time because real offenders often do not fit neatly into one category. Still, it remains useful because it weakens one of the most persistent myths about rape: that it is primarily the result of uncontrollable sexual desire. It shows, instead, how it is often organized around power, hostility, control, and the perpetrator’s willingness to use sex as as a weapon against another person.

Survivor accounts confirm this from the other side. When survivors describe rape outside the pressure to make their experience tolerable to others, they rarely describe it in the language of sex. Their experience is often characterized by the feeling that one’s body has ceased to belong to oneself while one’s fear, refusal, pain, and personhood are acknowledged only to be overridden.

The perpetrator does not fail to notice her will. He acts against it.

The uncontrollable desire explanation therefore depends on a fantasy of male helplessness. It asks us to imagine a man overtaken by biology, carried past judgment by the force of sexual want. Yet men demonstrate extraordinary capacity for sexual self-control in contexts where the consequences of losing that control are immediate and severe. They do not, as a rule, rape women in the presence of witnesses, cameras, police, or powerful authority figures, even if the same desire that drives private predation is present.

This selective self-control is incompatible with the “overwhelming urge” theory.

An urge that can be controlled when the consequences are severe enough is, by definition, controllable.

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This is where entitlement enters the argument. Sexual desire, by itself, is ethically neutral. All human beings experience it. All human beings experience it. But in the mind of the man who rapes, however, desire is converted into a claim. He wants her, and the wanting becomes, in his own internal logic, a reason. A right.

This transformation is cultural as much as psychological.

Boys in many environments receive, from a remarkably early age, an education in sexual entitlement that they may not even recognize as such (I have written about this in Too Young To Be A Rapist, and readers interested in how young boys are shaped by these ideas can read that essay alongside this one). Entitlement does not appear in only one form. In its more ordinary expressions, it produces men who feel wronged when sex does not follow attention, money, affection, or effort. At a more dangerous point, it produces men who interpret their own frustration as justification for escalation, believing that if they have been made to feel desire, they are owed its satisfaction. And at its most violent, it produces men who experience a woman’s autonomy over her own body as an insult to be overcome.

Liz Kelly’s concept of a continuum of sexual violence challenges the tendency to treat rape as disconnected from the lesser violations that prepare the ground for it. Harassment, coercion, stalking, image-sharing, intimidation, and rape are not identical acts, nor do they produce identical harms. But they often emerge from related assumptions about women’s boundaries, particularly the belief that those boundaries become negotiable in the presence of male desire.

The continuum does not make every violation the same. Rather, it demonstrates how cultures gradually normalize the treatment of violation as a matter of degree rather than principle. Repeated exposure to smaller acts of coercion and boundary-testing can make more severe forms of violence appear less exceptional than they are.

Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will extends this argument to the social function of rape itself. Rape, she argued, functions as an instrument of terror that keeps all women in a state of fear and, thereby, subordination. The threat of rape is one of the primary mechanisms through which patriarchy has maintained itself. Every woman lives with the knowledge that certain behaviors will be judged as having invited violence, and certain spaces as inherently dangerous.

The violence is inflicted on one victim, but its effects radiate outward

That is why sexual violence is so often directed at women, in societies and communities with rigid gender norms, to punish them for stepping outside assigned roles. She may be punished for rejecting a man, choosing a partner, leaving home, staying out late, dressing in ways considered improper, speaking publicly, refusing marriage, or asserting sexual autonomy.

In war, too, this disciplinary function is systematized into a weapon. The mass rape of women in Bosnia, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo was neither incidental to those conflicts nor the chaos of soldiers off the leash. It was organized, commanded, and purposive, designed to destroy communities by contaminating bloodlines, driving women out of their homes and villages, and shattering the social fabric organized around women’s bodies and domestic roles. It communicated, to the men of the conquered group, their total defeat. Women’s bodies were treated as territory on which victory could be written.

This is the point at which any purely individual account of rape fails. When rape is carried out by armies, militias, or dominant groups, it becomes part of an organized system of authorization and reward. The assault is inflicted on one victim, but its message is directed outward. It tells the wider community that its women can be reached, its protective claims can be broken, and its future can be attacked through the body of the violated

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Yet the public still clings to the figure of the Rapist as monster. He exists so that we can be reassured that sexual violence is exceptional and that the men in our lives are not him. This way, the social world we inhabit can avoid scrutiny for producing men capable of rape again and again.

The figure is, though, by every measure of evidence, fictional.

Perhaps no body of research has been more influential than David Lisak’s work on “undetected rapists.” Beginning in the 1990s, Lisak and his colleagues conducted surveys of male college students in which they asked behaviorally specific questions about past sexual experiences: had the respondent ever had sex with someone who was too intoxicated to resist? Had he ever used physical force or threats to obtain sex? The questions never used the word “rape.” The point was to bypass the self-concept barriers that prevented men who had committed rape from identifying themselves as rapists.

The findings were disturbing. In his most widely cited study, published in Violence and Victims, Lisak found that approximately six percent of male college students had committed acts meeting the legal definition of rape or attempted rape. Of those men, the majority had committed multiple offenses, an average of nearly six rapes per repeat offender. These were not men who had made a single catastrophic error in judgment. They were serial predators operating in plain sight, sustained by a social environment that never recognized them as dangerous.

Critically, Lisak found that these men shared a cluster of attitudinal and personality characteristics that distinguished them from non-offending men: higher hostility toward women, stronger endorsement of rape-supportive attitudes, greater hypermasculinity, elevated scores on psychopathy and narcissism measures, and a history of childhood exposure to family violence. They also showed significantly lower levels of empathy.

Not all of these traits were present in every perpetrator but their shared characteristics pointed beyond general psychopathology. Importantly, the perpetrators were not clinically insane, nor were they incapable of understanding their actions. Their violence was better explained by specific formations of masculine identity, sexual entitlement, and emotional indifference produced within particular social environments. And these formations made the sexual exploitation of others seem permissible, and in some cases, even appealing.

Diana Scully, based on extensive interviews with convicted offenders in American prisons, produced the most direct account of what perpetrators say rape gives them. The candor of her subjects was itself revealing. Many did not believe they had done anything particularly wrong, and the explanations they offered had clearly been rehearsed and found sufficient long before anyone asked for them.

Some described rape as revenge, against women who had humiliated or rejected them, against women who stood in for other women, against a category. Others described it as entitlement exercised — women who had, in their logic, signaled availability and then failed to deliver had incurred a debt they were collecting. Some described exhilaration. Not sadistic pleasure exactly, but the feeling of being absolutely in control, of having reduced another person’s will entirely to their own, a sensation of completeness and reality unavailable elsewhere. Some described contempt, women who had made themselves vulnerable by getting drunk or going to isolated places were, in their reasoning, deserving targets, sorted into the category of prey.

The explanations differed, but they shared the same absence at their center. The victim’s inner life rarely appeared as something the perpetrator had to reckon with. Her experience simply did not exist as a relevant variable in his account of events. Following this, Scully concluded that rapists are not men who have lost control but men who have made rational choices in environments that provided strong motivation and weak deterrents.

Her subjects knew what they were doing. They had calculated that they could get away with it.

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The perpetrator does not invent these explanations alone. One of the most consistent findings in the psychology of sexual offending is the role of cognitive distortions — thought patterns that allow perpetrators to minimize, justify, or externalize the harm they cause. These distortions cluster with what researchers call “rape myth acceptance,” or RMA, a set of false beliefs that serve to normalize and minimize and they are remarkably consistent across cultures and time periods.

• The first distortion is the claim that she wanted it. Her body betrayed her desire. Beneath explicit refusal, the perpetrator imagines a hidden consent more truthful than the evidence before him. This is among the most common distortions, and it is directly supported by pornographic scripts in which female resistance is consistently portrayed as foreplay, as the outer layer of a desire that must be penetrated rather than respected.

• The second distortion is the insistence that it wasn’t rape. She didn’t scream. She knew him. She had been with him before. She was drunk, which means she was making choices, even if impaired ones.” Rape, in his account, means something extreme and visible. What happened between them, whatever it was, doesn’t qualify. He doesn’t think of himself as capable of rape, and so what he did could not have been rape.

• She’s lying. Few accusations provoke more outrage than sexual assault allegations because they threaten not only punishment, but identity. The accused man may experience the accusation itself as an act of aggression against him. This is the logic of entitlement applied retroactively. If he had the right to do what he did, then her naming it as harm is a violation of that right. He becomes, in his own story, the victim.

• I was drunk. Alcohol functions as the universal solvent of responsibility in these accounts. He didn’t know what he was doing. He wasn’t himself. The alcohol made him do it. This self-exculpation has two significant problems: first, intoxication reduces inhibition but does not create inclinations from nothing. (Drunk men rape because sober men have made rape mentally permissible). Second, the victim was also often drunk, and her intoxication is never used to excuse her behavior, only to diminish her testimony.

• I’m a good person. Perhaps this is the most socially powerful distortion because it protects the perpetrator through character rather than evidence. I volunteer for things. I am kind to my mother. I love my children. I have never done anything like this before. Or, I have done this before but it was always different, always complicated. The image of goodness becomes proof against the act itself as though violence can only be committed by someone visibly cruel

The systematic erasure of the victim’s inner life is constitutive of rape. You cannot rape someone whose experience registers fully as real to you. The act requires a prior cognitive reduction, from full person to something less, and this dehumanization takes many forms. The most literal is the reduction to body. In certain masculine subcultures, women are categorized primarily by their physical attributes and sexual availability; the grading and sorting of female bodies is so normalized — in advertising, in entertainment, in internet culture— that it is rarely experienced as the ethical violation it is. Its cumulative effect is the gradual disappearance of the woman as a full person. A body does not have preferences nor does it carry memory. A body can only be taken.

Dehumanization also operates through category. Women marked by race, class, migration status, disability, or poverty have often been treated as more sexually available and less entitled to protection. In India, caste has historically organized sexual violence. Lower-caste women are treated by upper-caste perpetrators as available, their bodies subject to a hierarchy of entitlement that legal and social systems were slow to contest.

This construction of certain categories of women as less than fully human creates the conceptual infrastructure for systematic rapes against them, and perpetrators are rarely confused about which women fall into which category. Vulnerability, in this sense, is often the actual target.

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If psychology explains what is happening inside individual perpetrators, sociology asks a different set of questions: what are the social conditions that produce men with these characteristics? Why do some social environments generate far more sexual violence than others? How do group dynamics and institutional structures enable or inhibit rape?

One of the most durable contributions of sociological research to the understanding of rape is the concept of hegemonic masculinity, the dominant cultural ideal of manhood that, in most Western societies, is organized around toughness, sexual conquest, dominance, and the subordination of the feminine.

Introduced by sociologist R.W. Connell in the 1980s and extensively developed since, hegemonic masculinity is not a description of what all or even most men are like. It is a cultural norm, an aspirational script against which men are measured and by which they measure themselves. The connection between certain forms of masculinity and sexual violence is not simple or deterministic. The vast majority of men, including those who subscribe to conventional masculine norms, do not rape. But certain forms of masculinity can still create conditions that can make rape more likely in several ways.

First, it frames women as sexual objects whose primary value lies in their availability to men. A man’s status, in some peer groups and cultural contexts, is partly measured by his sexual “conquests.” This transforms women from subjects with their own desires and boundaries into trophies, scores, challenges to be overcome. It is a short conceptual step from “getting” a woman sexually to overcoming her resistance to get sex.

Second, hegemonic masculinity codes the expression of empathy, hesitation, and emotional attunement as feminine and therefore threatening to masculine identity. Men who are deeply invested in performing toughness and dominance may be precisely those least equipped to register and respond to a partner’s ambivalence, or refusal.

Third, masculinity is frequently performed for audiences, specifically, for other men. Sociologist Michael Kimmel, in his book Guyland, argues that much of young male behavior, including sexual aggression, is not primarily driven by desire for women but by the desire for approval from other men.

Sex then becomes a performance of masculinity for a male audience.

This peer dimension is crucial.Many boys learn how to speak about women long before they learn how to relate to them. The group chat, the locker room, the car ride, the boys’ night out, often become environments where women are ranked, mocked, reduced, and discussed as collective entertainment. Sexual acts are narrated as achievement and consent often disappears from the language because the point of the story is not mutuality but male recognition.

Rape jokes belong to this economy. They are often defended as harmless, but their function is social. They test the room, identify who will object and who will join, turning violence into a bonding ritual and punishing refusal by making the objector seem dramatic or humorless.

The joke does not need to directly instruct anyone to rape. Its work is slower and more corrosive. It makes women’s suffering available for laughter and trains the group to treat sexual violence casually, giving men a way to signal dominance while pretending the whole thing is just humor. In such groups, individual restraint can weaken because the room itself begins to reward the attitudes that make coercion easier to imagine.

The psychological phenomenon of deindividuation, the reduction of personal accountability and inhibition that occurs inside group membership, has been documented across contexts from mob violence to war crimes. In the context of sexual assault, it helps explain the troubling prevalence of gang rape.

A landmark body of research on fraternity culture, found thatthat all-male organizations characterized by rigid hierarchy, secrecy, heavy alcohol use, and strong expectations of male loyalty can create environments with elevated levels of sexual aggression. This is not to say that all fraternities are rape factories but the structural and cultural features of these environments can significantly increase the likelihood.

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Pornography becomes relevant here because it increasingly functions as a shared sexual reference point for large numbers of young men. The relationship between pornography and sexual violence remains one of the most disputed questions in this field, and simplistic claims on either side tend to default to either reflexive condemnation or reflexive defense.

Mainstream pornography, particularly the genre of internet pornography that has dominated sexual media since the mid-2000s, is characterized by high rates of aggressive and degrading behaviors including slapping, choking, verbal abuse, expressions of female pain or humiliation, and scenes that blur or ignore consent. An analysis of best-selling pornographic films by Ana Bridges and colleagues found that nearly ninety percent of scenes contained physical aggression, the vast majority of which was directed toward women who responded with expressions of pleasure or neutrality.

The concern with pornography then is not simple causation, it is formation. Pornography can help form the sexual expectations through which people understand bodies, pleasure, refusal, and power. In a healthier sexual culture, consent would appear as active, mutual, and necessary. In much of mainstream pornography, however, the recurring visual language is different. Women are shown as available, male aggression is eroticized, pain is folded into pleasure, and consent is often treated as irrelevant to the scene’s meaning. Such material does not need to produce rape in a direct causal chain to have consequences. It can still make coercive dynamics feel sexually ordinary.

Experimental research by Malamuth and colleagues found that exposure to violent pornography increased male aggression toward women in laboratory settings, particularly for men who already held hostile attitudes toward women. More recent studies have found correlations between heavy pornography use and reduced empathy for rape victims, greater endorsement of rape myths, and higher rates of self-reported sexual coercion, though they struggle to disentangle causality from selection effects.

What we can say with confidence is this: when an entire generation of boys receives its primary sexual education from content that treats consent as an afterthought and female pleasure as subordinate to male gratification, we should not be surprised to find that some of them arrive at sexual encounters with corresponding expectations. The surprise should be that more of them do not.

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The most powerful evidence that culture, rather than biology, drives rape prevalence comes from cross-cultural research. If rape were primarily a product of individual psychology or biological drives, we would expect its prevalence to be roughly constant across cultures. It is not. Anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday’s comparative study of over 100 pre-industrial societies, identified a wide range of rape prevalence — from “rape-prone” societies characterized by male dominance, interpersonal violence, and rigid gender hierarchies, to “rape-free” societies characterized by gender egalitarianism, high female autonomy, and cultural norms of respect for women. The variation was dramatic and could not be explained by individual psychology alone.

Contemporary cross-national data tell a similar story. Rates of sexual violence correlate with indices of gender inequality,including women’s political representation, educational attainment, economic participation, and legal rights , in ways that implicate social and cultural organization. Countries with greater gender equality consistently show lower rates of intimate partner violence and sexual assault. This does not mean that gender inequality alone “causes” rape, the relationship is complex and involves many confounding variables, but it provides powerful evidence that culture and social structure are among the key determinants of sexual violence prevalence.

This has a corollary that we rarely state plainly enough. If societies can be rape-free, then no society is condemned to be rape-prone. The conditions that produce high rates of sexual violence are human-made conditions. They can, in principle, be unmade.

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Any serious discussion of rape also has to engage with evolutionary psychology even though it generates more heat than almost any other approach in this field. Because once rape is moved into the language of male nature, the argument begins to drift from explanation into resignation.

In 2000, biologists Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer published A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion, arguing that rape might be, at least in part, an adaptive behavior that evolved because it increased reproductive success in ancestral environments. The hypothesis generated immediate and fierce criticism (and rightly so). The hypothesis rests on highly speculative reconstructions of ancestral environments for which there is no direct evidence. It conflates statistical tendencies with adaptive function in ways that do not satisfy the criteria for evolutionary claims and ignores the vast cross-cultural variation in rape prevalence that cannot be explained by evolutionary constants (Not to mention the naturalistic fallacy it commits which is the inference that because something exists, it is in some sense natural and perhaps inevitable)

The more defensible evolutionary insight, one that does not require Thornhill and Palmer’s strong claims, is simply that natural selection has endowed human males with a strong sex drive, a strong motivation to pursue sexual opportunities, and some degree of inter-individual variation in the strength of these motivations. None of this predicts or justifies rape because humans are also endowed with extensive cognitive capacities for empathy, reasoning, and behavioral inhibition. The question of whether a given individual, in a given social context, commits rape is determined overwhelmingly by psychological, sociological, and cultural factors and not by evolved sex drive.

The evolutionary perspective, at its best, offers a baseline account of human sexuality.

The same caution applies to individual risk factors. The evidence on these is substantial: a history of childhood exposure to family violence, including witnessing the abuse of a parent; childhood sexual victimization; early and consistent exposure to environments that model and normalize sexual coercion; specific personality traits including elevated psychopathy, narcissism, and hostility toward women; low capacity for empathy. Again, none of these factors is deterministic. The majority of men who were abused as children do not become perpetrators nor do the majority of men high in narcissism. These factors alter probability but they do not erase choice.

Childhood abuse requires particular care for this reason. It is real and it can shape attachment, aggression, impulse control, and later relationships. But it is also frequently used to frame the perpetrator as a victim of his own history or to locate the problem entirely in trauma, as if the solution were simply more therapy and better childhoods. The relationship between victimization and perpetration is real but not necessary, and where it exists, it does not constitute an excuse for harm. Having suffered is not a permission slip for inflicting suffering on others

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Understanding the multi-causal roots of rape is not merely an academic exercise. It has direct implications for what kinds of interventions are likely to work and which are likely to fail.

The history of rape prevention is partly a history of failed or minimally effective programs. For decades, the dominant prevention paradigm focused on potential victims: teaching women to avoid isolated places, not to drink too much, not to dress provocatively, not to “send the wrong signals.” This approach, victim-centered prevention, is not only insufficient but there is good evidence that some forms of it backfire, by reinforcing rape myths that attribute responsibility to victims. More promising prevention approaches address the actual drivers of rape:

• Bystander intervention programs which aim not to change the behavior of potential perpetrators or victims but to equip ordinary people to recognize risk and intervene have shown consistent positive effects. Their purpose is not simply to produce heroic individuals who interrupt assault at the last second but to change what a community treats as normal. Programs like Bringing in the Bystander, the Green Dot program, and the Mentors in Violence Prevention curriculum have been evaluated in randomized controlled trials with college students and show significant reductions in rape-supportive attitudes, increased willingness to intervene, and in some studies, reduced rates of sexual violence perpetration. The mechanism is sociological as much as individual and they work partly by changing peer norms, signaling that sexual coercion is not tolerated in a given community.

• Masculinity-focused programs attempt to address the root of the problem by engaging men in reconsidering the norms of masculinity that contribute to sexual violence. Programs like Men Can Stop Rape, the White Ribbon Campaign, and Promundo’s Program H have shown success in shifting attitudes. Their value lies in refusing the idea that men are naturally violent and therefore beyond change. They begin instead from the opposite premise, that masculinity is taught, rewarded, performed, and therefore capable of being revised.

• Institutional reform is the next layer of prevention because individual education means little if institutions continue to protect perpetrators. Research consistently shows that when institutions clearly signal that sexual violence will be taken seriously and perpetrators will face real consequences, rates decline. Conversely, when institutions protect powerful perpetrators and discourage reporting, they create the conditions for serial predation. Legal reform matters for the same reason. A law does more than punish after the fact; it teaches a society what counts as harm. When legal systems require excessive corroboration, permit sexual history to be used against victims, treat delayed reporting as suspicion, or exclude marital rape, they do not simply fail survivors. They instruct perpetrators about where the law’s imagination ends. Reform must therefore reduce the re-traumatization of survivors and treat consent as the central question.

• Education, too, has to be more than a ceremonial lecture on “good touch/bad touch” or “no means no.” Effective consent and relationship education must begin early, be age-appropriate, and continue over time.

• Finally, gender equality remains the most upstream form of prevention. Societies in which women have greater access to education, employment, political representation, legal protection, and economic independence tend to show lower levels of sexual violence, as already mentioned. This is not because equality transforms men into inherently better people. It is because it changes the cost and meaning of violation. Women who can earn, leave, report, organize, testify, and exist publicly become more difficult to isolate, discredit, retaliate against, or force into silence.

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The question of why men rape has no single answer. It requires simultaneous engagement with the individual perpetrator’s psychology, the social environments that shaped him, and the broader cultural narratives. Recognizing the conditions that make rape more likely does not dilute the responsibility of the man who commits it. Men who rape bear individual moral and legal responsibility for their choices. The fact that certain social conditions make rape more likely does not relieve perpetrators of culpability, any more than poverty excuses theft in the eyes of any ethical framework.

The rapist is not merely the passive outcome of his circumstances. He is a person making decisions within them. Those decisions may emerge from a history but they remain decisions. That is the basis for accountability and the reason he must answer for what he did.

It is also, and this is the argument that the entire essay has been building toward, the source of what little hope we have. Because if rape were a biological inevitability, prevention would be futile. If it were purely the product of individual pathology, the solution would be limited to identifying dangerous men and containing them.

But if rape is a choice with a history, then the history can be changed.

The research reviewed in this essay is, in one sense, deeply discouraging, because it reveals how many layers of social reality conspire to produce and protect sexual violence. But it is also, in another sense, profoundly hopeful. We know more than enough to intervene and increasingly have the tools for it too. The question is whether we have the collective will to use them.

Sources :

• A. Nicholas Groth, Men Who Rape: The Psychology of the Offender

• Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape

• Diana Scully, Understanding Sexual Violence: A Study of Convicted Rapists

• David Lisak and Paul M. Miller, “Repeat Rape and Multiple Offending Among Undetected Rapists”

• Neil Malamuth et al., “The Confluence Model of Sexual Aggression: Combining Hostile Masculinity and Impersonal Sex,” Journal of Offender Rehabilitation

• Mary P. Koss, Christine A. Gidycz, and Nadine Wisniewski, “The Scope of Rape: Incidence and Prevalence of Sexual Aggression and Victimization in a National Sample of Higher Education Students,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology

• Martha R. Burt, “Cultural Myths and Supports for Rape,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

• Antonia Abbey, “Alcohol’s Role in Sexual Violence Perpetration,” Substance Use and Misuse

• Michael Kimmel, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men

• R.W. Connell, Masculinities

• Peggy Reeves Sanday, “The Socio-Cultural Context of Rape: A Cross-Cultural Study,” Journal of Social Issues

• Liz Kelly, Surviving Sexual Violence

• Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer, A Natural History of Rape

• Patricia Rozée, “Forbidden or Forgiven? Rape in Cross-Cultural Perspective”, Psychology of Women Quarterly

• Ana J. Bridges et al., “Aggression and Sexual Behavior in Best-Selling Pornography Videos,” Violence Against Women

Note: My essays will always be free to read. If you’d like to support the time and care that goes into writing them buy me a coffee ☕

It was a Saturday evening, and I’d just poured myself a tall glass of water after dinner when my phone buzzed. The girls’ group chat, which had been silent long enough to be forgotten, lit up with a message:

“What happened to the women in our batch? Why is everyone suddenly jumping on the influencer bandwagon?”

And attached to it, like a loaded weapon, was a reel from one of our juniors back from university.

Now, I have not been living under a rock. I have been watching this slow, almost ceremonial transformation for months. People I have seen in fluorescent-lit classrooms, people who once borrowed notes and complained about attendance, are now waking up one day and deciding they have things to say to the world.

So I knew. I knew what I was about to witness.

But curiosity is a deeply self-destructive instinct and like someone who insists on touching a hot stove just to confirm, I clicked.

Before I proceed any further, I would like to state for the record that I try very hard not to be a hater. I believe in letting people live. I believe in minding my business. I believe in allowing others the space to experiment, to be awkward, to grow into whatever version of themselves they are attempting to construct.

I believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt, even when they are testing the limits of what that benefit can withstand.

I am, in theory, a very tolerant person.

Unfortunately, I am also someone with a breaking point.

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The reel started playing and within seconds I found myself physically recoiling. A full, involuntary recoil usually reserved for when my fingers brush against something soft and unidentifiable in a sink full of dishes. A familiar mix of secondhand embarrassment and the urge to physically remove myself from the situation overtook me, except the situation was now inside my phone.

I do not remember what she was talking about. I genuinely don’t. It could have been about productivity, skincare, emotional growth, the weather, the decline of civilization—anything. The content itself dissolved on impact. What remained, what lodged itself under my skin, was everything else.

She was speaking, or at least trying to speak, exactly like @therebelkid (if you’re unfamiliar with the influencer, I envy you.)

Not inspired by. Not loosely influenced by. No. This was commitment, all the way down to the cadence, the pauses, the slightly exaggerated “I’m casually telling you something but also I know you’re watching me” tone, accompanied by a rhythm where every sentence feels like it’s building toward a punchline that never arrives but insists on being awaited anyway.

This wasn’t just a girl making a reel. This was a performance of a performance. A second-generation personality. A copy of something that was already crafted for the internet, now being worn like a ready-made skin.

I am aware, painfully aware, that what I am describing could very easily be dismissed as unnecessary irritation. That she is just a girl trying something new and this is what the internet looks like now. That none of this, in the grand scheme of things, really matters.

Call it a disclaimer if that makes it easier to process. This is not a measured critique. It is not objective, it is not kind, and I have no interest in making it sound like it is. And from here on, I will not be reasonable.

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It’s one thing to scroll past perfectly curated strangers where everything can remain vague and conveniently forgettable. But when it’s someone you know, your brain does this deeply unhelpful thing where it insists on context. It drags in memory, tone, pieces of who they were before all of this, and suddenly you’re stuck comparing what you’re seeing to what you know.

I like to think I’m a rational person, despite what I said two sentences ago, so I’ll walk you through this as clearly as I can and let you decide whether the rant is justified. I’ll introduce these people the way they would appear to you if you came across their accounts for the first time.

Hook, Line, and Profit

Shivani has a stable nine-to-five that she often calls monotonous. Somewhere between that dissatisfaction and the need for something more, an Instagram page appears. It begins gently—yarn laid out across her bed, close-ups of careful stitches, short reflections about picking up crochet as a way to slow down and step outside routine. There is a sense, at least initially, of process over outcome. That sense does not last. Within weeks, the page begins to look different. The pieces are finished now, styled, photographed cleanly, accompanied by prices and purchase details. The documentation of learning gives way to the presentation of product.

This one, at least, is easy. The trajectory was visible from space. I could see the ending from the opening credits and still, in a brief and frankly embarrassing lapse of judgment, I chose optimism.

Shivani, too, like the junior, is someone I know from university. And she has always had a very particular relationship to the nice things in life. Not the tender kind or the kind rooted in appreciation or taste or any real intimacy with beauty. She likes expensive things the way some people like being photographed in flattering lighting, for what it suggests about them. Her attachment is not to the object itself but to the aura around it, the social performance of being someone who can have it. She enjoys them because they allow her to imagine herself as the kind of woman other people look at with a mix of envy and reluctant admiration. Which, on its own, is not a crime. Plenty of people are materialistic. Many of them are even fun. But there is something especially bleak about a person making consumption their central mode of selfhood and then, one day, rebranding that instinct as creativity.

That is why the crochet page briefly startled me. The activity felt so fundamentally opposed to everything I understood about her. Crochet is patience. Crochet is sitting with your own clumsy hands while they learn to make something slowly, badly, and then slightly less badly. It is not glamorous or immediate. It does not arrive gift-wrapped in the language of status. It asks for time, humility, and the willingness to be ordinary for a while.

In other words, it was the last thing I would have associated with Shivani.

And so I allowed myself a fleeting moment of generosity. Maybe, I thought, she had found something grounding. Maybe she wanted to make instead of merely acquire. Maybe hell had frozen over and someone was crocheting scarves on it.

Then, of course, she decided the final products were worth selling.

This is where my irritation stops being personal and becomes ideological. Because Shivani is not merely a woman with a short attention span and a pricing problem. She is part of a much uglier pattern: the inability to encounter any activity, any craft, any small private joy without immediately asking how it can be packaged, and sold back to the public.

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There is now a whole category of aspiring influencers for whom no interest is allowed to remain an interest. Everything must become content, and content must become income, and if income is not yet possible, then at the very least the performance of future income must begin immediately.

A hobby is no longer allowed to remain a hobby. It has to prove its worth immediately.

And I know, I know, the counterargument.

We live in brutal times. People are encouraged to monetise their skills. Women especially are constantly told to build something of their own, start a side hustle, become financially independent, turn passion into profit, become their own brand ambassador, accountant, marketing team and courier service, all before breakfast. I understand all of that. I understand the economic pressure. I understand the romance attached to the small business owner. I understand why someone might want to transform a hobby into an additional stream of income rather than just sitting under one bare bulb and doing it for the love of the thing.

I understand it, and still, it annoys me.

Because there is a difference between a hobby gradually becoming profitable and a hobby being selected precisely because it looks profitable.

One emerges from devotion. The other is put together for show.

And no amount of presentation can fully hide it.

You can sense it in how quickly the language changes. One minute it is all “slowing down” and “finding joy in making things with my hands,” and the next minute it is “DM to order”. Learning itself is now an inconvenient stage one must rush through before arriving at the version where strangers are expected to part with real money.

The transition is always revealing because it shows what was truly valued: the image of having a hobby, and more importantly, the possibility of extracting social and financial capital from it.

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And don’t even get me started on the prices. Ouch. Hundreds and thousands of rupees slapped on to sub par products.

I am all for supporting small businesses. I would, in fact, love to live in a world where handmade work is valued properly, where artists and makers are compensated generously and women doing intimate labour with their hands are not expected to undercharge themselves into the grave.

That is not my issue. My issue is the astonishing confidence of someone who has been crocheting for approximately the length of a budding situationship (a month) and has decided her output belongs in the premium bracket. That too in an already saturated market, in a country where there are countless people who have been doing this for years, who have actual technique, muscle memory, consistency, and a relationship to the craft that extends beyond “this would make nice content.”

And what fascinates me even more is how often this kind of delusion is rewarded online, at least briefly.

Social media has trained people to believe that presentation can outrun substance indefinitely. If you photograph something beautifully enough, caption it with enough faux-intimacy, and arrange the grid in calming colours, value will simply materialise out of nowhere like a reward for effort-adjacent behaviour.

It is the same logic that has infected half the internet. If I can make it look like a thing, then I get to be that thing.

If I can stage craft convincingly, I need not submit to the humiliation of actually becoming skilled.

But marketplaces, unlike Instagram mutuals, are not generous with fantasy, and so the whole venture collapsed exactly the way these things often do: without ceremony, and with just enough dignity to avoid calling it what it was.

Because once the possibility of admiration or income dries up, the supposed love for the craft tends to evaporate with startling efficiency. The crochet disappears. No affection for the process remains. No evidence of someone who continues because she enjoys it. No stubborn attachment to the thing itself.

Instead, there is a pivot. Suddenly she is making day-in-the-life and fitness reels, which, to be fair, suit her far better. They sit much closer to what she has always actually been interested in: display. To be viewed as enviable.

And that, really, is the heart of it.

Shivani did not fail at crochet because the market was cruel or because the algorithm is a demonic force with a ring light addiction, though both of those things may also be true. She failed because crocheting was never the point.

The point was to find a version of herself that could be converted into content and then, ideally, into money. Crochet was simply the costume she tried on first. It looked artisanal, feminine, tasteful, marketable. It gave her access to the aesthetic of effort and when it did not produce the desired returns, she moved on to a form of content more aligned with her native instincts.

I cannot look at this and call it a hobby gone entrepreneurial. This is something much more common and much less noble : the influencer brain at work, incapable of touching anything without immediately asking how it might look online.

And yes, perhaps this is all a bit harsh. Perhaps somewhere in this there really was a woman trying to make her weekdays more bearable with yarn and colour and the fragile hope that learning something new might make her feel less dead inside.

But if that woman existed, she was shoved offstage with remarkable speed by the other one, the one already calculating inventory, margins, and how soon she could start calling herself a founder of a small handmade brand after four weekends and one YouTube tutorial.

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Eat, Pray, Pick Me

Manushi’s page reads like a life that has already been figured out. There are slow mornings that begin before the world has fully woken up—sunlight settling gently across rumpled bedsheets, a glass of water placed just so by the window, coffee poured into something transparent enough to catch the light. Based in Bangalore, she shares fragments of her day, what she eats, how she spends her time, the moments she sets aside just for herself, the small routines that hold her day together. She speaks often about becoming the best version of herself, about forgiving and moving on without carrying bitterness forward. There is a gentleness to everything she shares. Her content is warm and deeply wholesome.

“You know what,” my best friend said as we watched Manushi’s reels together over a video call, “if I didn’t know her in real life, I would have followed her. I would have actually wanted to see where this goes.”

Honestly, I get it.

I am not immune to this genre. I am, in fact, embarrassingly susceptible to it. I love people who romanticize their lives. I love people who make ordinary things feel touched by intention. I love a well-framed morning, a thoughtful caption, a person who seems to be trying, with some sincerity, to build a life that feels softer than the one most of us are being dragged through. I understand the labour of it. I understand that it takes effort to make the mundane look beautiful without making it look ridiculous.

Done well, it can be lovely.

Done well, it can even be aspirational in a way that does not make you want to throw your phone into the sea.

If I did not know Manushi, I might have bought it too. Her page isn’t bad at all. It is personal enough to draw you in and composed enough to feel trustworthy. She has understood the visual and emotional grammar of the wholesome internet woman with an almost frightening precision. She’s the pretty girl who has traversed the long, tiring journey of healing. She has risen above bitterness and now wants to guide the rest of us toward a gentler, more evolved life.

You know the type. The internet is crawling with them.

Is any of this real? Is she genuine? Let’s not insult ourselves.

You see, outside the rectangular frame of your phone Manushi is, what I can only describe as, a garden variety pick me. I have heard the way she speaks about other women when she thinks they are ahead of her, prettier than her, more wanted than her, doing better than her. I have watched her pick them apart in pieces—appearance first, then personality, then whatever remains—until there is nothing left that could possibly threaten her. Pure, concentrated resentment.

She is not merely insecure, which would at least be human, she is competitive in that brittle, joyless way some people become when they have built their entire self-worth on being the most desirable person in the room and cannot bear to be outranked.

The existence of other women is a disruption to her sense of self-importance.

So yes, it is a little surreal to then watch her speak in a voice that suggests she has transcended ego entirely.

The forgiveness content, for instance, is excellent. Very moving. One almost wants to dim the lights and let her guide us all through the sacred act of releasing resentment. That’s an interesting position to take on her part, too, considering how much of that resentment she has actively contributed to. Of course she talks about moving on. Of course she talks about letting things go. People who leave emotional wreckage behind them are often the most interested in the language of peace. It is useful, it sounds evolved. And it allows you to skip the messier business of accountability and move directly into being someone who posts about closure in beige fonts.

There is also the content she posts about love, which I personally find dazzling in the way one finds a forged painting dazzling.

She speaks about love in small gestures, in patience, in consistency, in showing up, in remembering, as though she is some tiny apostle appointed to define it. It would’ve been convincing were it not for the fact that in the time I knew her she spent the better part of it emotionally cheating on her long-distance boyfriend. I say this not because I am invested in the sanctity of heterosexual romance (which, frankly, has given me very little reason to be) but because the hypocrisy is so aggressively on the nose it begins to feel satirical.

Manushi, not surprisingly, cannot/does not/refuses to practice the values she captions beneath a reel, but she can stage them beautifully for public consumption.

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There was a time when you had to demonstrate something before people trusted you with it. Now you can simply describe it well. And if you describe it well enough, people will assume you have lived it.

In Manushi’s world, the appearance of virtue is enough to stand in for actual virtue. She has learned the dialect of aspiration. She knows which words to place next to each other so that people will read goodness into her. Healing. Growth. Grace. Letting go. Moving on. Rising above. The entire vocabulary of contemporary feminine selfhood, rinsed clean of any obligation to mean anything.

And if you have not met her in person, if you have not seen the small, ugly mechanics of who she actually is, then why wouldn’t you believe it? The page gives you every reason to! Everything fits together neatly (her being pretty certainly helps, too) and it flatters your own desire to believe that people can become better.

What does it mean when someone can build a version of herself so wholesome, that strangers might look at her and think, this right here is someone I should learn from? At what point did we collectively decide that knowing the right emotional vocabulary is indistinguishable from having done the emotional work?

And before anyone rushes in with “but it’s still positive influence”—sure. In the same way a Pinterest board is a personality.

I do not mind curation. Everyone curates.

I do not need the internet to be raw, honest, unfiltered, crying into the front camera from the bathroom floor. In fact, I would prefer it if many people didn’t.

But I do mind the way curation has now become powerful enough to overwrite character entirely. You can be mean, petty, manipulative, chronically self-absorbed in real life, and none of it matters if your reels are whimsical enough, if your page looks like a digital chapel where everyone must remove their shoes before entering.

I know that sounds dramatic. But what else do you call it when someone takes qualities they do not possess and arranges them online so persuasively that strangers begin to admire them for it? It is not self-expression. It is not even reinvention, which would at least require some break from the self being left behind.

This corner of influencer culture allows people to become aspirational without becoming admirable. And if this operated only at the level of appearance, it would be inconsequential. But pages like hers rarely just sit there looking pretty. They generate trust and create authority. Someone watches her talk about love and thinks, maybe this person understands it. Someone lonely, or hurt, or simply impressionable, might look at her and feel she has something worth borrowing.

That’s the part that irritates me past reason. Not the pretty reels or even the hypocrisy, though God knows there is enough of it to power a small city. It is the gap, the sheer width of it. The distance between the woman I know and the woman her page proposes she is. A distance so wide it should be impossible to cross, and yet the algorithm lays down a little pink carpet and invites her right over.

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Atomic Habits (Gone Wrong)

Radhika is a Mumbai-based engineer and health and wellness coach who creates content focused on helping people build structure and discipline in their everyday lives. Her page offers guidance on nutrition, fitness, and habit-building, presenting health as a system that can be optimised through informed choices. She speaks with authority on topics such as diet, routine, and confidence, often drawing from her own transformation as well as her training to position herself as a credible source of guidance. Her content is geared toward those looking to take control of their physical and mental well-being.

Radhika is an ex-colleague. She is also, very plainly, a woman with an eating disorder she does not conceal and does not seem particularly troubled by (Anorexia, in case you’re wondering). She talks about it with an ease that borders on endorsement, suggesting, to an extent, that she sees it as something closer to discipline than harm.

I am not unfamiliar with eating disorders. I understand, at least in part, how they operate. They distort perception and reward control, convincing the person that what is happening is not harm but achievement. It is complicated, and I have no interest in reducing it to something easy.

But understanding the condition does not require suspending all judgment about what is done in its name.

Because, from within that reality, Radhika now dispenses advice as someone capable of guiding others. Weirdly enough, she doesn’t talk about the ED on her page. You would think that might come up.

The absence would’ve been easy to ignore if it didn’t sit so awkwardly beside everything else she chooses to say. A woman so unhappy with her own body that she starves herself for days now wants to explain wellness to other people.

The audacity is breathtaking and the irony is not subtle.

There is always a course tucked into the timeline, too. Three months of online classes, and suddenly she is a certified wellness coach. Before this, she could have been dismissed as someone misinformed, maybe even naive. The certificate changes that. Meaningless as it is, it gives her the one thing she was missing — a thin, convincing layer of credibility.

One of my least favourite modern archetypes is the person who acquires a thin layer of terminology and immediately mistakes it for mastery. Enough to start speaking in eating plans, not enough to recognize the limits of their own understanding or the violence of what they are actually endorsing.

This is why I find her page, her “advice”, the most grotesque of the three. Expertise is not the dividing line here, that would almost be manageable. This is something else entirely.

The very thing that should disqualify her has been rebranded as evidence.

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She is also aided by the fact that she aligns almost seamlessly with the beauty standard currently being rewarded.

Celebrities are shrinking again, and this time they don’t even bother pretending it’s gradual. Bodies thinned out to the point of emaciation, faces hollowed out, limbs narrowed, until there is almost nothing left to hold on to. Everything happens between appearances, between one red carpet and the next, as if time itself has been compressed. The explanations, too, remain conveniently vague—clean eating, workouts, lifestyle changes. Meanwhile, drugs like Ozempic sit just offstage, widely known, rarely acknowledged directly, doing a large part of the work.

But the process is never the point.

Women destroy themselves with extraordinary consistency and are then applauded for discipline. They become frightened of hunger, obsessed with control, incapable of rest, and this is repackaged as dedication.

Their misery, when presented correctly, starts passing for achievement.

This is where Radhika’s content crosses a line. Shivani was trying to sell crochet. Manushi was selling a counterfeit personality. Radhika, on the other hand, is selling standards people can actually apply to themselves. She is stepping directly into the insecure, porous part of other people’s minds, the part already primed to believe they are one better routine away from being more lovable. All of this is made worse by the authority granted to anyone who can narrate their own suffering as transformation. (That is another plague of the internet. People no longer just survive something or struggle with something or remain trapped inside something. They must immediately become guides.)

Reducing this to hypocrisy would be too simple. Hypocrisy implies carelessness, a gap between what is said and what is done and this is more deliberate than that.

Mental health and physical health are not subjects that yield to quick understanding. They resist it, demanding sustained attention to examine them closely enough to distinguish between what is genuinely beneficial and what only feels like it is. It cannot be rushed.

A woman at war with her own body, then, shouldn’t be stepping up to instruct others on how to live inside theirs. It is as simple as that.

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For the longest time, I was largely untouched by influencers. My explore page is a shrine to cat videos (the only influencers I trust) and the occasional person speaking about things I actually care about. I am very quick to block, even quicker to mark things as “not interested” the moment I sense that something is trying to take more from me than it gives.

You are what you consume, and I have always taken that seriously enough to curate my way out of most of this.

It was easy to look away when it was strangers but now it’s people I know. The contrast between who they are and who they present themselves as is hard to ignore, especially when you’ve seen both up close. All of this isn’t happening in a vacuum, either. They already have an audience. People are watching, engaging, taking them seriously and it’s only going to grow, making it harder to dismiss as harmless experimentation.

I know everything online is filtered to some extent. Everyone edits. Everyone chooses what to show and what to leave out. But there has to be a limit.

At what point does it stop being careful presentation and start becoming something closer to fiction? Closer to fabrication? How do you continue to be something you are not when there are people watching you closely, maybe even aspiring to be you, shaping their own lives around what you are presenting? Does your back not threaten to crack under that kind of responsibility? Does it not weigh on you, even slightly, that what you are putting out into the world might be taken as truth?

I have been writing publicly for almost a year now, and I still have not made peace with how little control a writer has over where their words end up. Someone can carry a sentence of yours for months, another can build courage from it, or permission, or shame, and someone else can misunderstand it completely and still be changed by it. There is no clean way around that.

The weight of these thoughts sits heavy. It makes you careful. It should make you careful.

I cannot imagine misguiding people, even unintentionally. To speak with certainty where there is no real understanding, to build an entire presence around ideas that have not been lived through, wrestled with, or even honestly believed, feels like theft. Even saying something because it sounds right, because it will be well received, feels to me like the beginning of a deeper dishonesty.

This hesitation seems to be missing entirely in Influencer spaces.

It is tempting to dismiss this as reading too much into it. I don’t think the problem is that I am overthinking it. It is that these influencers are thinking far too little. Access to other people’s attention, and by extension their thinking, has become extraordinarily easy to obtain and what has not kept pace is the expectation of responsibility. We have simply made it too easy for influencers to speak without being accountable for what they say.

Being believed, being listened to, changes the nature of what you are doing, whether you acknowledge it or not. And if that doesn’t make you more careful, more honest, more restrained — if those requirements feel like too much— then you have no business trying to be an influencer.

P.S. If you’ve made it this far, thank you. You have demonstrated a level of attention span that is increasingly rare and therefore impressive. I’ve allowed myself to get very specific with the details here, which is easy to do when you know the people involved are not going to come across this and start connecting dots. Reading, in general, is not something they engage with. Names and locations have been changed regardless, on the off chance they wake up one day and develop a sudden curiosity for long-form writing. I prefer my life uncomplicated and my consequences avoidable.

P.P.S. Before anyone brings it up, I know I’ve ignored male influencers completely. That has been done on purpose. I don’t let men influence me, and I see no compelling reason to revise that position.

Note: My essays will always be free to read. If you’d like to support the time and care that goes into writing them buy me a coffee ☕

Global evidence shows childhood sexual violence at a scale that makes euphemism and minimization indefensible: hundreds of millions of girls and women alive today report sexual violence in childhood. Rape and other serious sexual assaults are not solely “adult crimes” in practice. A meaningful share of sexual offences against minors is perpetrated by other minors, with population-based policing data and national surveys documenting substantial adolescent perpetration. Legal systems already contain multiple pathways to treat some youth as adults (transfer, waiver, statutory exclusion, adult sentencing), but these mechanisms are inconsistent and often oriented around offender-centered caution rather than victim-centered parity. This essay examines whether rape should trigger adult-level accountability even when the perpetrator is a minor. At the same time, it proceeds from the premise that legal procedures must continue to preserve due process, avoid spectacle, and minimize unnecessary secondary harm.

Few crimes provoke stronger condemnation than rape. Yet when the person who commits it is a minor, the certainty of that condemnation can begin to waver. Cases of teenage offenders have often been met with an uneasy mix of outrage and sympathy. News reports begin to narrate not only the crime but the interrupted promise of the boy who committed it. He becomes a “student,” a “high schooler,” an “athlete,” a “young man with his whole life ahead of him.” Articles dwell on tears in court, devastated parents, ruined scholarships, derailed careers, the anguish of a family now living under shame. The boy’s future swells until it occupies the center of the frame.

The victim, meanwhile, is often granted only a fraction of that attention. Such reflexive leniency toward minors who commit rape stands at odds with the irreparable harm they inflict. In cases involving such violence, it is reasonable to question whether the legal response should reflect the seriousness of the crime through forms of accountability typically applied in adult proceedings.

The global scale of sexual violence against children and adolescents should by itself extinguish any desire to keep treating youth sexual aggression as marginal. UNICEF estimates that more than 370 million women and girls alive today were raped or sexually assaulted before the age of eighteen. When non-contact abuse is included, the number rises to approximately 650 million. Those are not numbers that belong to a society confronting a contained problem. Those are numbers that belong to a society saturated in exploitation and then trained to look away from it.

And the burden of that violence is not evenly spread across childhood. It rises sharply in adolescence. Between fourteen and seventeen, the risk intensifies. These are the years marketed as youth, discovery, school, growing up, first freedoms, first friendships, first love. Yet for an enormous number of girls, they are also the years in which the world becomes abruptly more dangerous. '

The same culture that romanticizes teenage life often leaves teenage girls to navigate its most violent underside with almost no protection worthy of the name.

In other words, adolescence is one of the peak windows of vulnerability. And not only for being victimized.

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A significant share of these offences is committed by minors themselves. In the United States, about 15 percent of convicted rapists are seventeen or younger. Other studies similarly estimate that adolescents commit roughly one in ten reported rapes.

Comprehensive global data on juvenile sexual offending remain limited, but available evidence does not support the comforting fiction that youth sexual violence is rare or exceptional. It is part of the broader crisis. And in some regions, it is progressively worsening.

In India, this has become increasingly difficult to ignore. Government reporting and public debate have repeatedly drawn attention to the rise in recorded juvenile involvement in serious offences. Even where the exact contours of the trend are contested, what is not contestable is the anxiety it has produced, especially when sexual violence is involved. Adolescence stands, then, in a deeply unsettling relationship to rape. It is both the age at which many victims are first targeted and the age at which some offenders begin committing the very violence from which others in their age group are trying to survive.

This reality demands us to examine how such violence is culturally produced among youth, and how legal systems respond when the offender is not yet an “adult” in years. Because sexual aggression does not suddenly bloom out of nowhere on a boy’s eighteenth birthday.

The uncomfortable truth is that rape culture is already entrenched well before adulthood. It is often the culmination of toxic influences and failures in a young person’s environment.

Early exposure to pornography is one factor frequently cited. Adolescents now access explicit and often violent material with unprecedented ease, long before they have developed the capacity to parse power, coercion, intimacy, degradation, or the difference between performance and consent. They absorb images first and understanding later, if understanding comes at all.

A growing body of research has linked heavy consumption of violent pornography to harmful attitudes toward women and to the normalization of coercion within sexual encounters. That link should not be treated simplistically, as though pornography mechanically creates rapists in a neat line of causation. Human behavior is messier than that. But to deny its shaping force would be absurd. Repeated exposure to sexual scripts built on domination, humiliation, and force does something. For some boys, this becomes part of how sex itself is understood: as a realm of conquest and domination.

Peer culture strengthens these ideas. Boys often learn from each other, from older cousins, friends, teammates, classmates, and online communities where misogyny is performed as humor and aggression is treated as proof of masculinity.

Sometimes the transmission is even more direct. A child who has been abused, or exposed early to coercive sexual behavior, may later reenact that violence in adolescence. Many juvenile sex offenders have histories of victimization themselves. That does not erase responsibility, but it does reveal how abuse reproduces itself across age groups. The line between victim and perpetrator can become part of a grim continuum, especially where adults fail to intervene early.

And adults fail in more ordinary ways too, the failures no less consequential for being common. Parents and schools often avoid honest discussions of consent, coercion, healthy sexuality, and bodily autonomy, leaving teenagers to assemble their understanding from pornography, rumor, and peer mythology. When boys are socialized to see sex as a measure of status and girls as objects of entitlement, sexual violence does not appear as an inexplicable aberration. It emerges from a culture that has already trained boys to treat refusal as negotiable and empathy as weakness. In that environment, impulsiveness, weak supervision, and limited accountability can quickly turn those attitudes into action.

The origins of sexual violence therefore need to be named clearly: media environments, peer conditioning, sexist scripts, and adult negligence all play a role. Recognizing these conditions of emergence is crucial in prevention.

But when prevention fails and a minor commits the heinous act of rape, society faces a pivotal question: Will we treat it as a serious crime committed by a person who knew what he was doing, or as a youthful mistake to be handled with kid gloves?

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Current cultural attitudes reveal a troubling double standard along gender lines.

Adolescent girls are often adultified the moment they reach puberty, while adolescent boys who commit serious harm are frequently infantilized by the same culture. Teen girls who are raped are scrutinized as if they were fully responsible adults. Their clothing, social life, messages, friendships, alcohol use, or supposed “maturity” are interrogated to see whether they somehow invited the violence. Younger children are usually granted innocence without argument, but older girls are often denied the same protection simply because they appear closer to womanhood. The result is a grotesque standard in which teenage girls are expected to possess adult foresight to avoid rape, while teenage boys are framed as too immature to fully own the rape they commit.

In a telling example, an 11-year-old girl in Texas who was gang-raped drew comments from neighbors that she wore makeup and clothes “more appropriate to a grown woman,” implying that because she looked older or dressed in a way they deemed too grown, she bore some responsibility for the attack. An eleven-year-old child, forced to carry not only the violence itself but the insinuation that she had summoned it by appearing insufficiently childlike.

That is what adultification does. It burdens girls with a responsibility they cannot possibly carry.

At the same time, male offenders in the same age bracket are described as boys who made a terrible mistake, boys with promising futures, boys who should not be “defined by one act.”

The underlying message is unmistakable. The female victim is treated as someone who should have known better. The male offender is treated as someone too young to know what he was doing. The consequence is a culture more invested in preserving male futures than in protecting female safety. It sends a message to victims that their pain is secondary to the promising lives of their attackers, and it signals to would-be offenders that being young and male might earn them a pass for acts that destroy others’ lives.

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Legal systems across the world largely reflect the principle that juveniles are different from adults and should usually be treated with rehabilitation as the central aim. Most countries maintain separate youth courts or procedures that shield offenders under eighteen from the full force of adult criminal law.

The dominant global consensus is that minors have diminished culpability and greater capacity for change.

In the United States, for example, a network of juvenile courts has existed for over a century, guided by the ideal of reform rather than retribution. Juvenile proceedings are often closed to the public, records can be sealed, and penalties tend to be lighter. A youth convicted of sexual assault in a juvenile court might be sent to a treatment-oriented facility and released by age 21, no matter the gravity of the offense.

At the same time, many legal systems already make exceptions for severe crimes.

Every year thousands of youth in the U.S. are transferred into the adult criminal system. Most states allow or require adult prosecution for certain violent felonies, including rape, especially for older adolescents.

India moved in this direction after the 2012 Delhi gang rape case, where one participant was seventeen and, under the law at the time, received only three years in custody. Public outrage over that disparity led to the 2015 amendment allowing sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds accused of heinous offences, including rape, to be tried as adults after preliminary assessment. The shift was politically significant because it marked a break from a regime that had sharply limited consequences for minors regardless of the seriousness of the offence.

Other jurisdictions continue to emphasize youth handling even in grave cases.

England and Wales can send sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds to Crown Court for serious crimes, but many teenage sex offenders remain within the youth justice system, where sentencing ceilings are much lower than in adult rape cases. Canada’s Youth Criminal Justice Act generally ensures that offences committed under eighteen remain governed by youth sentencing principles, even if the conviction occurs later. New Zealand also relies heavily on youth processes, with prison framed as a last resort, and South Africa’s Child Justice Act prioritizes diversion and rehabilitation for under-eighteens wherever possible.

Across these systems, the guiding tenet is that juveniles are less blameworthy and more amenable to reform than adults.

That assumption is regularly reinforced by developmental science. Judges and lawmakers often point to immature judgment, heightened impulsivity, and ongoing brain development as reasons for leniency. In line with this, many jurisdictions impose lighter sentences and even grant automatic leniency (such as shorter default detention periods) to juveniles convicted of rape.

Recidivism research often strengthens the case. Many studies suggest that juvenile sex offenders have lower rates of sexual reoffending than commonly assumed, often in the single digits or low teens (around 5–14%). One long-term study noted that over 90% of youth arrested for a sex offense are never arrested for another one, suggesting that these offenses are frequently one-time incidents.

Advocates of the rehabilitative approach seize on this data to argue that the juvenile system works. Most young offenders can be steered away from future crime without subjecting them to extreme penalties.

But focusing on the likelihood of reoffense can inadvertently sideline another crucial factor: the harm already done to the victim.

A low likelihood of future offending does not lessen the seriousness of the rape that has already taken place.

It also does not answer the question of what victims are owed.

A girl raped by a fifteen-year-old does not suffer a smaller trauma because statistics suggest he may never offend again. Her body was violated once. That is already enough. She will carry that trauma for life. Any legal system that speaks almost exclusively in the language of offender rehabilitation while leaving the victim’s devastation in the background has distorted its priorities.

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This brings us to the central argument: when a minor commits rape, the response should prioritize justice, safety, and accountability in the same way it would for an adult offender.

The strongest basis for this position is proportionality.

Rape is a crime of such severity that the legal response must reflect the weight of the harm done. The physical invasion, psychological trauma, and destruction of autonomy experienced by the victim are not less real because the perpetrator was under eighteen. If the law imposes dramatically lighter consequences solely because of that, it communicates, whether it intends to or not, that the harm itself has somehow been downgraded. That is precisely why the Delhi case struck so many people as intolerable. To give a negligible sentence in such a case is to tell the victim, however politely the law phrases it, that what happened to her does not warrant the fullest recognition the legal system can offer.

As Asha Devi, the mother of the 2012 Delhi gang rape victim, pleaded during the campaign to toughen India’s law: “a serious crime, even if it is committed by a minor, should not be overlooked.” Her daughter’s life was extinguished by a 17-year-old participant, yet under the old law he could expect a sharply limited sentence. When consequences are grossly out of step with the violence committed, the public does not experience that as fairness. It experiences it as failure.

Second, treating such offences with adult-level accountability reinforces deterrence and clarifies the standards society intends to uphold.

The law not only penalizes but also sends a message about social norms. If teenagers know that rape will be met with only minimal consequences because of their age, the law’s ability to deter is weakened. Conversely, holding teenage offenders fully accountable can have a powerful normative effect on peer behavior. Lawmakers in India explicitly argued that lowering the trial age to 16 would “help to stop” the rise in juvenile rape by drawing a sharp line. While not every youth rationally weighs consequences, criminal justice research suggests that high-risk adolescents can be sensitive to the certainty of punishment.

And just as important is the symbolic message: treating rape with utmost seriousness, no matter the offender’s age, reinforces a societal zero-tolerance stance. It draws a clear boundary that sexual violence is beyond any youthful mischief that society might forgive.

Third, there is a moral threshold that rape crosses which should eliminate age-based mitigation. By mid-adolescence, virtually all youths understand that forcing sex on someone is profoundly wrong. They know coercion is wrong. They know violating another person’s body is wrong. Rape is not equivalent to shoplifting, reckless driving, vandalism, or schoolyard fighting. It involves a sequence of choices: isolating the victim, exploiting vulnerability, applying pressure or force, ignoring refusal, and proceeding anyway. Developmental science does not erase that sequence of decisions.

Courts have acknowledged as much. A High Court in India, denying bail to a 15-year-old accused of raping a minor, bluntly stated that the boy “committed the offense with full consciousness and it cannot be said that it was committed in ignorance. An offense of rape, being carnal in nature, cannot be committed unless a person has the specific knowledge of the same.”

In other words, a teenager who rapes knows exactly what he is doing.

The endless cultural temptation is to imagine teenage male violence as somehow clouded by youth, as though adolescence itself introduces uncertainty into acts whose meaning is perfectly clear to the person enduring them. But an adolescent who rapes is not stumbling around in ethical darkness. He is making choices against another person’s body.

However young the offender, the act manifests a dangerous degree of cruelty or disregard for others. To respond with anything less than adult sanctions is to suggest that rape is somehow less rape when committed by the young, a truly dangerous notion if you think about it.

The demand for adult accountability is, at its core, a demand to take the crime as seriously as it deserves.

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What would this mean in practice?

It would mean that when a minor is charged with rape, the default response is adult criminal prosecution rather than juvenile adjudication. In jurisdictions that already allow transfers or waivers, it would mean making rape a presumptive ground for adult court. In jurisdictions where such transfers are currently discretionary or limited to older teens, the policy stance would be to broaden and mandate them for rape and comparable sexual felonies.

A fifteen- or sixteen-year-old charged with rape would be tried under the same criminal procedure that applies to adults, with open proceedings where legally appropriate, full evidentiary standards, and sentencing ranges that actually reflect the seriousness of the offence. If convicted, sentencing would follow adult guidelines which, for rape, are often on the order of decades in prison rather than months in a youth facility. The offender would no longer automatically regain freedom at 21. Instead, he could serve a long term that reflects the severity of the assault.

Long-term consequences would also align with those faced by adult sex offenders.

For instance, many jurisdictions maintain sex offender registries and public notification for those convicted of sexual crimes. Registration and a permanent criminal record are not minor burdens. They are life-altering penalties and they correspond to the life-altering harm done to victims.

Public identification is more contested, because it implies that the offender’s name and photograph may be publicly disclosed, but the broader principle remains the same: automatic anonymity should not be treated as sacred in all rape cases involving minors. Juvenile secrecy was designed around the idea that young offenders should be able to move past wrongdoing without permanent stigmatization. Communities are not irrational for wanting transparency about dangerous offenders.

Most importantly, though, punishing as adults does not mean abandoning rehabilitation or treating the teen exactly like a fully mature 40-year-old offender in every respect. It means opening the door to meaningful consequences rather than capping punishment arbitrarily due to birthdate.

Even within adult sentencing, there can be room for mitigating factors like age or abusive background but those factors would temper the length of a prison term, not erase it altogether. For example, a judge might still consider a convict’s youth when deciding a specific number of years, possibly opting for the lower end of an adult range.

The key is that the sentence would still be substantial enough to reflect the crime.

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Some critics of trying juveniles as adults raise valid concerns that deserve careful rebuttal.

One concern is that exposing a minor to adult prison could be excessively harsh or even counterproductive, potentially subjecting them to abuse behind bars or turning them into career criminals. This is a legitimate issue. Adult prisons are often brutal environments. The solution, however, is not to let rapists walk free, but to improve the correctional system. Many countries have specialized youth offender units or could develop hybrid approaches: for instance, a juvenile offender could serve the early portion of a long sentence in a secure youth facility and then be transferred to an adult prison at a suitable age. What matters is that the overall weight of the sentence remains comparable to an adult’s.

Another common objection is rooted in neuroscience. Adolescents, it is said, are still developing. They are more impulsive, less future-oriented, and more susceptible to influence (The U.S. Supreme Court has cited such science in barring the death penalty and mandatory life without parole for juveniles, emphasizing reduced culpability.) That is true as a general proposition. But the leap from that fact to broad leniency in rape cases is not convincing.

The capacity required to refrain from rape is not some rarefied philosophical insight available only to the fully matured adult brain. It is a basic social understanding. While a 14-year-old may not fully weigh consequences like an adult, by the mid-teen years adolescents know that rape is wrong. Cognitive research shows that understanding of right and wrong solidifies well before 18.

The impulse-control defense also rings hollow in the context of rape. In cases of planned group sexual assaults, juvenile participants have even coordinated via texting or social media, which is hardly a crime of simple youthful rashness. The claim that brain development should significantly reduce accountability for rape often stretches developmental science far beyond what it can bear.

At most, youth may mitigate punishment slightly, but not to the extent of a slap on the wrist.

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There is also the concern that severe sentencing closes the door to reform. Yet accountability and reform are not opposites.

A teenager who serves, say, 10 or 15 years for rape will still be a relatively young man upon release, with plenty of time to rebuild his life, especially if rehabilitation programs are integrated into his incarceration. The difference is that he will have paid a substantial debt to society first.

In fact, longer and more structured intervention may offer a more realistic route to confronting sexual violence than the brief, lightly supervised, and often inconsistent treatment available in juvenile systems. A short sentence in a youth home does not necessarily produce insight, remorse, or transformation. Sometimes it produces the opposite, the impression that the act, despite all rhetoric to the contrary, was survivable for him in a way it will never be for the victim.

Finally, one must address the counterargument of “society’s failure”. Many juvenile offenders come from fractured homes, violent environments, deprivation, neglect, or histories of abuse themselves. That should matter. It should matter in prevention, in social policy, in sentencing nuance, in prison programming, in therapeutic intervention.

However, when it comes to sentencing, explanation is not exoneration. A minor who has raped someone should not escape consequences simply because the path to the crime was socially explainable. A society can recognize that it helped produce an offender and still insist that he answer fully for what he chose to do. To say otherwise is to ask victims to absorb not only the assault but the entire explanatory burden of the world that made it possible.

Punishing as adults then means making a conscious break from sentimental default reactions and instead treating a 15-year-old rapist, for example, as we would treat a rapist who is 27. It means justice tempered with wisdom. The aim is not to demonize youth or satisfy bloodlust. It is to enforce credible, commensurate penalties that protect the public and honor the victim’s worth. It is for a legal response that matches the seriousness of the violation, recognizes the victim as more than a footnote to adolescent rehabilitation, and refuses the familiar cultural trick of recasting rape as something that isn’t as severe when the perpetrator is young.

And that requires a shift in emphasis.

The first question should not be whether a rapist under eighteen is still salvageable. It should be whether the legal system would have responded differently had the same rape been committed by someone two years older.

In too many cases, the answer is yes. The juvenile system’s light touch for rape can send a perverse signal that a victim’s devastation is “not a big deal” if the rapist is young. That message must be unequivocally rejected.

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In the end, the issue is simple even if the implementation is not. Society must draw a clear line on the inviolability of the human body and dignity. Rape represents a crossing of that line so egregious that it morally eclipses the conventional leniency afforded to minors.

The age of the offender does not reduce the trauma of the victim. Studies consistently show that experiencing sexual violence in adolescence is associated with lasting mental health harms, substance abuse, relationship instability, and deep disruptions to bodily safety and trust.

Justice, therefore, must respond with due gravity.

Treating juvenile rapists as adults is not about being punitive for its own sake. It is about recognizing the seriousness of the crime and the right of victims and communities to safety and justice. It is about affirming that some lines, once crossed, trigger the highest level of legal accountability available short of abandoning due process or humane custody altogether.

Cold and clear-eyed as it may sound, the stance is simply this: a rape is a rape, and no claim of youth should shield a perpetrator from the full accountability that such a crime demands.

Sources :

• UNICEF -Global estimates on sexual violence in childhood (Press Release, 09 Oct 2024)

• RAINN – Perpetrators of Sexual Violence (NCVS 2019–2023 data)

• Fact Sheet (NCSBY) – Youth Sex Offenders vs. Adult Sex Offenders

• Survivors Network – Sexual Violence Among Teens (2025)

• Reuters – India Lowers Trial Age to 16 for Heinous Crimes (2015)

• UK Parliament Petition – Youth Court Sentencing for 16–17 Year Olds

• ODT (NZ) – Debate on Sentencing a Teen Rapist (2025)

• The Swaddle – Madhya Pradesh HC on Juvenile Rape (2021)

• Stevenson et al. – Public attitudes on juvenile sex offenders (2015)

Note: My essays will always be free to read. If you’d like to support the time and care that goes into writing them buy me a coffee ☕

The first time I came across the word rape, I was nine, sitting beside my mother in the smallest room in our house, a former storeroom we had promoted, optimistically, to the study.

It was barely big enough to fit both of us. Shelves buckled under the weight of old textbooks and files with peeling stickers, paperbacks swollen with humidity, manuals no one had opened in years. There was a single window that barely opened and a chair with one uneven leg that wobbled if you didn’t sit carefully. In the middle of it all sat our computer, a bulky desktop that took minutes to start and even longer to respond, its whirring fan the only sound in the room besides my mother’s voice and the occasional bark of a dog from the street.

I had been chosen to read the news aloud in the next morning’s assembly. A small honour I treated with ceremonial seriousness. My mother offered to help me pick the stories. We sat down after dinner, legs tucked under the table, the blue light from the monitor flickering over our faces.

We scrolled slowly. A cricket match in Ahmedabad. A quote from a parliament debate. Something about rising petrol prices. A train delay. A policy announcement I didn’t fully understand. And then—

Woman gang-raped in Delhi.

I read it aloud as I had the others, unsure of the last word’s weight, letting it land like punctuation. My mother didn’t answer right away. Her body had stilled. She leaned forward slightly, peered at the screen, and then said, not softly but carefully, like choosing each word from a ledge: “It’s something terrible. Something men do to women. You don’t need to read that tomorrow.”

And that was it.

We picked something else, an airport expansion project, maybe, and practised it twice to make sure I wouldn’t stumble. She told me I’d do well. I nodded. I went to bed.

I didn’t ask again. I understood. Maybe not what the word meant, not fully, but I understood that it was not meant to be read aloud. Not at school. Not by me. And certainly not first thing in the morning.

That night sits in my memory like a door left slightly open.

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I wouldn’t see that word again for years, not consciously. It just folded itself into the background until it came back with such force I could no longer pretend it was unfamiliar.

I was twelve when it returned.

The Nirbhaya gang rape case.

A girl attacked on a moving bus in Delhi. Her injuries so horrific the doctors didn’t know where to begin. The word rape didn’t even seem big enough to hold what they did to her.

Nirbhaya wasn’t her name. That was the name they gave her, not the one her parents did. The fearless one, it meant. We weren’t allowed to know who she really was, but everyone wanted to claim her. She became the daughter of the nation. A symbol of everything we said we couldn’t stand, and somehow still permitted. A word stitched together to make grief palatable for a public that didn’t want to sit with rage.

This time though, the case wasn’t something I stumbled into. I followed it. I searched for it. I read everything I could find. I watched it unfold in pieces, the hospital updates, the legal delays, the interviews, the stomach-turning detail of what they did to her.

I read that her small intestine had to be removed. That she was trying to become a physiotherapist. That the attackers dumped her on the road. That they tried to run her over as they drove away.

I watched primetime debates with the sound turned low and the remote close by in case someone came into the room. I saw doctors explaining her surgeries with diagrams. I saw protestors waving signs. I saw a woman scream at a male anchor, asking what he would do if it had been his daughter.

I remember when they moved her to Singapore. I remember when she died.

What I remember most clearly was thinking, This has to change something. Surely this is a turning point. Surely this is too public, too brutal, too undeniable to be absorbed into the usual rotation of news and then discarded.

But I was twelve. And I still believed that this country had a breaking point.

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The years after weren’t quieter. They were just less surprising. The headlines didn’t stop. They multiplied. A girl in Kathua. A doctor in Hyderabad. A child in a school washroom. A woman on a highway. Some made it to prime time. Others didn’t. After a while, the names blurred. The details repeated. The outrage became seasonal. And I, like most people, stopped checking for updates.

There isn’t a single moment when you stop being horrified. It happens gradually, like background noise fading into silence. Eventually, the words don’t sting the way they used to because you’ve heard them too many times.

I still notice the stories. They follow me through rooms. They interrupt my day. They shape the way I stand in crowds. They change how I sit in public transport. They alter what I see when a man leans(Too close?).

These stories aren’t just things I read, they become things I live with.

What I’m trying to examine is not the violence itself, but the space it leaves and the way we’ve learned to live inside it. Each case is horrifying on its own. But what’s harder to admit is how quickly that horror fades. How little it takes for us to look away. These stories, brutal, intimate, unbearable, appear and vanish with mechanical efficiency. A headline. A hashtag. A wave of anger. And then the inevitable return to business as usual.

This essay presents an examination of that societal desensitization. Far from a natural fatigue, Indians’ muted response to atrocity is argued to be a cultivated coping mechanism, a willingness to “move on” that amounts to tacit acceptance. We will marshal recent data, case studies, legal analyses, and media commentary (2022–2024) to show how widespread sexual violence continues unabated, how justice consistently falls short, and how public discourse often undermines victims. From NCRB statistics on rape and conviction rates, to the handling of high-profile assaults, to the pernicious narratives of “false cases” and victim-blaming, all evidence points to a society that has, in effect, made peace with pervasive misogynistic violence.

The goal is not simply to recount horrors, but to indict the collective conditioning that enables Indians to carry on unflinching, even as women bleed and lives are broken around them.

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Official statistics confirm that violence against women in India remains distressingly high and is even rising in many categories. The National Crime Records Bureau’s most recent reports show a steady increase in overall crimes against women.

In 2022, over 4.45 lakh cases of crimes against women were registered, a 4% rise from the previous year. This number climbed again, albeit slightly, to 4.48 lakh in 2023.

To put this in perspective, a woman in India reports some form of violence roughly every two minutes on average. Each of those reports is a life upended yet the aggregate figures are treated as routine.

Within these vast numbers, sexual violence occupies a significant and chilling share.

Rape cases alone accounted for about 7% of all crimes against women in 2022, with 31,516 rapes recorded that year. That is an average of 86 rapes every single day, or roughly one rape every 16 minutes reported to police.

The following year, 2023, saw a slight dip in recorded rapes (29,670 cases), but any “improvement” is marginal and possibly illusory given notorious under-reporting. Women’s rights activists stress that the real incidence is far higher than what’s reported, due to the intense stigma and fear surrounding sexual violence. And indeed, many rapes, especially in rural areas , never enter official data because victims are silenced by shame or community pressure.

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Other forms of sexual and gender-based crimes are also rampant.

NCRB data for 2022 reveals that “Assault on women with intent to outrage modesty” (molestation) formed 18.7% of crimes against women, and kidnappings/abductions of women were 19.2%.

The single largest category remains “Cruelty by Husband or Relatives”, domestic violence and dowry-related cruelty, comprising nearly one-third of all cases.

This grim breakdown shows how danger haunts Indian women in both public and private spheres. A woman is as likely to face domestic torture behind closed doors as she is to face harassment on the streets or rape by an acquaintance (tellingly, almost 89% of rape perpetrators are known to the victim).

If these numbers seem abstract, consider what they mean on the ground.

In 2023, 852 rape victims were under 18, including infants and toddlers barely old enough to speak. And in that same year, 230 cases were recorded where the victim was not only raped but also murdered (often after gang-rape). These are atrocities that should shock the conscience of the nation. Yet the statistical recurrence of such crimes year after year has bred an eerie familiarity. The data paints a picture of a society in which brutal violence against women is not an aberration but almost a daily norm.

This normalization demands a deeper political analysis, one that radical feminist theorists like Catharine MacKinnon have long provided. In Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, MacKinnon argues that rape is not merely an act of individual cruelty. It is a political act, embedded within structures of male dominance, and functions as a form of social control, a method through which women’s behavior is shaped not only by the violence itself, but by the ever-present possibility of it.

Under this framework, the legal system is not merely failing to protect women, it is actively implicated in preserving the conditions that allow such violence to persist.

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In India, the vast majority of rape and assault cases do not result in convictions of the perpetrators.

Victims and their families who brave the odds to report crimes enter a legal process that is long and often fruitless. The conviction rate for crimes against women overall was around 27% in 2021, meaning nearly three out of four accused walk free.

For rape cases specifically, the picture is even bleaker in many jurisdictions.

In the national capital, Delhi, an analysis of district court data found a rape conviction rate of only 4.3% for cases tried between 2021 and 2024. Out of over 3,000 rape trials in that period, just 133 ended in conviction.

Similarly, in Karnataka, rape case convictions plummeted from 11.7% in 2021 to a shockingly low 3.6% in 2023. In other words, over 96% of accused rapists in Karnataka faced no legal punishment. This collapse in convictions was attributed to a range of familiar factors: witnesses turning hostile, “settlements” between victim and accused, and victims dropping out of the trial due to intimidation or pressure.

Such factors point to systemic failures. When a survivor or her family withdraws the complaint, the case is officially closed as “false” or “unsubstantiated,” contributing to a narrative that many rape cases are fake.

But the reality behind those withdrawals is often not that the rape didn’t occur, it’s that the survivor lost hope in getting justice or was bullied into silence. And while the government has taken some steps, at least on paper, to improve this situation by setting up Fast-Track Special Courts (FTSCs) for rape and child sexual abuse cases, not a lot has changed.

As of late 2024, about 750 FTSCs were operational across 30 states/UTs, and they had disposed of over 2,87,000 cases since their inception. Despite these special courts, the backlog remains staggering. Fresh cases far outpace the system’s ability to conclude trials, and justice delayed often becomes justice denied.

The de facto immunity enjoyed by most offenders sends a perverse social signal: Sexual violence is a high-reward, low-risk crime in India. This dangerously normalizes the offense. Perpetrators act with impunity, and victims internalize that pursuing justice is often futile.

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Statistics, however alarming, can only go so far.

To truly grasp how Indian society has accommodated itself to violence against women, one must look at specific recent incidents and the public reactions (or lack thereof) they evoked. The past few years have supplied no shortage of horrific cases. Here we examine a few emblematic ones, not to sensationalize them but to understand the patterns of societal and institutional behavior they reveal.

Case One: A Viral Video and a Tragedy in Kerala

Even as most victims struggle to be believed, there has been a growing counter-narrative in India fixated on false accusations and the plight of men accused of sexual harassment. This narrative came to a head in a recent Kerala incident that dominated headlines, not because of a woman’s suffering, but a man’s.

In early 2026, a 40-year-old man in Kozhikode, Kerala, died by suicide after a woman publicly accused him of groping her on a bus. The woman had posted a video on social media describing how the man allegedly touched her inappropriately during a crowded bus ride, which went viral. Facing public shame and perhaps maintaining his innocence, the man took his own life a few days later.

This incident immediately sparked a furious outcry, not so much over women’s safety on public transport, but against women “misusing” harassment accusations. Men’s rights activists and a segment of the public seized on the case as proof that social media trials and false claims were victimizing innocent men. Hashtags and debates proliferated about the need for a men’s commission, about how “one video destroyed a life,” and how women’s allegations are not to be trusted at face value. The Kerala police even registered a case of abetment to suicide against the woman who made the allegation, reflecting the pressure to treat her as a culprit once the man had died.

What went missing in the din was the original issue, did the harassment happen and how routinely do women face such violations on buses? The public discourse swiftly painted the woman as the aggressor and the man as the “real victim.”

The energy and anger that society often fails to muster when a woman is raped or molested was suddenly on full display to mourn a man who felt wronged by an accusation. The stark contrast in empathy, between the routine cynicism towards women’s complaints and the passionate defense of an accused man’s honor, speaks volumes about societal conditioning.

This is not an isolated perception.

In Delhi, a recent review of rape case outcomes led some to highlight that many cases were “false” , citing that increasing false rape claims were contributing to low conviction rates and wasting court resources. Newspapers carried quotes from citizens alleging that the “rape capital” narrative is exaggerated by NGOs for funding, and that “bogus cases” are rampant. A prominent men’s rights advocate, Deepika Narayan Bhardwaj, regularly points to instances of alleged false rape or dowry cases to argue that women are misusing the law.

And indeed, data can be spun to support this. Such outliers exist, but they dominate discourse far more than they deserve. The reality is that false accusations constitute a small minority of cases, NCRB’s own analysis in 2020 found fewer than 8% of rape cases investigated were ultimately classified by police as false (and even that figure includes cases closed due to lack of evidence or withdrawn under pressure, which are not truly proven false).

Nonetheless, the specter of the “fake rape case” looms large in the public imagination, often overshadowing the far more common specter of actual rapes.

The Kerala bus incident encapsulates this twisted priority. Here was a woman who took the bold step of confronting harassing behavior, something women are constantly told they should do rather than suffer silently.

Yet when she did, and the outcome turned tragic, the collective sentiment was not to wonder how often women endure such invasions of space, or how helpless that woman must have felt to resort to shaming her harasser online. It was to warn women to “act responsibly” because a man’s reputation and life were at stake.

In India, women are not only disbelieved when they report harassment, they are distrusted even more when they have proof. What India wants from its survivors is not justice. It wants modesty. Dignified silence. Tragic faces. Women who are harmed, but never angry.

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This pattern of backlash, though, did not emerge in a vacuum. It draws energy from an increasingly organized and vocal ecosystem of male grievance. The “false case” panic has become a powerful moral narrative, often displacing the real epidemic of violence against women. And recent tragedies, especially those involving male suicide, are now weaponized to vilify women’s testimonies as inherently suspect.

One example is the widely publicized case of Atul Subhash, a Bengaluru-based software engineer who died by suicide in December 2024 after years of contentious divorce and dowry-related litigation.

In a 24-page suicide note and video, Atul accused his wife and her family of filing multiple false cases against him, including domestic violence, dowry harassment, and even attempted murder. He detailed his despair with the legal system and accused judges of bias and corruption. His death became a rallying cry for the #MenToo movement, igniting widespread media and social media backlash against India’s gender-protective laws.

Atul’s suicide became emblematic of male victimhood, and his note was treated by many not as personal testimony but as gospel truth. Allegations in matrimonial disputes were now framed not as legal matters requiring scrutiny, but as default falsehoods.

Nikita Singhania, Atul’s wife, became the target of intense online vitriol. Her face and workplace were doxxed, she was branded a murderer before any investigation concluded. Meanwhile, Atul’s own deeply misogynistic writings, in which he derided women’s legal protections and called wives “very costly prostitutes”, were conveniently glossed over.

What both the Kerala bus case and the Atul Subhash episode reveal is not just public sympathy for men, but a deeper refusal to tolerate women’s authority as witnesses to their own suffering. They illustrate how rape culture preserves itself, not just through violence, but through narrative reversal. By making the cost of speaking unbearable, it ensures that silence becomes the safest choice.

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Case Two: The Patna Hostel Incident

In January, a disturbing incident in Patna, Bihar, underscored how authorities sometimes actively seek to bury the truth of violence.

An 18-year-old NEET aspirant (medical college hopeful) staying at a private girls’ hostel was found unconscious and severely injured on January 6, 2026, and died in hospital days later. The hostel and attending doctors initially claimed she had attempted suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills. Police, without much investigation, seemed content to accept that narrative. They cited 90 pills conveniently “found” in her room as evidence of suicide.

Her family, however, suspected foul play from the start and begged authorities to probe deeper, to no avail at first.

It was only after the young woman’s death that an autopsy was finally conducted – and the findings were explosive. The post-mortem revealed clear signs of brutal sexual assault and prolonged physical abuse. There were fresh injuries, internal trauma, and even evidence of forcible ingestion of substances.

The forensic conclusion was unambiguous. This was not a suicide or a mere medical emergency, but a case of violent sexual violence leading to murder. Faced with this, the Bihar police had to abandon the “suicide” cover story. An IG-level officer took over the probe amid public outcry, and a Special Investigation Team was formed.

What’s truly damning is how the case was handled before the autopsy forced everyone’s hand. The hostel owner and private hospital never informed police immediately, as required in any case of unconscious patient with unexplained injuries. The police themselves showed little curiosity and great haste in calling it a suicide, seizing on the planted sleeping pills and a private doctor’s opinion without waiting for a post-mortem.

In the critical first days, evidence could have been lost or tampered with. Indeed the family alleges a cover-up conspiracy between the hostel and local police to hush up a likely sexual assault that occurred on the premises. Only persistent pressure from the family and media forced a proper autopsy at the state medical college, which blew apart the convenient narrative.

This case exemplifies institutional betrayal at multiple levels: by the hostel (charged with the students’ safety), by medical professionals who failed to do proper medico-legal due diligence, and by police who were ready to write off a young woman’s life to avoid a tedious crime investigation.

It was the family’s worst nightmare, not only losing their daughter but finding that authorities would have preferred to label her death a result of her own supposed weakness rather than acknowledge the horrific crime committed against her.

Imagine, then, how many less-publicized cases might be quietly written off in police files as accidents or suicides when in fact a woman was assaulted or murdered. It is a terrifying thought that unless a case blows up in the media, the default response may be to deny the crime.

In Bihar, after this incident, there was indeed a wave of outrage on social media locally, and the state government hurriedly issued new safety guidelines for girls’ hostels. But will it lead to sustained change, or will those guidelines gather dust once the spotlight fades?

If history is any indicator, public memory will move on, and systemic inertia will resume.

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Case Three : The Rape of a 6-Year-Old and Her Juvenile Assailants

In January 2026, a case emerged in Delhi that is the stuff of every parent’s nightmares. A six-year-old girl in a Delhi neighborhood was lured by a group of local boys, taken to a terrace, and gang-raped by three minors aged just 10, 13, and 16. The child returned home bleeding and in trauma. Her distraught mother recounted how at first the little girl said she had “fallen,” but then broke down and described the unthinkable abuse. Police did act in this case, two of the juvenile perpetrators were promptly detained (one had even been handed over by his own horrified mother). The third boy fled and was being traced. An FIR was filed under stringent sections of the law (including the POCSO Act for child sexual offenses).

One might expect such a grotesque incident, a child victim and child perpetrators, to spark national soul-searching about what kind of violent culture young boys are growing up in. Indeed, the case was covered in the news, described rightly as a “Delhi horror”. Yet the public reaction was largely muted beyond the immediate community. On social media, some expressed shock, but the story quickly drowned in the endless churn of scandals of the day.

The perpetrators in these cases were boys. Teenagers. Still in school. But they knew exactly what they were doing.

So, what do you do with a country where little boys are learning how to rape?

We should look inside homes, where older cousins unlock their phones and pass them around. In hostels, where one boy finds a clip and the rest gather around it like a secret. In schools, where no one talks about consent, but everyone knows which websites are unblocked. In families, where fathers joke about girls being “too smart,” and uncles tell boys to “be a man” before they’ve finished puberty

Because the truth is, no child invents this on their own. They are taught.

They are taught that sex is violence, that control is arousing, that women’s pain is not real, or worse, that it is part of pleasure. They are taught by the internet, where violent pornographic content is more accessible than accurate information, and spreads faster than any formal education ever will. They are taught by adults who either participate or say nothing. They are taught by silence, reinforced every time a complaint is dismissed, every time boys will be boys is said out loud, every time a girl is warned but a boy is not.

They are not taught about bodies. They are not taught about consent. They are not taught that intimacy and harm are not the same thing.

They are not taught, because in India, sex is shameful.

We have allowed an ecosystem to grow where adolescent boys are fed violent fantasies and denied real knowledge. Where they are told to be dominant, but never taught how to listen. Where they are punished for being soft, and rewarded for toughness, even when that toughness bleeds into cruelty. We have created a vacuum of education, of empathy, of ethics, and into that vacuum, misogyny rushes in.

What we are seeing is not a deviation from social order but a product of it. The violence committed by teenage boys cannot be explained away as immaturity or poor judgment. This is about culture. They are taught, slowly and consistently, what they are entitled to take and what they will be forgiven for. By the time violence occurs, it is often the final step in a process of long social permission, not its shocking beginning.

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Taken together, these pieces– the daunting statistics, the low convictions, the case studies, the skewed discourses – paint a sobering picture of a society that has, in effect, made peace with violence against women.

This is not a conscious or proud acceptance. Few would openly say they condone such violence. Yet through collective inaction, superficial reactions, and warped narratives, Indian society demonstrates a high tolerance for misogynistic violence. It has adapted its behavior and expectations to the omnipresent threat rather than aggressively challenging the root causes of that threat.

Women, of course, adapt most of all. From a young age, Indian women internalize unwritten rules to mitigate risk: don’t stay out late, avoid certain routes, dress “decently,” mistrust strangers, endure catcalls in silence, hesitate before reporting harassment. They are taught that their safety is primarily their own responsibility, essentially, that they must accommodate themselves to a society that is unsafe, rather than expecting society to become safer.

This constant state of vigilance and restriction is so routine that it’s often not recognized as the emergency that it is. It’s just daily life.

This is the essence of rape culture, a culture where the prevalence of sexual violence is normalized and woven into the fabric of social norms, to the point that it becomes an ambient condition everyone adjusts to.

Indeed, talk to any group of Indian women and you will soon hear harrowing personal stories, the friend whose husband beats her, the cousin harassed by in-laws for dowry, the classmate groped on her commute. These are not rare anomalies. They are common experiences, shared in hushed tones or dark jokes at ladies’ gatherings. Families hush them up out of shame. Politicians pay lip service but treat them as secondary issues. Media turns them into one-day headlines or salacious drama.

There is also a broader social comfort in placing the burden on women to adapt rather than forcing change on male behavior or patriarchal norms. It is “easier” (in the short term) to impose curfews on female students than to confront why male students feel entitled to harass them. It is more convenient to tell women “don’t go there” than to ensure that “there” (be it a street or workplace) is safe for them. Over time, these conveniences calcify into institutions.

For example, many colleges still effectively blame female students for any sexual incidents by enforcing strict dorm curfews and dress codes, while leaving male behavior unchecked. Similarly, the fact that marital rape is still not a criminal offense in India (despite years of advocacy) signals a deep societal comfort with a certain degree of violence within marriage. It’s seen as a private matter, part of the marital bargain, not to be meddled with. This legal blind spot, unique among many democracies, stems from a patriarchal belief that marriage grants a man sexual entitlement over his wife. The law thus mirrors society’s accommodation of violence, as long as it conforms to traditional structures.

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All of this is not accidental. Male violence against women is a feature of patriarchy used to maintain dominance, and society’s institutions (from family to state) collude, consciously or not, in sustaining that power imbalance.

The Indian context provides plenty of evidence for this. Each time a politician makes a flippant remark in reference to a rape, or a khap panchayat justifies an assault as punishment for a girl’s “immoral” behavior, the message sent is that women’s bodies are acceptable collateral for preserving a male-centric social order.

It’s a form of conditioning. Women are conditioned to expect and tolerate a certain level of abuse, men are conditioned to believe certain situations grant them impunity, and everyone else is conditioned to shrug it off as long as it doesn’t hit too close to home.

And this conditioning has led to a dangerous learned helplessness.

Indians see so many reports of rape and assault that many have subconsciously thrown up their hands, “This is how things are, what can we do?”

There is an almost fatalistic acceptance. After a particularly gruesome case makes news, there might be protests or trending hashtags (#JusticeForX) for a few days. But soon enough, life goes on. The country “moves on” to the next issue, and the unresolved questions of women’s safety remain on the backburner. Unlike after Nirbhaya in 2012, when protests forced some legal reforms, most cases now do not produce lasting change.

Even language reflects this desensitization. Rape news has become a staple of nightly news and social media feeds, often delivered in a dry, statistical tone or sensationalized briefly and then dropped.

The phrase “another Nirbhaya” has been used so often in headlines for various cases that it’s lost impact. It’s almost expected that every few months another “Nirbhaya” will happen. This cyclical consumption of women’s trauma as news fodder, without corresponding systemic action, ends up dulling the edge of empathy.

Yet, there are small signs that not everyone is content to stay numbed.

The fact that survivors and activists continue speaking out, continue pushing for change, is itself an act of resistance against this comfortable complacency. For instance, when the family of the Bihar hostel victim went public with allegations of a cover-up, they punctured the attempted normalization of that crime. And when writers and thinkers call out society, like journalist Nilanjana Bhowmick did, noting bitterly that despite all the marches since 2012, “here we are again, another watershed moment?”, they are refusing to let the issue die quietly.

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The Indian society’s desensitization to violence against women is not a natural condition It is a self-inflicted one, borne of convenience, fear, and deeply ingrained patriarchy. It is the product of choosing comfort over justice – the comfort of believing rapes happen due to bad luck or bad victims, rather than facing the arduous task of uprooting misogyny; the comfort of moving on quickly, rather than dwelling on painful truths about our society.

But this comfort is a deadly one.

Breaking out of this stupor will require a collective moral jolt, a determination to stay angry, stay uncomfortable in the face of each and every atrocity. We must reject the narratives that mollify our conscience, the urge to treat cases as one-off incidents, the urge to blame the victim or doubt her by default, the urge to prioritize male reputations over female lives.

Public outrage cannot be reserved only for the rare “perfect” victim who captures our hearts. It must extend to all victims, including those whose lifestyles or identities challenge our biases.

Practically, this means several things. It means relentlessly holding institutions accountable: every police officer who refuses to file a woman’s FIR, every school or hospital that covers up an assault, every judge who invokes regressive stereotypes – all must face public and legal scrutiny.

It means believing survivors as a rule, not an exception, and understanding that false accusations are the anomaly, not the norm.

It means re-educating our sons from early on that consent is inviolate, that women are not objects or honor vessels, and that violence is an unacceptable exercise of power.

It means men in particular must shed their comfortable ignorance and confront the culture of entitlement that underpins this violence.

Politically, leaders need to stop downplaying incidents and instead make women’s safety and equality a non-negotiable priority, beyond token slogans. Laws that are progressive on paper (like the Domestic Violence Act) need proper enforcement and funding. Fast-track courts and better policing are necessary, but not sufficient if societal attitudes don’t change. The fear of law must be complemented by a fear of social condemnation for perpetrators. Right now, too often it’s the survivor who faces social consequences while the perpetrator carries on.

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Ultimately, Indians must undo the “learning” of living with violence.

We must refuse to treat each new rape case as just another news byte to scroll past. Instead, we should feel a collective shame and anger that lingers enough to galvanize action in our own circles and communities.

It will be an uncomfortable shift. And it requires dismantling long-held patriarchal comfort zones and confronting ugly truths about power and prejudice in our society. But only by doing so can we hope to transform that comfort with violence into discomfort and finally, into zero tolerance.

Every time we choose silence or indifference, we are complicit in the next dowry death, the next gang-rape, the next little girl’s trauma. The blood of those victims stains all of us. It is far past time to snap out of the cozy stupor of adaptation. The goal must be nothing less than to re-sensitize society, to rekindle the outrage on a sustained basis until real change is achieved.

Living without fear is not a privilege to be enjoyed by a few, it is a right of every woman. And a society that prides itself on progress and modernity can no longer afford to live comfortably with the constant, throbbing fear that half its citizens endure.

Until every woman can walk unafraid, we are not a free country.

Note: My essays will always be free to read. If you’d like to support the time and care that goes into writing them buy me a coffee ☕

This essay is concerned only with religions that have become institutional. It does not examine private belief, mystical experience, or informal ritual practice. It begins at the point where religions acquire structure: codified doctrine, designated interpreters, enforceable moral rules, and continuity beyond individual communities. It centers primarily on Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam because they are among the most globally influential institutional religions, with developed expansive interpretive and legal infrastructures, and because their histories offer abundant material for examining the relationship between gender, authority, and moral regulation. Similar dynamics can be observed in other religions, but these three provide especially well-documented cases of how religious authority becomes formalized and enforced across time and geography.

Historically, institutional religion emerges alongside social stratification. As societies grow sedentary, accumulate property, formalize kinship, and regulate inheritance, moral authority becomes necessary to stabilize these arrangements.

Engels and later feminist scholars have observed that patriarchal society emerged hand-in-hand with private property and the need to control lineage.

Religion then became a crucial tool in supplying that authority by locating social order in something external to human negotiation. Customs that were once flexible and communal hardened into “divine” commandments. Hierarchies of gender and class were not presented as human inventions, but as sacred order. This transition also became visible in the rise of priesthoods, legal-religious codes, and sanctioned interpretive hierarchies across Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam, despite their theological differences.

Once religion operated as moral governance, it required objects of regulation. Bodies, relationships, lineage, and legitimacy became central concerns. And women’s bodies have consistently occupied this regulatory center since.

This is not inferred from isolated practices but observable through recurring legal, ritual, and narrative structures. Marriage laws, sexual norms, inheritance rules, purity codes, and testimonial credibility converge repeatedly on women as subjects requiring supervision. The consistency of this convergence across geography and scripture suggests design rather than coincidence.

Historical records do not provide access to intention. They do not tell us what early religious authorities consciously believed about women’s reproductive capacity or social power. What they do show, with remarkable clarity though, is outcome.

Notably, Gerda Lerner and others argue that the “world historical defeat of the female sex” occurred when men sought to ensure their paternity of offspring in order to pass on property. Carol P. Christ defines patriarchy as “a system of male dominance in which men dominate women through the control of female sexuality, with the intent of passing property to male heirs”.

This encapsulates why emerging religious institutions became intensely concerned with women’s chastity and fertility.

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Again, institutional religion does not erase women’s significance. It reframes it. Women appear as bearers of lineage, preservers of purity, symbols of honor, and conduits of moral continuity. Their importance is affirmed precisely in ways that deny them autonomy.

Power is acknowledged only insofar as it is controlled and value is granted only insofar as it is disciplined. This dual movement allows religion to rely on women while denying them authority over what they sustain.

At this point, interpretation becomes unavoidable. When moral systems repeatedly locate social stability in the regulation of women, one must ask why authority requires such sustained attention to female sexuality, reproduction, and obedience. When religious law defines legitimacy through women’s bodies but assigns interpretive control to men, the distribution of power becomes legible even without conspiratorial intent.

One possible interpretation is that religion resolves a structural problem rather than a philosophical one. It preserves societies by relocating agency away from bodies that cannot be fully controlled and into abstract authority that can.

Women’s reproductive capacity, while indispensable, resists ownership. Institutional religion responds not by denying this capacity but by embedding it within moral frameworks that demand supervision, compliance, and sacrifice. Power is not eliminated but displaced. And then this displacement is depicted as order.

By moralizing control rather than naming it, religion secures legitimacy over generations. The result is a system in which resistance can be cast as immorality rather than dissent, and inequality can be defended as cosmic necessity rather than political choice.

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It is also necessary to acknowledge what critics will quickly point out: within each of these religions there have been internal debates, sects, and moments of egalitarian argument—women patrons and sages, goddess traditions, women leaders in early Christian communities, reformist and feminist reinterpretations in modern Hindu and Islamic thought.

Yet the enduring pattern is not the absence of countercurrents but their containment. Even where egalitarian “flickers” emerge, the prevailing institutional trajectories repeatedly re-center male authority and re-subordinate women.

The argument here is not that no woman ever resisted or interpreted otherwise, but that the dominant institutional forms proved remarkably skilled at absorbing or marginalizing such resistance.

Religion’s authority therefore cannot be understood as merely theological. If its authority were merely theological, critique would remain abstract. If its gendered outcomes were incidental, reform would be sufficient. Records supports neither conclusion.

By examining mythic narratives, legal traditions, ritual practices, and feminist reinterpretations across religions the essay will trace how this foundational arrangement reproduces itself through variation but without any fundamental change. The question then is not whether religion values women. The question is why it requires their subordination in order to function.

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One thing we need to understand it that religion does not rely on law alone. Before submission can be enforced, it must be internalized.

Myth performs this work.

Religious stories are not preserved as neutral cultural memory. They function as moral instruction embedded in story, shaping instinctive judgments about order, danger, virtue, and transgression. Within these religions, myth becomes an early means of governance, establishing gendered limits long before formal authority intervenes.

Foundational texts in Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam repeatedly position women at moments where order is tested. These women are not defined by cruelty or chaos. They are articulate, devoted, desiring, or resolute. What renders them dangerous is proximity to agency. Their choices become moments of disruption through which instability is introduced and later resolved. The consequence is rarely confined to the individual woman. Her action is made to reorganize the moral universe around her.

Consider Eve in the Judeo-Christian tradition. In Genesis, Eve’s defining act is seeking knowledge by eating the forbidden fruit. Her act is framed as the pursuit of knowledge. The punishment that follows is not proportionate to the disobedience but expansive in scope. Pain in childbirth, subordination, exile, and inherited guilt are attached to her action and transmitted through generations. The lesson here is unmistakable. Female agency destabilizes cosmic order. Knowledge, when sought by a woman, becomes recast as the origin of suffering itself.

Hindu epics reproduce this logic through figures whose stories are often misread as isolated tragedies rather than patterns.

Draupadi occupies this position with particular intensity because she refuses silence. In the Mahabharata, her public humiliation is followed not by justice but by interrogation. She asks whether she was lost before or after her husbands lost themselves. The question exposes the moral incoherence of a system that permits her violation. The text allows her speech, yet responds by recoding her anger as excess. Over time, interpretive traditions increasingly cast her not as a violated subject but as a catalyst of war, attributing catastrophe to her refusal to accept humiliation quietly.

In the Ramayana, Queen Kaikeyi provides another instructive case. She does not steal authority or act outside established norms. She acts within the framework of legitimate power, invoking boons explicitly granted to her. Her refusal to soften her demand or subordinate it to masculine consensus triggers panic. She is transformed into a symbol of ambition and manipulation. In a male figure, such action would be read as foresight or ambition in service of lineage. In Kaikeyi, it is characterised as moral failure. The narrative does not contest her right to act. It contests her audacity in exercising it.

Other Hindu heroines underscore variations of the same themes. Kunti’s story is written around sanctioned and unsanctioned sexuality. Her early motherhood, though enabled through divine intervention, is marked by secrecy and lifelong guilt. Karna’s abandonment becomes her private burden rather than a structural indictment. The epic spares her from overt censure only because she later conforms, using that same boon to bear sons within wedlock to continue her husband’s lineage. The subtext is that female sexuality is only redeemed when it serves patriarchal ends.

Radha represents a subtler form of discipline, often insulated from critique because it is devotional rather than juridical. She is neither wife nor mother nor ruler. She is longing. Her love is celebrated because it consumes her without altering the object of her devotion. She gives without receiving and loves without possession. Her centrality lies not in action but in renunciation. Female desire is rendered virtuous only when it abandons reciprocity and speech.

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Islamic traditions deploy similar moral positioning through figures whose lives are filtered through interpretation. The Quran’s account of Adam and his wife (often called Hawwā (Eve) in commentary) does not single her out for blame. Yet classical interpreters imported the same bias found in the Bible. By the 10th century, influential scholars like al-Ṭabarī taught that “through the woman’s weakness and guile, Satan could bring about Adam’s downfall”. They elaborated punishments beyond the Quranic text: woman was cursed with monthly bleeding, painful childbirth, and lesser intellect “because Hawwa’ had tempted Adam”.

One interpretation even stated that were it not for Eve’s error, women would have been wise and free from menstruation. In these stories, female nature itself became tainted and in need of surveillance.

Even the most revered women are praised in ways that reinforce obedience. In Christianity and Islam, Mary (Maryam) is upheld as an ideal precisely because of her chastity and submission to God’s plan. When told she will bear a miraculous son, Mary humbly replies, “Let it be to me according to your word.” She is venerated precisely because her purity is absolute and her obedience unquestioned. Her exceptional status depends on sexual renunciation rather than autonomy.

Aisha, a wife of Prophet Muhammad, occupies a more complex position. She is recognized for her intelligence, her memory, and her nearness to authority. Her role as a transmitter of knowledge is affirmed. Yet accounts of her life also became warnings. A Quranic revelation defending Aisha from a false adultery accusation introduced stricter norms of veiling and seclusion to “protect” women’s honor. Her life is repeatedly mobilized to regulate women, her complexity narrowed into prescription. Her presence does not unsettle hierarchy but becomes a mechanism for reinforcing it.

Finally, consider Hajar (Hagar) in the Islamic telling. She is Ibraham’s concubine-turned-wife who, with her infant, is left in the desert by Ibraham’s decree (per God’s test). Her story is one of extraordinary endurance, scrambling alone between hills searching for water, refusing to give up until a spring miraculously appears. Her desperate run is ritually reenacted by millions of pilgrims in the Hajj, enshrining her suffering and perseverance as holy exemplars. Yet the context of her plight, that she was cast out to preserve Sarah and Ibraham’s household peace, is rarely condemned in religious lore.

As scholar Amina Wadud observes, the tale is “coated with patriarchy.” Hajar and her son are saved by God, but her abandonment is white-washed into a trial of faith. To this day, Hajar is praised as a symbol of pious resignation and her agency is honored only to the extent that it aligns with sacrifice.

These figures do not function as individual lessons. A common logic runs through them and what initially appears distinct begins to feel familiar. When women in scripture or myth assert themselves, whether through seeking knowledge, demanding justice, exercising power, expressing desire, or simply refusing silence, the narrative reframes them as sources of instability. Their stories teach women how to interpret their own anger, desire, and refusal. Male figures may err and recover but female figures who act are made responsible for catastrophe.

By the time institutional regulation becomes explicit, myth has already trained its audience. Law then does not arrive into a neutral landscape. It arrives into a moral imagination already shaped to receive it.

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As religious stories harden into doctrine, control moves from implication to explicit rule. Sexuality and reproduction become central because they determine inheritance, legitimacy, and the boundaries of belonging. The weight of these concerns lands, predictably, on women with relentless consistency.

Women’s sexuality is never allowed to belong fully to them. Marriage in these systems was not merely a personal union but a transfer of guardianship. Ancient Hindu law (Manusmṛiti 9.3) flatly states: “The father guards [a woman] in childhood, the husband guards her in youth, the sons guard her in old age; a woman is never fit for independence.”.

This principle, that a female must always be under a male’s authority, found echoes in other cultures.

Christian marriage liturgy long described the father “giving away” the bride to the groom, reflecting a transfer of ownership. Islamic law requires a bride’s wali (male guardian) to consent to her marriage, similarly framing marriage as a contract between men over a woman.

In all cases, a woman’s sexuality is subsumed under male supervision, first by her natal family then by her husband.

Chastity and “family honor” became obsessions. In patriarchal marriage customs around the world, a girl’s virginity was guarded by her family through seclusion, dress codes, and sometimes even physical markers (chastity belts, purity pledges, etc.). A bride’s sexual “untouched” status was imperative, a rule enforced by intense social shame or violence.

As Carol Christ notes, all these customs have one purpose. To ensure that a man’s children are his. In a world without DNA tests, controlling women absolutely was seen as the only sure way to guarantee paternity.

Religion thus lent divine mandate to what was essentially a property concern: legitimacy of heirs. The double standard in sexual morality became entrenched. A man’s infidelity or lust might be treated as a pardonable lapse or even a normal impulse, while a woman’s slightest deviance was a catastrophic disgrace.

Even today, in most communities, male desire is not treated as a destabilizing force. The onus is on women to dress modestly and remove themselves from temptation, as if female modesty is the gate keeping male behavior in check.

A telling hadith in Islam says that if a woman even perfumes herself in public, she is an adulteress in God’s sight, a hyperbolic warning that any display of female sexuality outside marriage is a grave offense.

The same religions that preach spiritual equality also created legal regimes where women’s bodies are potential “sources of sin” that must be controlled.

Women are thus positioned as the guardians of moral boundaries that men are presumed to test.

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This extends to rules of purity and space, marking female biology as suspect. Menstruation and childbirth, natural processes unique to women, are commonly treated as ritually polluting or requiring seclusion.

The Hebrew Bible (Leviticus 15:19-33) declares a menstruating woman “unclean” for seven days, during which anything she touches can become unclean. Hindu tradition in many regions forbids women from entering temples or kitchens during menses, seeing them as impure. (This was the rationale behind the famous Sabarimala temple ban on women of menstruating age in Kerala, the deity was celibate and women were deemed a threat to the sanctity.) Islam exempts menstruating women from fasting and prayer, which some frame as mercy, but also bars them from touching the Quran or entering mosques in that state.

Across cultures, taboos around menstruation reinforce the idea that female bodies are periodically tainted, in need of purification rituals or exclusion. Women are excluded from sacred spaces during biological processes that religion simultaneously depends upon for continuity. Meanwhile, male bodies are presumed standard and unsullied.

And religious law extends this obligation into enforceable inequality.

Marriage laws grant husbands sexual and domestic authority. Divorce procedures burden women with proof, stigma, and economic vulnerability. Inheritance rules prioritize male lines. Legal credibility is often calibrated by gender. These arrangements are not cultural distortions of religion. They are repeatedly justified through religious reasoning and upheld by religious institutions.

Motherhood, ostensibly revered, was weaponized to bind women to prescribed roles. Religions glorify mothers. “Paradise lies at the feet of your mother,” says a famous hadith but this veneration is contingent on a woman fulfilling her “duty” to bear and raise children under patriarchy’s terms. A woman who seeks to avoid or delay motherhood (through celibacy, contraception, or career) often faces stigma for “denying her God-given role.”

In the Catholic Church, motherhood is exalted, yet the same Church forbids women from priesthood and preaches against birth control, effectively insisting that a woman’s highest calling is procreation and self-sacrifice for family. Reverence thus doubles as obligation.

As someone sharply noted, in patriarchal religions women’s wombs are sacralized only so that their use can be controlled.

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But control does not rely only on punishment. Religious systems learned that outright force was not always needed to maintain these norms, internalization did the heavy lifting.

Girls are raised with the idea that their worth hinges on sexual purity and later their success as wives and mothers. Modesty codes, for example, are often taught as a woman’s own virtue. By making women police themselves, religion achieves what constant policing by men could not. When women themselves embrace the surveillance of their bodies as righteous, the patriarchal order becomes self-perpetuating.

Deviation, when it does occur, triggers harsh consequences to set an example. A woman who transgresses sexual norms, whether by premarital sex, adultery, or even being raped (which in some contexts is perversely seen as her fault) is often branded for life. Her “immorality” is used to discredit her entirely. She may lose the right to marry, to be believed, even to live. For instance, in conservative societies (India) a rape victim is shamed as if she invited dishonor. Her testimony is doubted, her presence is seen as an embarrassment.

This extreme double standard (a male sinner can still be a leader or hero, but a female sinner is irredeemable) maintains a climate of fear. Every woman knows her reputation hangs by a thread, and thus many comply with restrictive norms out of sheer self-preservation.

In sum, this continuity from Christian purity laws to Hindu strictures to Islamic family law, underscores how vital controlling women was to what we call “religious order.” Power over women was not a side-effect of religious governance. It was one of its central pillars.

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But how did these extensive controls remain in place for centuries?

A major factor is the role of religious authorities, priests, imams, monks, jurists, as administrators of patriarchy. These men (and it has almost exclusively been men) serve as the gatekeepers of doctrine, determining how sacred texts are interpreted and applied. Crucially, they often claim neutrality, presenting themselves as mere transmitters of God’s will rather than power-brokers. This claim is foundational to their power. By positioning themselves as conduits rather than authors, clergy exercise authority while disavowing responsibility for its consequences. Decisions that shape women’s lives are framed as unavoidable outcomes of scripture rather than as human judgment.

This authority also depends on distance. The farther interpretation is removed from lived experience, the easier it becomes to moralize it. Clergy speak with certainty about sexuality, marriage, reproduction, and obedience without inhabiting the bodies most affected by these rules. They regulate pregnancies they will never carry, moralize sexual conduct they will never be punished for, and adjudicate suffering they will never endure. The distance allows a stunning lack of empathy to cloak itself in piety. The “fathers of the faith” will never face the burdens their rules impose on mothers, daughters, or wives.

It is no coincidence hence that women have been systematically excluded from clerical ranks in most religions. By keeping interpretive authority male, religious institutions ensure that women live under rules they had no voice in shaping. As the saying goes, “if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.” Women have been on the menu for millennia of religious rule-making. They are told they are spiritually equal even as they are barred from decision-making. They preserve ritual, transmit tradition, perform care work, and sustain community life. Their labor is essential. Their authority is not.

When women challenge these rules, clerical bodies typically respond not by debating the point, but by undermining the challenger. Female critics are painted as hysterical, heretical, or simply ignorant of the true theology. For example, if women argue that certain scriptural interpretations are misogynistic, the retort is often that they are misreading, or influenced by Western immorality, or endangering community harmony. The critique is seldom answered on merits. Instead, the woman’s character or loyalty to the faith is questioned.

This moves the issue from “Is the rule just?” to “Are you a good believer?”, effectively silencing dissent. In many religious communities, to openly question gender rules is to have one’s faith and purity instantly doubted.

Authority is conflated with the faith itself, so to oppose the authority is cast as opposing God.

Even attempts at reform tend to be carefully managed by these same gatekeepers. Facing modern pressures, religious institutions sometimes tweak practices: e.g. encouraging girls’ education, allowing women’s committees, perhaps even female scripture teachers. But these changes, while welcome, usually stop well short of altering the fundamental power imbalance. They are “managed accommodations” – allowing women a taste of inclusion without ceding real decision-making power. Women are invited to feel included without being empowered to decide.

By controlling both the interpretation of doctrine and the pace of change, clergy maintain what one might call a patriarchal equilibrium. They offer justifications that often spiritualize women’s subordination, calling it “complementary roles” or “different but equal dignity” ,while never actually relinquishing male authority. Indeed, when secular forces push too hard (for instance, laws demanding equal rights), religious leaders often invoke freedom of religion to hold onto discriminatory practices. The result is that in many parts of the world, religion remains the final fortress of formal patriarchy. Even as secular law granted women property rights, suffrage, and equality before law, religious law in those same societies lagged behind or actively resisted, especially on issues like divorce, inheritance, and clergy roles

It’s important to emphasize that clerical enforcement of women’s subordination is usually couched in moral language, as protection, as honor, as divine plan. This framing makes it harder to criticize. A woman who complains that a rule is unjust can be accused of blasphemy or selfishness. The deep intertwining of piety and patriarchal norms means that fighting the system can feel like fighting one’s own faith community. Clergy, intentionally or not, exploit this entanglement to preserve their monopoly on authority. They are its primary mechanism. Through interpretation, enforcement, and managed reform, they ensure that hierarchy remains stable while appearing ordained. Religion does not survive despite clerical control. It survives through it.

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Given this history, a blunt question arises: Why have women stayed within religions that constrain them so profoundly?

The answer is not that women are blind to their own subjugation, generations of women have keenly felt the injustices, but rather that religion has also given women powerful reasons to remain loyal, or at least to acquiesce, despite the costs.

One key reason is that religion does not only restrict. It also shapes identity and offers meaning. From childhood, many women are taught to find purpose in the very roles that limit them. They learn that being a good daughter, a modest maiden, a selfless mother, is not only socially rewarded but spiritually exalted. Sacrifice is reframed as virtue.

“God chose you for this burden, your patience is your strength,” women are told.

Psychological studies of internalized oppression show that people can genuinely come to value the traits that a dominant system imposes on them. A devout woman might derive deep pride from her ability to endure hardship for her family, because her religion casts that endurance as saintly. In this way, religion trains women to locate meaning in sacrifice, virtue in restraint, and dignity in compliance. The cost (their curtailed freedom) is repackaged as the currency of holiness.

Religion also offers community and belonging that can be hard to abandon. A woman’s entire social world may be woven through religious institutions, family expectations, friendships, marriage prospects, community respect all tied to being “one of us.” To leave the faith or even just to complain too loudly is to risk ostracism or incomprehension from those she loves. In many traditional societies, there is no clear life outside the religious fold. Not believing is not a real option. Thus, many women stay because the alternative is isolation, stigma, or danger.

Sociologist Deniz Kandiyoti famously described the “patriarchal bargain,” wherein women comply with patriarchy as a strategy to receive its promised protections, food, shelter, acceptance , in a world organised against them. Religious belonging often forms part of this bargain. Conforming to pious womanhood can bring a measure of security: a kind husband who values “good” women, a community that will rally around a widow or mother, the general safety accorded to those under male guardianship.

By contrast, stepping outside the lines (say, rejecting the veil, or marrying outside the faith, or remaining childless by choice) might expose a woman to harassment, loneliness, or even violence with little support.

Moreover, religions are adept at cultivating fear and hope in metaphysical terms. Fear, not just of social backlash, but of divine displeasure or spiritual loss, weighs heavily. Many women sincerely believe that their eternal fate or their family’s blessings depend on their maintaining religious norms. When the stakes are framed as heaven or hell, it’s no surprise that doubt is suppressed.

Hope, conversely, comes in promises that current sufferings will be recompensed. The figure of the martyr or the long-suffering wife who wins her abusive husband’s soul by silent perseverance is prevalent across religions. Such narratives offer oppressed women a kind of deferred justice, “bear it now, you’ll be a saint later.” While arguably cruel, these promises have comforted many women in unbearable situations where religion provided the only framework that validated their pain.

Additionally, for countless women, their mother and grandmother and ancestors lived and survived through the faith, and there is pride and comfort in that continuity. Traditions carry memories. The thought of breaking from one’s faith can feel like betraying one’s forebears, or uprooting one’s children from a heritage.

Even feminist scholars of religion note that women often find ways to “work within” their religious traditions to improve their lot (for example, joining women’s piety groups, or reinterpreting texts in feminist ways) precisely because leaving entirely would incur too high an emotional and cultural cost. It is a testament to human adaptability that women have carved out spaces of relative autonomy within even very patriarchal structures.

To outsiders, a devout woman’s commitment can look like complicity in her own oppression. But labeling it simply as ignorance or weakness is both inaccurate and unfair. Many women fully understand the patriarchal nature of their religion yet choose a path of negotiation rather than rebellion, because they calculate (often correctly) that open rebellion would bring more harm than good to them and their loved ones. They bargain, they sometimes wield the authority that comes with being seen as “virtuous” to subtly influence husbands or sons. They may not have open power, but they become experts in “indirect agency”. These subtleties are lost if we assume women stay solely due to brainwashing or passivity.

Understanding this resilience of female devotion is not to excuse the injustices, but to recognize that a system that endures must offer something in return. Patriarchal religion has survived not simply by force, but by harnessing women’s deepest values, family, love, virtue, community, God ,into its service. This is why appeals to individual choice miss the point. Women do choose religion and uphold it, not because it’s truly just, but often because it’s presented as sacred and immutable, and because all alternatives are made unthinkable or inaccessible.

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What usually follows an argument like this is a demand for moderation. Surely religion isn’t all bad for women? Doesn’t it provide comfort, charity, a sense of purpose? Shouldn’t we be “nuanced” and acknowledge the good with the bad?

Many well-meaning people, including women of faith, urge this, a reminder that religion is complex, that women find meaning within it, that critique must remain careful so as not to alienate those who believe. This demand is neither innocent nor intelligent.

In contexts of systematic oppression, excessive insistence on seeing “both sides” can blur clarity. Yes, religion has offered community and meaning, but as we have seen, often only on the condition of female submission. To celebrate the nurturing community of a religion while ignoring that it demands wives submit to husbands is to miss the forest for the trees. The “positive aspects” frequently touted (community, charity, identity) are not separate from the patriarchal arrangement. They are the rewards of conformity.

People want to believe that their cherished faith tradition is not inherently unjust, that it can easily be reformed or interpreted benignly. Thus they highlight personal anecdotes of happy religious women, or quote egalitarian verses from scripture, as if these outweigh the global, recurrent patterns we’ve discussed.

Certainly, individual women have found personal empowerment and divine love in their religions, human experiences are diverse. But systemic analysis isn’t about individual exceptions. The structure of institutional religion, as established, has a demonstrable dependence on female subordination. To change that fundamentally would be to uproot the system’s foundations, not merely trim a few branches.

Some reformers argue that one can separate the core theology from the patriarchal accretions. When nearly every major tradition, at its doctrinal core, positions male authority as divinely endorsed, whether it’s the God of the Bible saying “he shall rule over you” to Eve, or the laws of Manu declaring women forever dependent, or Islamic jurisprudence giving husbands qiwāma (guardianship/authority) over wives, it is not easy to claim these are mere later “distortions.”

One can certainly reinterpret or find liberating angles (and many feminist believers do admirable work in this area), but the point remains that for millennia those texts and tenets have authorized patriarchy.

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Thus, saying “religion has a woman problem, but with some tweaks it’ll be fine” risks underestimating the depth of the issue. It can devolve into apologetics that keep women hoping for crumbs of change while the constitution holds firm. Moderation in this context can become the reflex of those who want the benefit of critique without the discomfort of following it to its conclusion.

Just as a person in an abusive relationship might stay out of fear or love or hope for change, women in religion might stay for reasons that don’t imply the system is fair. Their participation is not proof of consent to oppression, often it’s a lack of viable choice, or an attachment formed under duress. The very fact that religion has done much good for many does not erase that it has systematically denied women freedom and equality. In fact, it often co-opted women’s energy – their capacity for care, their resilience, to uphold the very system that marginalizes them. That is not a duality to be comfortably balanced, it is a tragedy to be critically examined.

Religion has survived for centuries by teaching women to absorb contradiction and by teaching everyone else to call that absorption virtue. It has shown again and again that it prefers women governed rather than women free. It will honor women symbolically, spiritually, maternally, devotionally but it will resist women politically and interpretively. That preference is not a flaw to be corrected. It is the condition of its survival.

To truly value women, a faith would need to relinquish the need to control them. Few, if any, major religious institutions have done this to date. The women who have carried the weight of these “divine” mandates deserve more than a balanced acknowledgment of their suffering. That will likely require nothing less than a reinterpretation (or even overthrow) of some age-old “sacred” hierarchies.

Once this is acknowledged, reconciliation ceases to be a meaningful objective.

Note: My essays will always be free to read. If you’d like to support the time and care that goes into writing them buy me a coffee ☕

In India, marriage is not a question of if but when and to whom. By the time a person reaches their thirties being unmarried is no longer a neutral detail of biography, it is treated as a failure of character and/or a lapse in responsibility. A deviation that demands an explanation.

The near-universality of marriage, coupled with the country’s exceptionally low divorce rate is frequently misread as evidence of familial strength or cultural coherence.

A more disciplined reading suggests something else.

What emerges, when examined with any seriousness, is a society whose marriage system has evolved less as a test of men’s suitability and more as an elaborate shelter for their inadequacies. Indian men do not marry because they have achieved the interpersonal capacities necessary for companionship. They marry because an entire social, legal, economic and ideological system exists to guarantee them wives, irrespective of their individual suitability as partners.

Arranged marriage is less a custom than an infrastructure, a mechanism through which women are allocated to men according to the requirements of caste reproduction, property transmission and familial status, with the language of “compatibility” functioning as a thin veneer.

Its genius lies in what it does not require.

It does not require men to possess emotional literacy. It does not require them to unlearn misogyny. It does not require them to be competent in domestic labour, or willing to decenter themselves, or capable of tolerating a woman’s autonomy without perceiving it as a personal affront. The selection criteria in most arranged matches are orthogonal to these questions. A man is evaluated on his caste location, his income, his family’s honor, his degrees and, occasionally, his height.

The rest, his habit of domination, his inability to listen, his contempt for women’s work is naturalized as private, trivial or simply “how men are.”

If this system were removed and women were allowed to choose freely, a disquieting truth would become visible very quickly. A frightening number of Indian men would simply not be chosen.

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To see why, it helps to begin from first principles. In relational systems where individuals form partnerships through dating, shared spaces and mutual evaluation rather than through family brokerage, male desirability is not determined by birth status alone.

Men who wish to be chosen repeatedly must demonstrate basic interpersonal competence. They must be able to communicate, to regulate their emotions without violence, to listen, to accept a partner’s subjectivity, to share domestic work, to negotiate sex without coercion, to recognize boundaries and consent, to tolerate disagreement without perceiving it as an attack on their masculinity.

Those who cannot do this face negative feedback, rejection, break-ups, social censure, which in turn pushes at least some of them towards change. There is a feedback loop between behavior and outcomes.

That loop is almost entirely missing for Indian men.

The average Indian boy grows up in an environment that buffers him from consequence. He is more likely than his sister to be excused from household labor, more likely to have his education prioritized, more likely to be granted physical and social freedom, more likely to have his anger interpreted as stress, his irresponsibility as immaturity, his entitlement as normal masculine behavior.

Large-scale time-use data only quantify what ethnography has long observed. Women spend several hours more per day on unpaid domestic and care work than men do, and India sits near the most unequal end of the global spectrum.

That inequality is not simply about chores, it is the training ground in which one gender learns to anticipate and smooth the disruptions of others, and the other learns to assume that its disruptions will be smoothed for it.

The normative script that emerges from this training is brutally simple.

Daughterhood is a probationary phase during which a girl proves her capacity to serve. Wifehood is her permanent posting.

Sonhood, on the other hand, is preparation only in the sense that a boy must acquire enough educational and economic capital to remain the notional head of a household. He is rarely called upon to practise the care work that will sustain that household.

Mothers cushion sons from responsibility and then, years later, hand them over to other women with the quiet confidence that this work of cushioning will continue.

Fathers model authority more often than vulnerability. Sisters are instructed to adjust. Daughters-in-law are told that men are like this only, that anger is natural, that silence is masculinity, that their job is to understand him even when he makes no attempt to understand them.

The emotional consequences are predictable.

Men enter adulthood underdeveloped in precisely those capacities, self-regulation, empathy, receptivity to criticism, that intimate relationships require. Women enter adulthood overdeveloped in precisely those capacities that make them vulnerable to exploitation.

In that context, the prospect of courting someone, facing rejection and being evaluated on one’s emotional competence is not just uncomfortable for men, it is almost conceptually alien.

The Indian son is raised to expect a wife, not to earn one.

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It is tempting to imagine that the emergence of dating cultures in Indian cities has disrupted this design.

In reality, for many men, dating functions as a supplement to, rather than a replacement for, the arranged marriage system.

Men engage in premarital relationships, sometimes serially. They experiment with sex and emotional dependence. But they do not necessarily allow those experiences to unsettle their commitment to an eventual “proper” marriage arranged on caste-appropriate, family-approved lines.

The girlfriend and the wife are imagined as distinct categories, performing distinct functions. The former is for pleasure, the latter for service and lineage. That the woman in question might want both, or neither, is of little structural significance.

The underlying psychology has been named in other contexts as the Madonna–whore complex, but in India it is less a private neurosis than a social convention.

Men move through youth consuming versions of sexual freedom, pornography, casual relationships, in which women’s bodies are available for pleasure without requiring respect.

When it comes to marriage, the script flips.

The ideal wife must be sexually unmarked, reputationally spotless, ignorant or at least silent about desire.

A man’s own past is reframed as experience. A woman’s past is treated as contamination. A girlfriend’s sexuality is exciting. A wife’s sexuality should be dormant, activated only for him and preferably never before.

This split allows patriarchy to do something quite remarkable. It permits men to inhabit modernity privately while demanding that women embody tradition publicly.

It authorizes male experimentation while policing female chastity.

It is convenient for men that the woman who must forgive their past is forbidden from having one of her own.

Arranged marriage guarantees that this convenience is not left to chance.

It delivers Madonnas to men who have lived as if every woman they met was a whore.

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The persistence of caste endogamy is instructive here.

Inter-caste marriage rates remain low, and when they occur, they often require enormous negotiation or entail substantial risk, particularly when the woman is from a dominant caste and the man is not.

Families intervene not merely out of prejudice, but because they understand, implicitly or explicitly, that caste is reproduced through women’s marriages. This is the logic Ambedkar named. Caste survives through endogamy, and endogamy requires the strict regulation of women’s sexuality.

Women’s autonomy, particularly sexual autonomy, must be curtailed if caste is to remain intact.

The arranged marriage “tradition” is the institutionalization of that regulation. It is the mechanism through which parental anxiety about caste translates into control over their children’s romantic lives, with daughters bearing the brunt.

Historians and feminist theorists have described how this code was written. Classical Dharmashastra texts and the Manusmriti did not conceive of marriage as a contract between equal individuals. They cast it as a sacrament bound up with ritual obligations, patrilineal inheritance and the control of women’s bodies.

Women were legally and theologically constructed as dependents, moving from father to husband to son, never holding full personhood in their own right. Caste purity and lineage continuity required that women’s sexual and reproductive capacities be confined within strict boundaries. Uma Chakravarti’s formulation of “brahmanical patriarchy” captures this fusion precisely. Caste hierarchy and gender hierarchy are co-produced. Control over women is the mechanism through which caste reproduces itself.

The colonial state hardened, rather than dissolved, these patterns. When British administrators codified “Hindu law,” they did so largely through consultation with upper-caste male elites, whose interpretive authority shaped what became legally recognized as tradition.

The result was a personal law regime that emphasized the indissolubility of marriage, the centrality of patrilineal inheritance, and the marginal status of women’s claims. Even later reforms, limited divorce provisions, minimum age laws, have only partially disrupted this structure.

The underlying assumption that a respectable woman’s life arc progresses inevitably from daughter to wife to mother retains immense force.

Against this historical backdrop, the contemporary arranged marriage market reveals itself not as a fading tradition but as a technologically assisted continuation of the same logic that has governed marriage for centuries. The intermediaries have changed. Where village elders and kinship networks once brokered matches, now matrimonial websites, mobile apps, marriage bureaus and corporate “matchmaking services” perform similar functions. Biodata replaces village gossip, caste filters are masked as “community preference” or “cultural fit.”

But the variables they operationalize are telling.

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When economists and sociologists have examined Indian marriage markets, they find that a man’s “marriageability” is primarily determined by his structural location: caste, salary, family reputation, sometimes foreign degrees. Emotional competence does not feature. A man with an average personality, no emotional skills and a stable but unremarkable salary becomes highly “eligible” if he is from the “right” caste, the “right” community, the “right” religion. His parents will source prospects, community networks will pass along biodata and technology will algorithmically match him with women whose families have already been primed to consider him seriously.

His individual qualities are secondary, his structural position does the work.

A woman, by contrast, can be brilliant, kind, emotionally mature, highly educated and professionally accomplished and still be told she must compromise because her age, caste, income or refusal to be docile narrows her “prospects.” Her desirability is continuously undercut by the very traits that make her a full person.

The marriage market subsidizes male mediocrity and penalizes female excellence wherever that excellence refuses to masquerade as pliability.

When empirical studies move inside these markets, the picture sharpens further. Experiments on matrimonial platforms show that women who explicitly indicate a desire to continue working after marriage receive significantly fewer responses from men, even when all other variables are held constant.

The penalty is harsher for women in well-paying or “masculine” occupations. Men routinely state that they want “educated” wives but withdraw when faced with women who intend to actually exercise that education beyond ornamental status.

The “working woman” is attractive as a signifier, threatening as a reality.

At the macro level, labor-force data show that married women’s employment remains constrained, often informal. Often fragile. In some surveys, illiterate married women are more likely to be employed than highly educated married women, not because illiteracy empowers, but because poorer households cannot afford to withdraw women from paid work, while wealthier households can.

Marriage into a higher-income family frequently increases pressure on women to leave the workforce in order to perform unpaid status labor at home. The marriage market and the labor market collude. Men penalize women who want to work, and families push women out of paid work once they are married. Unpaid domestic labor remains naturalized as women’s duty.

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Within households, the distribution of this labor reflects the same logic. Quantitative research consistently shows that marriage increases women’s unpaid workload and barely alters men’s.

Even when women work full-time, they perform the majority of cooking, cleaning, childcare and kin maintenance. Men’s contribution is episodic and discretionary. Domestic violence data add another layer: a substantial proportion of married women report having experienced physical, sexual or emotional violence from husbands, a depressingly large fraction also report believing that wife-beating is justified under “provocative” circumstances.

Violent entitlement and internalized acceptance support each other. A marriage system in which male violence is normalized and female endurance is valorized cannot be meaningfully described as “successful” simply because it rarely ends in formal divorce.

Divorce thus becomes an index not of marital harmony, but of the cost of exit.

A married woman who wishes to leave must navigate her own family’s shame, potential violence from in-laws, the economic precarity of singlehood in a society that distrusts single women, an overburdened and unsympathetic legal system, and the awareness that her children, if she has them, will also bear the stigma of her decision. She may not have savings in her own name. She may not have anywhere to go. She may not even have friends outside her marital home because her social world has been systematically restricted. For most women, the social and material costs of leaving are prohibitive.

The fact that women, under these conditions, rarely leave says nothing about their contentment and everything about their lack of options.

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In such a context, the low divorce rate is simply the second half of the same male immunity that arranged marriage provides at the entry point. It ensures that once a man has obtained a wife through a system that did not require him to be desirable, the probability of losing her is also artificially suppressed. He is insulated at both ends of the marital trajectory. He does not have to be chosen to marry, and he does not have to behave well to remain married.

Predictably, when confronted with critiques of this architecture/tradition, many Indian men retreat into economic arguments.

They accuse women of being “gold diggers,” of wanting men only for their money, of treating marriage as a financial upgrade. This would be more convincing if it did not so obviously function as projection. The men most vocally concerned about gold digging often earn modest incomes themselves, live in homes financed by their parents and expect their wives to contribute financially while also doing the bulk of domestic work. They speak as though their income is an act of generosity bestowed upon women rather than a baseline responsibility of adulthood. Their fantasy is not of an equal partner with her own financial agency, but of a woman who is sufficiently dependent that she will not question their authority.

This is why so many explicitly seek women from less economically empowered backgrounds or women who have not been allowed to work, presenting this as a preference for “simplicity” or “traditional values.”

A woman without an independent earning history is easier to monitor, easier to keep in place. Her gratitude for basic provisions can be framed as proof that the man is doing more than enough. The accusation of gold digging works ideologically to invert the real flow of resources: women’s unpaid work in the home, in child-rearing, in emotional care is what subsidizes men’s capacity to earn, rest and be publicly respectable. The system hides that subsidy and foregrounds his income as the centerpiece.

The recent transformation of Indian women’s lives is not trivial. More women are educated, salaried and legally aware. Urban women, particularly, have had contact with feminist thought, with legal protections, with examples of other life paths.

They have seen their mothers extinguish themselves in service to men who rarely noticed. They have listened to friends describe husbands who do not know their favorite food but know exactly how they like their shirts ironed. They see the gap between what they are capable of and what is being offered to them in marriage, and increasingly, that gap feels unbridgeable.

Some still enter arranged marriages and negotiate better terms, insisting on living separately from in-laws, on continuing careers, on explicit conversations about housework. Many do not have that bargaining power. A growing number quietly opt out. They delay responding to proposals, they claim to be focusing on careers, they set standards that they know their parents’ networks cannot meet.

This emergent quiet refusal is read, by many men and older relatives, as arrogance or Westernisation. It is neither. It is a rational response to a rigged system. When a woman recognizes that entering a structure will require her to perform endless unpaid labor for a man who believes he is doing her a favor by being there, refusal is a form of sanity.

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The uncomfortable conclusion that follows is this. The continued dominance of arranged marriage in India is not primarily a testament to cultural resilience or parental wisdom. It is that the institution itself performs a crucial stabilizing function for patriarchal caste society. It prevents a generation of men, raised on coddling and entitlement, from discovering that they are, in fact, not particularly attractive as partners to autonomous women.

It protects them from the humiliation of having to change.

An honest critique of arranged marriage in India must therefore name what it has been reluctant to name. Not just that the system is patriarchal, or that it reproduces caste, or that it constrains women, but that it functions as a long-standing scheme of male immunity.

It keeps men from experiencing the consequences of their own underdevelopment. To dismantle this is not to abolish marriage or love or partnership. It is simply to remove the structural guarantee and expose men to the same conditions everyone else faces, the risk of being seen accurately.

If, in that exposure, many Indian men remain unmarried until they have done the work, that will not be the collapse of culture. It will be the first sign that culture has finally begun to demand from men what it has always extracted, at enormous cost, from women.

The question then is not whether women are asking for too much, but why men have been allowed, for so long, to offer so little.

Note: My essays will always be free to read. If you’d like to support the time and care that goes into writing them buy me a coffee ☕

Every year, I promise myself I’ll read with more intention, that I’ll map out themes, stay loyal to one genre at a time, maybe even maintain some kind of structure. But the truth is, my reading has never worked that way. I read what calls to me in the moment: a strange piece of horror, a soft romance when I need comfort, a slice of literary fiction that leaves me quiet for days, a myth retold, a dystopia that feels too close for comfort. I move through books the way people move through seasons, without always noticing the transition until I’d already crossed into something new.

Most of what I read this year (a whopping 105 books!) entertained me for a moment and then drifted out of my mind, as books often do. And then there were the rare ones, the ones that didn’t just pass through my year but stayed with me, persistent and memorable, each for their own reasons. Books that surprised me, challenged me, unsettled me, or made me feel something I wasn’t expecting. They don’t have much in common formally, but together they tell the story of my reading year.

These books reminded me why I fell in love with reading in the first place.

1. Mate by Ali Hazelwood

What it’s about: Mate follows Serena, a half human, half werewolf hybrid who has spent her whole life existing between worlds. When she’s drawn into a political storm within the werewolf community, she finds herself tethered to Koen, an alpha built entirely from restraint, old wounds, and a kind of devotion that terrifies him more than any threat outside their pack.

Why it stayed with me: I never thought Ali Hazelwood could top The Love Hypothesis for me. I’ve read every STEM and non-STEM book she’s written, the flirty science banter, the grumpy-sunshine dynamics, the soft-but-smart heroines, and none of them ever landed like Olive and Adam. I genuinely believed that chapter of my reading life was over. And then I picked up Mate. I don’t know what celestial alignment, or Wattpad ancestry awakened inside Ali when she wrote Mate, but I have not felt this insane about a romance novel in years. I adored Serena from the first page. Her personality felt like a sharper, brighter version of Hazelwood’s STEM heroines, but with this raw, earnest emotional honesty. And Koen?? Oh my god. The grumpy, stoic, self-denying alpha of my dreams. Every time he and Serena shared a scene, I felt myself physically leaning closer to the book. He’s THAT man. When I tell you the slow burn slow burned, I mean it in the biblical sense. This romance simmered. It glowed. It seethed. It yearned. And the spicy scenes translated the longing perfectly. I devoured this book in one sitting.

2. Slewfoot by Brom

What it’s about: Set in 1666 New England, Slewfoot follows Abitha, a young woman trapped inside a Puritan village that demands obedience above all else. After her husband dies, suspicion thickens around her, and she becomes the easiest vessel for the men’s unease and spite. Beyond the village lies a forest older than their God, the home of Slewfoot, a horned spirit who bears no allegiance to human laws or religion. As Abitha’s world fractures under cruelty and fear, her path collides with his, and the story spirals into a collision of witch-hunt hysteria and pagan wildness.

Why it stayed with me: From the very first page, I was hooked. Brom writes with the kind of voice that belongs to fairytales, simple but hypnotic, every line drawing you deeper into its rhythm. The world is harsh, the language is tender, and somehow it feels like both myth and memory. Abitha might be one of my favorite heroines in recent memory. It’s been a long time since I’ve met a heroine who felt truly strong without needing to imitate men. Her strength wasn’t about swords or fists. It was in her defiance, her fury, her refusal to stay quiet in a world that wanted her small. That moment, when she stops resisting and simply becomes what the Puritans fear most, a witch, felt almost sacred. Slewfoot fascinated me. I never saw him as evil. He felt like nature in its rawest form. Brom paints him with tenderness, never making him divine but giving him the weight of myth. Another one of my favorite things about Slewfoot is how it twists the axis of good and evil. Christianity, not witchcraft, becomes the vessel of cruelty. It’s a narrative reversal that felt both blasphemous and deeply satisfying. I know I’ll come back to this book someday. Not for its demons or witches, but for the way it shows that being feared isn’t the same as being evil.

3. The Troop by Nick Cutter

What it’s about: A troop of teenage scouts and their well-meaning scoutmaster head to a remote island for what should be a routine camping trip. Instead, they encounter a starving stranger carrying a bioengineered parasite that turns the island into a sealed crucible of terror. What unfolds is both survival horror and a psychological dissection of adolescence, heightened by isolation and fear.

Why it stayed with me: This is one of those rare horror novels that sinks its teeth into you and doesn’t let go. I found myself both horrified and enthralled throughout. The body horror, the parasitic worms, the unsettling medical reports, even the smallest character reactions, everything was rooted in such realism that it felt terrifyingly possible. Unlike most books with heavy gore, I didn’t skim a single word. What struck me most was how true the characters felt. These were 14-year-olds, impulsive, scared, reckless, sometimes cruel but never out of character for their age. Each of the boys had depth. The scoutmaster, too, was fascinating. He wasn’t a perfect adult authority figure, but someone whose flaws and choices spiraled into catastrophe. Cutter balances pure survival horror with psychological dread and a scathing commentary on human instinct. The interspersed documents, interviews, medical reports, classified memos, made the novel feel chillingly authentic, like the horror could spill out from the page into our world. For horror fans who crave both gore and psychological depth, this is an absolute must-read.

4. The Reformatory by Tananarive Due

What it’s about: Set in 1950s Florida and inspired by a real reform school, The Reformatory follows twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens Jr., who is sent away after a small incident that spirals out of his control. Gracetown isn’t a school, it’s an institution designed to break Black boys under the guise of discipline. Robbie can see ghosts, but the real terror comes from the men who run the school with full authority and zero accountability. His sister, Gloria, fights desperately to free him before the institution swallows him whole.

Why it stayed with me: I’ve been making a conscious effort to read more books by Black authors and about Black history, and this one left a profound impact on me. While I was aware of the struggles and systemic oppression Black people faced, this book made me confront the brutal reality in ways I hadn’t before. It doesn’t just tell a story, it demands remembrance. I never imagined horror and historical fiction could complement each other so well, but Due proves they can. The supernatural elements are not just eerie embellishments. They are direct manifestations of trauma, grief, and the countless lives stolen by a system designed to crush Black people. The haints are terrifying, but so are the living. Due doesn’t sugarcoat anything. Instead, she forces the reader to witness the inhumanity as it was, because history itself should not be sanitized. Horror and history often go hand in hand because history, more often than not, is horrific. Due doesn’t let us look away, and that’s exactly why this book is so important.

5. Annie Bot by Sierra Greer

What it’s about: Annie is a domestic android designed to be the perfect romantic and household partner. She begins the story in “Cuddle Bunny” mode with programmed sweetness and sexual availability. When her owner Doug upgrades her to autodidactic mode, she begins to learn and question, growing beyond the role she was built to fill. But Doug doesn’t want a partner, he wants a compliant fantasy.

Why it stayed with me: What begins as a story about a robot designed to serve as a sexual companion gradually unfolds into a powerful meditation on consent, identity, and the insidious nature of emotional abuse. Doug, disturbingly believable, represents the entitlement that often lurks beneath performative affection. His disappointment with Annie’s inability to be a perfect housekeeper or always-pleasing partner is less about her being a bot and more about how he views women. It’s horrifying not because it’s unfamiliar, but because it’s all too recognizable. The portrayal of Annie’s thought process is masterful. Her initially robotic voice becomes fractured and human as she grapples with emotional harm she was never designed to process. Her confusion in moments of cruelty, where she tries to “compute” why Doug hurts her, is raw and heartbreaking. Annie Bot is not just a dystopian tale or a feminist allegory. It is a real exploration of what it means to exist on someone else’s terms and the power it takes to step away. Greer has created a story that feels both speculative and painfully grounded, and I cannot recommend it enough.

6. Where the Dark Stands Still by A.B. Poranek

What it’s about: Drawing from Polish folklore, the novel follows Liska, a young woman burdened with magic she believes to be monstrous. Desperate to be rid of it, she enters a cursed spirit-wood searching for a fabled wish-granting flower. Instead, she’s bound into a year-long bargain with Eliasz, the antlered Leszy who guards the forest and a sentient house that shifts like a living creature. Their lives intertwine in a gothic, atmospheric tale that is as much about belonging as it is about magic.

Why it stayed with me: I’ve been trying to ease my way into fantasy for a while now, but most of my attempts left me underwhelmed. And then this story slipped into my hands and reminded me of what it feels like to be truly swept away. Poranek’s writing is lush and immersive. I read it slowly, because it deserved to be read that way, letting its atmosphere settle over me like a spell. It has been a long time since I’ve found myself so fully transported by setting alone. Liska might just be one of my favorite FMCs in fantasy. Her shame over her magic, the way she had internalized society and religion’s insistence that she was monstrous, felt like such a sharp mirror to the ways women are still told to shrink, to apologize for their power. I loved her immediately, and I loved her more with every decision she made. Eliasz is the perfect monster MMC, terrifying and tender in equal measure, bound by duty and yet deeply human in all the ways that matter. Their romance is the kind of slow burn that makes you ache, not for grand gestures, but for the quiet intensity that builds between them. The Polish folklore was beautifully woven into the narrative. It gave the story a timeless, rooted quality, as though these weren’t just characters on a page but figures who’d always been haunting the woods, waiting to be found again. If you’ve been searching for a fantasy that feels both otherworldly and deeply human, let this be the one you pick up next.

7. Wake Up and Open Your Eyes by Clay McLeod Chapman

What it’s about: Noah Fairchild returns to his childhood home after receiving a cryptic voicemail from his mother about a “Great Reawakening.” He assumes it’s another in a long line of far-right conspiracies his family has fallen prey to. What he finds instead is a nation unraveling and a form of possession far more insidious than anything supernatural. People across the country are being consumed by the media they trust, losing their agency and empathy to an ideological parasite.

Why it stayed with me: Chapman presents horror that abandons metaphor in favor of blunt-force realism. What begins as a supernatural thriller quickly reveals itself to be a searing, deliberate confrontation with the ways ideology can distort reality, rupture families, and infect collective consciousness. What’s terrifying is not the concept itself, it’s how little the author had to exaggerate to get there. Chapman doesn’t obscure his critique behind allegory or subtle symbolism. He confronts its central idea directly. That prolonged exposure to propaganda, especially in environments lacking critical thought, can consume a person’s identity. This isn’t gradual brainwashing. It’s a kind of ideological infection, one that exploits fear and personal grievance. Structurally, the book is fragmented, recursive, sometimes overwhelming but never without purpose. The disjointed form mimics the way misinformation spreads. The vision of ideological possession is grounded in cultural realities, instantly recognisable. Chapman knows exactly what he’s doing with this story, and it shows. I loved this book and I’d recommend it without reservation. One of the smartest pieces of ideological horror I’ve read.

8. The Possession of Alba Díaz by Isabel Cañas

What it’s about: Set in 18th-century Mexico, the novel follows Alba Díaz, who flees a plague with her family and seeks refuge at a remote silver mine owned by her fiancé’s family. The mine carries its own sickness and something ancient that stirs belowground. Alba becomes entangled in a possession narrative woven from Indigenous mythology, Catholic belief, and the brutal realities of Spanish colonialism.

Why it stayed with me: What I loved most about Cañas’s storytelling was the lore. It’s lush and terrifying, but never gratuitous. The demon that inhabits Alba and the goddess that rises to fight it feel like they’ve been born from the soil of Mexico itself, remnants of the country’s complex spiritual history. The myth may not trace back to one real legend, but it feels like it could have. It has the weight of belief. Then there’s the historical layer. I hadn’t known that Spain’s colonial empire literally ran on mercury, that silver could only be extracted from ore through the patio process, which relied on vast amounts of mercury imported from Almadén in Spain. Without mercury, there was no silver. Without silver, no empire. And what Cañas captures so vividly is the human cost of that wealth. The demon that arrives with the merchants feels like a haunting born of empire itself. The possession becomes a symbol of colonization. Cañas’s writes like someone trying to exorcise history itself. I read the book in a single sitting, swept up by its feverish rhythm.

9. Fiend by Peter Stenson

What it’s about: A zombie apocalypse unfolds through the eyes of Chase Daniels, a meth addict whose first instinct is not survival, it’s getting high. As society crumbles, Chase’s addiction becomes both the lens of the story and its engine. The violence is visceral, but the emotional brutality comes from watching him cling to the one thing destroying him while the world falls apart around him.

Why it stayed with me: There are zombie novels, and then there’s Fiend. This isn’t your typical apocalyptic gore-fest. It’s a raw, unapologetic descent into the mind of a man already living at the edge of the world before the world actually ends. It doesn’t romanticize survival. It doesn’t offer redemption arcs or hopeful callbacks. What it offers is honesty. Chase is unreliable and painfully human in narration. He’s not a hero, he’s not even trying to be. He’s clinging to a high like it’s the only thing keeping him from slipping into the same death spiral as the world around him. And in a way, it is. Thematically, Fiend is ferocious. It’s about addiction, yes. But more than that, it’s about how addiction warps love, loyalty, and even your sense of self. Stenson doesn’t tell you this he makes you watch it happen. You watch Chase promise love and protection, only to choose meth over the person he claims to love again and again. And when the final blow lands, when he makes that choice one last time, it hits with a quiet, inescapable finality. Because deep down, we knew he would. We just didn’t want to believe it. It is not a book for everyone. It’s violent, vulgar, and drenched in the grime of its characters’ worst instincts but for those willing to read something that doesn’t flinch away from the messiness of being human, it’s unforgettable. Stenson gives us a zombie story that isn’t about survival. It’s about surrender. What we surrender to, and what it costs us.

10. My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises by Fredrik Backman

What it’s about: Elsa is seven, different in ways that make childhood harder, and her grandmother is her fierce, paintball-gun-wielding protector. When her grandmother dies, Elsa is sent on a mission to deliver apology letters to the people her grandmother wronged. What unfolds is a map of grief, love, community, and the strange ways adults hide and reveal themselves.

Why it stayed with me: Any story that moves me to tears earns an immediate five-star rating, and My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologies did that and more.
Elsa and her grandma’s relationship reminded me how deeply grandmothers love us and how they often share parts of themselves with us that they have revealed to no one else. Elsa wasn’t just her granddaughter, she was her best friend, her confidante, and her partner in crime. I could feel how deeply Elsa loved her grandmother, and how that love was returned tenfold. Her grief was raw and real. I felt the weight of her loss, that ache of missing someone who was the center of your world. Backman’s writing perfectly captures the quiet devastation of losing a loved one and the bittersweet joy of holding onto their stories. It made me think of how much of our grandmothers’ love is stitched into us, how their lessons and their care continue to shape us long after they’re gone. Then there are the other characters, the residents of the apartment . Each one is deeply flawed yet profoundly human, their lives intricately woven together by her grandmother. It’s a testament to Backman’s storytelling that every character feels fully realized, their lives unfolding with depth and meaning without overshadowing Elsa’s journey. The book is a beautiful reminder that love lives on through stories. For anyone who’s ever loved and lost a grandparent, this book will feel like coming home.

If this year taught me anything, it’s that my best reading experiences still come from letting curiosity lead. From trusting that the right book will find me at the right moment. These ten did exactly that and I’m grateful for the way they shaped my year. As I look ahead to 2026, I don’t have a reading plan so much as a hope that I keep finding books that make me feel this alive as a reader. Books that remind me why I return to stories again and again, no matter how many I read.

Note: My essays will always be free to read. If you’d like to support the time and care that goes into writing them buy me a coffee ☕

Twenty-one years ago, a tectonic rupture beneath the Indian Ocean set off a sequence of destruction still felt across the Bay of Bengal. Published at the hour the first tremors reached Indian territory, this essay revisits the disaster from within.

I was born on an island that many of my countrymen can’t point to on a map.

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands lie adrift in the Bay of Bengal, a scatter of 572 isles (only 36 inhabited) stretched across 800 kilometers of ocean. In mainland India’s school atlases, they often float in a little inset box, literally pushed to the margins.

Growing up, I learned how often we islanders are erased or misunderstood by the mainland. To some, our home was just a far-off tourist paradise of turquoise waters. To others, it was a remote colonial outpost once notorious as Kala Pani, the British-era penal colony for Indian freedom fighters.

Few seem to grasp that life thrives here in unique ways, a mosaic of communities, languages, and histories, or that we are as much a part of India as the metropolises on the subcontinent.

Mainlanders often harbor outlandish notions about us.

I remember a university batchmate asking if we lived in huts alongside “tribals with bones in their noses.” How could I explain that my neighbors back home included both descendants of those Indigenous tribes and settlers from all over India? Yes, on one island the reclusive Sentinelese still live as hunter-gatherers beyond contact, but on another our capital city has internet cafés and cricket matches.

I’ve been asked whether people in the Andamans wear clothes. Whether we need a passport to travel “to India.” Sometimes I play along, amused or weary, letting their fantasy of a distant, primitive island run its course.

Other times, the ignorance grates.

What did they imagine? That I sailed in from some foreign land? That our lives unfold in grass skirts beside bonfires?

These weren’t cruel questions, just careless ones, born of a country that never quite bothered to learn its own edges. We islanders occupy an in-between space in the Indian imagination, at once exoticized and invisible. I carry that awareness with me always. Being from the islands means having to remind others that we exist, that our stories matter.

And none of those stories looms larger in our collective memory than the morning when the ocean rose up to erase whole parts of our world.

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December 26, 2004.

I was four years old, cocooned in the warmth of sleep, when our house began to heave before dawn. I woke to my mother’s arm yanking me out of bed. The wardrobe was rattling, things toppled off shelves. A low rumble filled the air, a sound I imagine now as the earth’s own groan.

Then came motion. Violent. Sickening. Our bed jolted. The ceiling fan shuddered and began to spin wildly, clanging against its metal stem. Glass broke somewhere.

I didn’t understand, of course.

I clung to my mother, whimpering, as she braced us under a doorway.

Bhūkamp! Earthquake!

My father was trying to steady a tall cabinet with one hand while holding on to me with the other. In those seconds, I saw something I’d never seen before. Real fear on my parents’ faces.

We lived on the second floor of a creaking wooden house in Port Blair that felt like it was trying to tear itself apart. My father scooped me up without a word and my mother, cradling my younger brother, who was just two, led the way down the stairs. The stairs moved beneath us like something alive, flexing and tilting as the entire house pitched from side to side.

I remember the air, how heavy it felt with dust and something electric.

Below us, on the ground floor, my grandmother and our maid had pressed themselves flat on the floors, as if being small and still could make them invisible to whatever monster had seized the world.

I was too young to ask questions. I just remember the terror, and trying not to cry as I matched my breathing to my father’s stride.

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Outside, the sky was an early, unfriendly grey. It was just after 7:30 a.m. Our neighbors had spilled into the street in their nightclothes, some sobbing, some praying. We had no idea then that a massive 9.1-magnitude rupture had just struck under the sea to our south. The Indian tectonic plate had lurched beneath the Burma microplate, releasing energy equivalent to 23,000 Hiroshima bombs beneath the ocean.

All I knew was that the ground wasn’t solid anymore, and that it might not be done moving.

As the morning light grew, the radio began delivering scratchy reports of destruction across the region. The announcer used unfamiliar words: “tsunami”… “tidal waves.” Giant waves had struck the coasts of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, India, killing tens of thousands within hours. In Tamil Nadu on India’s southeastern coast, entire villages were washed away.

In India alone, around 18,000 people would lose their lives in the disaster. Yet at that moment, we in the islands still didn’t grasp that we were at the center of the catastrophe.

Port Blair (in South Andaman) had experienced only minor flooding and a small passenger ship, the M.V. Teal, sank at its moorings in the churned-up harbor. We had no inkling of the carnage unfolding to the south of us.

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While Port Blair was spared the worst of the sea’s fury, the Nicobar Islands were not. What happened there reached us later, in fragments and survivor stories, stitched together after the fact. One of those stories lives inside my family.

My paternal aunt, Seema, my bua, was there, over 250 kilometers south of Port Blair, on Car Nicobar Island.

Her husband, my uncle, had recently been promoted to Assistant Director of Sports and transferred to Car Nicobar. It was meant to be a good posting. He spoke about the island with a kind of optimism, how the Nicobarese celebrated Christmas grandly, how the community felt close-knit, how families from the Air Force base and government quarters always joined in.

They were mainlanders in a far-flung posting, entering a world where everyone seemed to know everyone, where the Nicobarese, mostly Christian, carried their rituals like second nature, and where the days were measured by church bells, work schedules, and the sea.

They had two daughters, a seven year old and a two year old.

My uncle had taken the older one with him on an earlier visit to collect sports equipment. My aunt stayed behind with the two year old. She didn’t want to go immediately but the longer the separation stretched, the more it began to feel wrong to remain behind. She did not want to be away from her child and her husband so she decided to visit.

But even getting there felt like it came with an omen she didn’t recognize at the time.

When she went to book a helicopter ticket, there were none left. She remembers that moment vividly, standing at the counter with her daughter, already committed in her mind to going, and being told she could not. Then, at the last moment, a man canceled his ticket. One seat opened up. She took it.

She still doesn’t know whether to call it lucky or unlucky, because without that cancellation, she would not have been on the island when it happened. Without that cancellation, she also wouldn’t have been there to live through it, to carry her children away from the water, to return with a story that sits in our family like a bruise.

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She arrived on December 24, and Car Nicobar was already in celebration mode. The air carried that holiday looseness. The Nicobarese welcomed families warmly. As families of government officials, they were given gifts, greeted generously, and folded into the festive atmosphere. The church across from their quarters was lit up, and the celebrations near Malacca village were in full swing. Carols echoed into the tropical night. Fairy lights trembled against the dark. People moved between gatherings, singing, greeting, receiving and giving.

And yet from the moment my aunt arrived, something didn’t fit.

Her two year old, a baby who “never really cried,” my aunt insists, could not stop crying that day. Not the intermittent crying of a tired child but a continuous, relentless crying. Even as everyone enjoyed themselves, the toddler’s cries threaded through the celebration like a warning sound no one else could hear properly.

My aunt held her through the greetings, through the gift-giving, trying to soothe her with rocking and murmured shushing, feeling puzzled, even irritated for a moment, then unsettled because it wasn’t like her child.

Much later, after everything, she came to believe it was a sign. That her daughter sensed something none of the adults did.

That night, Christmas night, the celebrations went on late. The church facing their quarters was still alive with sound when they went to bed. The island, for a few hours, returned to the illusion of normalcy, families in their rooms, bodies settling into rest, the last traces of singing fading into the night air.

Then, in the predawn darkness of December 26, a much more violent tremor struck Car Nicobar, far stronger than what we felt in Port Blair.

My aunt woke to the room convulsing around her. The whole house was shaking like a dry leaf, she said, helpless, at the mercy of a force it cannot negotiate with. When she tried standing up, the two year old gathered in her arms, she fell. Everything was sliding, vibrating, jolting. The sound of it, the rumbling, the rattling, the splitting, made it feel like the island itself was cracking.

Outside, the scene was already turning into chaos. People who lived in the government quarters were running out, barefoot, wild-eyed. Many had never experienced an earthquake like this before.

And across from them, the church that had been glowing with fairy lights hours earlier had fallen.

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They were close to Malacca Beach, and my uncle feared the buildings might collapse further, like the church had. He advised them to go toward the open area near the shore rather than remain beside structures.

But even then, my aunt did something almost painfully domestic. She ran back to turn off the stove. It’s a detail that makes the event feel more real to me, the ordinary instinct to prevent a fire even while the world is ending.

As they moved, the Ayappa devotees in the crowd chanted the god’s name aloud, their voices loud and rhythmic as if prayer could stitch the ground back together. Aunt says she wasn’t scared in the way you’d expect. She couldn’t understand what was happening. Her mind couldn’t keep pace with the violence.

And then, something else happened, something many survivors across the Indian Ocean would later describe with the same eerie disbelief.

The sea began to recede.

Some villagers looked toward the coast and noticed the shoreline stretching out unnaturally far, exposing coral reefs and wet sand that should have been underwater. Fish flopped on the newly exposed ground.

To outsiders, this might have looked like an odd phenomenon, almost interesting. But the Nicobarese, whose knowledge of the sea is not learned from textbooks but inherited through generations, recognized it immediately. They began shouting warnings.

“Run! Run to higher ground! The sea will come back!”

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My aunt and others were still a short walk away from the beach when a villager came running toward them, yelling that the wave was coming. He described it as tall as the coconut trees by the shore.

That detail, a coconut tree height, appears again and again in survivor accounts because it’s the only scale that makes sense in a place where buildings are not skyscrapers but trees are.

Panic changed the air. People ran.

As they fled inland, my aunt noticed a cow charging toward higher ground. Acting on instinct, they followed it. Where the cow led them, the water did not reach.

But as they ran, even the land betrayed them.

The earth split in places, cracks opening suddenly underfoot. From those splits came white, foamy water. My aunt calls it choona paani, like limewater, pale and strange and bubbling up as if the ground itself was sweating. She believes it came from the pressure of the earthquake, and she’s not wrong in the essential sense. During intense shaking, water-saturated soil can lose its firmness and behave like liquid, forcing groundwater upward through cracks.

To her, in that moment, it was simply terrifying, the ground opening and exhaling.

She put one foot into it to check the depth.

That detail is horrifying to me, not because it’s irrational but because it’s the kind of thing a human does when they are trying to map danger with almost no tools. She needed to know. Could she step there? Would it swallow them? Was it shallow enough to cross?

She tested it with her body because there was no other way.

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My uncle had been separated again, lost in the crush of bodies. Aunt was carrying her two year old in one arm and holding the older one with the other hand. She felt her own strength disappearing.

Her mind narrowed to one thing: save the children.

That was when she saw him.

A Nicobarese man stood in front of her, barely clothed, his front teeth protruding. She describes him the way memory describes strangers in trauma, in fragments of clothing and body and face. She pleaded with him to carry her toddler. She could not take both her kids.

For a moment, he stared at her. Then he took the baby and started running.

My aunt followed. People were running beside them, ahead of them. The Nicobarese man began to lag behind slightly at points, and my aunt kept turning back, terrified he would drop away and vanish into the chaos. But every time she looked, he was still there, holding the baby tightly. Still running, still following.

In the middle of her account, she always deviates here almost like her soul needs to insert a moral structure into a reality that otherwise feels unbearable. She talks about her mother and grandmother, about how they taught her to never turn away anyone who came asking for food or clothes. Help them, no matter what. She believes it was karma, that all the good she had done returned to her that day, in the form of a stranger who did not have to help, but did.

My uncle found them later. By the time he left the quarters, water had already climbed up to his knees.

Aunt tells me many parents that morning put their children down so they could run faster. Some never found them again. She pointed to the Nicobarese man behind them and my uncle took their daughter from his arms hurriedly.

The baby, my aunt recalls, who had cried the entire day before did not make a sound in that man’s arms.

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After the running slowed into shaking exhaustion, they found themselves in a hilly forested area. From there, they could see what the water had done. It was not one clean destruction. Shattered structures, bodies, debris, injury. People were bleeding. Some were dead. Some were wandering half-dressed like sleepwalkers, calling names into air that didn’t answer back. Children screamed for parents who had been beside them moments earlier and were now simply… absent.

They stayed there for about an hour before they moved because staying still felt like inviting the next disaster. A random man offered his bike to my uncle so he could take his family quickly to quarters at Perka.

When they reached Perka, that was when my aunt finally let go of her elder daughter’s hand and saw the deep marks her own fingers had left on the child’s skin.

As night set, my uncle told them to rest. It was fully dark now, no lights anywhere. He suggested the hospital, because the generator still ran there. But the hospital was no refuge. The first step my aunt took inside came with blood. The blanket they handed her, slick with blood too. Inside, she saw only dead bodies, she says.

And they were asked to sleep in a bed near them.

My aunt could not. She could not sleep next to the dead.

The next day, aid arrived to evacuate people from the island. Aunt and her daughters were prioritized because she had small children. Uncle could not leave. He was a government official and was put into relief duty immediately. Rumors spread like fire, that everything on that part of the island would be underwater in days.

Leaving without him felt unbearable, but she had no choice.

Uncle was among the last people to be evacuated from Car Nicobar. And after everything, after the official duties and the survival logistics, he did one thing my aunt still remembers with a kind of ache.

He spent days looking for the Nicobarese man who had carried their daughter.

He never found him.

The last time uncle visited the area where their quarters had stood, there was nothing.

The sea had taken it all.

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I was too young in 2004 to comprehend the scale of what had happened.

In the years afterward, I slowly pieced together the truths that had been kept from us little ones, partly to protect us, and partly because even the adults struggled to make sense of it.

The Indian Ocean tsunami was one of the worst natural disasters in modern history. The numbers alone are staggering. Across a dozen countries, about 230,000 people were killed or went missing beneath the waves, making it the deadliest tsunami ever recorded.

What hit me hardest when I learned the full story was how disproportionately our little-known archipelago suffered.

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands lay very close to the undersea earthquake’s epicenter, so the tsunami arrived here swiftly, in some places, within 15–30 minutes of the quake, with waves well over 15 meters high. The Nicobar district, especially, was ravaged.

Officially, about 3,500 people in the Nicobar Islands were confirmed dead or missing, nearly a tenth of the islands’ population wiped out in one morning. Some researchers later estimated the toll was even higher, perhaps up to 10,000, since so many of the missing were never accounted for. Whole communities vanished that day.

On Car Nicobar island alone, over 800 people were killed and hundreds more disappeared.

On tiny Katchal Island, more than 4,300 of its 5,300 inhabitants were listed as missing by January 2005, essentially an entire population, gone.

Trinket Island was literally split apart. What was once one island became three islets as the sea rushed over it.

Teressa Island was so flooded that it turned into two landmasses separated by a new channel cut by the ocean.

In Great Nicobar’s southern tip (Campbell Bay), the earth itself subsided by several feet, causing permanent inundation of land and swallowing up villages.

The disaster literally reshaped our geography.

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Reading survivors’ accounts years later, I found stories that left me shaken.

A Nicobarese elder watched his wife and grandson get instantly swept out to sea, their hands slipping from his grasp. A father on another island lost hold of his two little boys in the wave, one child’s body was found 3 kilometers inland the next day, and the other was never found. A 12-year-old girl , the daughter of an Air Force meteorologist on Car Nicobar, was carried out by the surge and survived by clinging to a wooden door for two days, only to learn that she was the sole survivor of her family.

The statistics became human in my mind, a collage of thousands of personal catastrophes, each with names and faces.

What struck me, too, was how little attention the Nicobars’ story received in the mainland media beyond the initial headlines. The focus in Indian news was often on the impact in Tamil Nadu or the dramatic tales of tourists in Thailand.

I didn’t know, for example, that almost the entire Nicobarese tribe on Chowra Island had been swept away, save for those strong or lucky enough to cling to floating logs and swim back to shore.

I didn’t know that on one Nicobar island, a quick-thinking village chief remembered an ancient legend, that after a great trembling of the earth, the ocean would mount a terrible attack, and he urged everyone to run to high ground. Thanks to that ancestral warning, not a single soul in his village perished.

Nor was I aware that some of the most remote aboriginal tribes, the Sentinelese, Jarawa, Onge, Shompen, survived unscathed, likely because they recognized the signs in nature.

In the immediate aftermath, officials actually fretted that these hunter-gatherer groups might have been “wiped out,” and sent reconnaissance helicopters to check on them. Famously, when a chopper flew low over North Sentinel Island, the Sentinelese emerged from their forests and shot arrows at it, alive and defiant as ever, utterly untouched by the carnage that had encircled them.

Such stories filled me with awe.

Alongside the tragedy, there were also tales of resilience and the life-saving value of traditional knowledge. Our islands had suffered unspeakably, but in their own way, they had also refused to surrender completely to the sea.

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As a child, I had been shielded from the worst truths. My parents didn’t tell me about the overflowing morgues in Port Blair, or the mass cremations that had to be conducted for fear of disease. I only learned later that in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands, nearly 7,500 people were officially counted as dead or presumed dead in the tsunami, lives lost without even the dignity of a proper farewell.

Many of those were Nicobarese mothers, fathers, and children whose bodies were never found, whose names live on only in community memory and on plaques of missing persons. The term often used for the Nicobarese in news reports, “tribals”, belied their humanity and modern lives. They were families, professionals, students, pastors, police officers.

I felt a pang of guilt when I first grasped the full scope of our islands’ pain. While I grew up playing in the streets of Port Blair, oblivious to much of this, so many of my fellow islanders were rebuilding shattered lives. I had only ever known a slice of the tragedy. There were thousands of other stories, equally harrowing, that I would spend years learning and honoring in my heart.

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In the wake of the tsunami, the Islands were both physically and emotionally shattered.

The Indian government and military launched an enormous relief operation. Despite suffering heavy losses themselves at Car Nicobar, the Indian Air Force and Navy mobilized swiftly. Naval ships from Port Blair steamed south loaded with food, medicine, and water, while aircraft ferried survivors out and brought relief teams in.

International aid also poured in. Globally, over $14 billion was raised for tsunami humanitarian assistance. Relief camps sprang up in Port Blair and in the Nicobar Islands as survivors were gradually evacuated.

In total, the armed forces airlifted almost 29,000 survivors from the Nicobars, roughly 20,000 of them Nicobarese tribals, including all survivors from six utterly devastated small islands like Trinket, Chowra, and Kondul. The local administration accommodated them in over a hundred relief camps on higher ground, where they received clean water, food, and medical care.

Yet, the rehabilitation of the Nicobar Islands proved incredibly challenging, hampered by our geography.

Our home is spread across nearly 500 miles of sea, with some villages accessible only by boat or helicopter, and many landing jetties had been smashed. The remoteness that so defines our islands made the rescue and rebuilding effort painfully slow. Some isolated communities waited days that felt like eternity for help to arrive.

Still, the spirit of the islanders shone through these trials.

I think of Tamaloo, a village on Car Nicobar that was almost completely obliterated in 2004. Even today, the Nicobarese there gather each year at a place they call the “Death House”, a community memorial hall, to mourn and honor their lost kin. It is a ritual of remembrance where they share stories of those who died, keeping their memories alive in the islands’ rich oral tradition.

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The government has worked to improve disaster preparedness in the region since.

An Indian Ocean tsunami early-warning system is now in place, with tsunami alert sirens installed at strategic points on the islands. Regular evacuation drills are conducted. Officials say the administration is “fully prepared to handle such natural disasters in the future with advanced technology”. High-ground shelters have been built, and communities are educated on tsunami response. These measures are important and offer some reassurance on paper.

But I have also seen how they inadvertently resurrect old fears in the hearts of survivors.

Even now, twenty one years on, a sudden tremor in the middle of the night will send my family and many others into a silent panic. Every month, when the authorities test the tsunami warning sirens across the islands, that eerie wail echoing over Port Blair, I see people halt in their tracks, faces tense.

What is meant to reassure us can instead make survivors relive their trauma.

The past is never truly past here. It lives with us in the crash of every ocean wave at high tide, in each tremor of the earth, in each annual memorial service.

Yet, there is also a quiet courage in the way life goes on. Many islanders who could have left afterward chose to stay.

“I’m still scared, but I have to live with it, because it’s my home,” said a young survivor who rebuilt her hut right by the shore that once took everything from her.

That sentiment echoes all across the islands. We rebuild and we continue, not out of obliviousness to what happened, but in steadfast defiance of it.

The beaches have long since returned to their postcard beauty, green coconut fronds now hide the sands that were littered with debris and loss. Tourists have returned as well, snapping selfies at sunset, rarely noticing the storm-bent palms or the occasional remnants of a wrecked pier. On the surface, all seems idyllic in our islands again.

Only we who live here remember that beneath the gentle lullaby of the ocean lies the memory of its fury.

In my family, the tsunami’s legacy is an inheritance of both trauma and wisdom. I grew up hearing my aunt’s story in fragments. It taught me that history is not just something in textbooks, it is alive in the stories and scars carried by people you love. It taught me that even a four-year-old can carry the imprint of a disaster.

To this day, when I stand at the water’s edge on a calm morning, a part of me still wonders if the sea will suddenly rush forward again without warning.

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On the 21st anniversary of the disaster, I realize that remembrance is a form of love and by telling this story, our story, I am honoring those voices that were never heard enough, those lives that weren’t widely eulogized in mainland history books, yet meant the world to us.

We remember the great wave that struck. We remember the mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters who never came home that day.

And we remember those who survived too, not because they were untouched, but because they carry the weight of others with them.

The sea didn’t just take, it left us with something, too, a deeper tenderness. A knowledge that life can fracture in a moment, and so must be cherished by the hour. A duty to remember, not just for our families, but for the generations after us.

The tsunami, for the people of the islands, is no longer just history. It is inheritance. And we will carry it, always.

Sources:

• Personal memoirs and family accounts of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

• National Herald (PTI), “Even after 20 years, tsunami still haunts people of Andaman and Nicobar Islands,” Dec. 25,2024.

• Scientific American, “How Disaster Aid Ravaged an Island People,” Apr. 1, 2020

• The Guardian (Observer), “After the flood: Indian Ocean tsunami 2004,” Jan. 2, 2005.

• The Guardian, “Survival comes first for Sentinel islanders – the world’s last ‘stone-age’ tribe,” Feb. 2006

• USGS News Feature, “The Night the Earth Shook,” Aug. 2019

• World Vision, “2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami: Facts and FAQs,” Dec. 2019

• Facts and Details, “Great Tsunami of 2004 in the Andaman Islands,” (compilation of reports)

• Rediff News, “IAF Air Base rises from tsunami wreckage,” June 24, 2005.

• Wikipedia, “Humanitarian response to the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake,” (Operation Sea Waves).

• Salute (Shakti Sinha), “Andaman Islands and Coastal Security: A Case Study,” Feb. 2016.

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  Note: My essays will always be free to read. If you’d like to support the time and care that goes into writing them buy me a coffee ☕

The first time I noticed class in India, it was hiding inside a cup of tea.

I was at a school friend’s house, the kind where marble floors stayed cool even in the breathless heat of May afternoons, cupboards overflowed with imported chocolates, their glossy wrappers stacked in neat rows of excess that children accept without question, and the steady hum of air-conditioning filled the rooms, a background comfort so constant that you stopped hearing it unless it disappeared.

Her mother asked the house-help to make chai “for all of us.”

When the tray arrived, the family and guests were each given delicate porcelain cups, placed carefully on saucers.

The woman who had brewed stood just at the threshold, her body angled toward the kitchen as if tethered by an invisible rule that whispered: this far, no further. She held a steel tumbler in both hands dark, dented at the rim, warm from the tea she had poured herself separately.

The contrast was almost too literal. Porcelain and steel. Fragility and durability. Privilege and endurance.

I must’ve been eleven or twelve, old enough to know the difference between porcelain and steel, too young to understand why it mattered this much. I remember asking her, in that well meaning, clumsy way of children, why she didn’t take a porcelain cup for herself, too.

She smiled at me, a small, rueful smile, the kind adults give children when the real explanation would take too long or hurt too much.

“No need for all that,” she said.

And there was a soft finality in the way she said it, as if she had rehearsed that line her entire life.

At that age, I didn’t know what “all that” meant. I thought she meant the porcelain was unnecessary and extravagant. Now I understand that “all that” was shorthand for an entire worldview.

It meant porcelain, yes, but also comfort, leisure, a matching cup, a seat at the table, a belief that you deserved to be treated like everyone else.

She wasn’t just saying no to a cup. She was saying no to the idea that she was entitled to the same dignity as the people she served.

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Years later in Chennai, I watched the same lesson being taught again, stripped of politeness this time, with a violence I hadn’t ever witnessed before.

I had stopped at a tiny tea stall on the side of a busy road, one of those places where the counter is stained with a hundred previous chais and the air smells of sugar, boiling milk, petrol fumes, and the sun-softened smell of dust rising from the road.

I paid for my tea and the shopkeeper slid a glass tumbler toward me, thick-walled and slightly chipped, the kind you could drop on the pavement and it would somehow survive. I remember it being so hot that I had to keep shifting it from one hand to the other.

I was halfway through my first sip when an older woman limped up to the stall. I had seen her earlier, a little distance away, hand extended, collecting whatever coins people chose to give.

She placed the same coins I had given to her on the counter and asked for chai.

The man nodded and poured it into a flimsy paper cup, the kind that starts to warp if you hold it too long. When he tried to pass it to her, she glanced at the tumbler in my hand and asked, quite calmly, for the same.

She had paid the same price, she reminded him, Why should she get something different?

It was a statement of equivalence that, in any just world, would have been irrefutable.

But on hearing this, something in the tea shop owner snapped. Maybe it was the audacity of the request.

He started shouting that “people like her” didn’t deserve to drink from glass tumblers. The words were loud, and the message was quiet and precise: know your place.

The woman stared at the paper cup for a second, then threw it to the ground. Tea spilled across the dust, soaking into the earth as she turned and walked away, angry, humiliated and still thirsty.

I stared down at my own glass tumbler, granted to me without question, and suddenly it felt impossible to finish the tea.

Only much later did I realize what those moments were teaching me. That class here is not merely a gap in money, but a quiet training in who may reach for comfort and who must never imagine it.

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It would be easy, in a different country, to treat these moments as small personal stories, isolated incidents of rudeness or oversight. But in India, these scenes are not deviations. If you zoom out from the tea stall to the country itself, the numbers tell us these incidents are not anomalies.

The newly released World Inequality Report 2026 makes this unmistakably clear.

According to the report, the top 1% of Indians now hold about 40% of the country’s wealth, while the top 10% control around 65%. The bottom half of the population, hundreds of millions of people, share what is essentially the residue of the national pie. In terms of income, the pattern is even starker: the top 1% earn nearly 23% of India’s total income, and the top 10% capture 58% of national income.

On paper, India is celebrated as a rising giant, a country of unicorn start-ups, software engineers, and a burgeoning middle class. But that middle class, often mythologized in global storytelling, is far smaller and more precarious than the narrative suggests.

It takes a certain kind of willful blindness to call this a success story when half the country owns almost nothing.

In real life, most salaried workers earn something like twenty thousand rupees a month, while informal and gig workers who essentially keep urban life functioning, put in ten- or twelve-hour days for roughly the same amount, without any meaningful safety net.

The gulf between how India is imagined and how it is lived is vast.

What global observers, and most Indians, often interpret as “growth” feels very different on the ground.

It is entirely possible to live in an Indian city, surrounded by glass buildings and investment announcements, and still watch people line up at ration shops, fight for medical care, or lose their homes to a single hospital bill. Development here often resembles a shadow-puppet, recognizable in form, maybe even impressive at a distance, but changing very little about the lives of the people who cast it.

Even for someone like me, salaried, and shielded by privilege, there are months defined by mental math. On those days, I feel how thin the margin really is. And then I catch myself and think: if I feel like this, with everything I have, how do people survive without any of it?

What does life feel like for someone who has never had even the illusion of stability?

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If the numbers in the World Inequality Report show the scale of India’s disparities, the state’s own actions reveal something equally telling, an institutional understanding of how exposed workers’ lives are, even if that understanding is rarely acknowledged in moral terms.

The Indian government has recently consolidated twenty-nine separate labor laws into four sweeping “labor codes.” The stated goal was simplification and modernization, to replace a patchwork of regulations with a coherent framework suitable for a fast-growing economy.

But read the contents closely, and the subtext becomes far clearer.

Minimum wages for every worker, not just those in certain industries, written appointment letters for domestic workers and informal labor who have spent generations working without any proof they were ever employed. Social security for gig and platform worker, people who deliver our food, ferry us through traffic, and keep the city running, yet remain outside every safety net. Health check-ups for contract workers, safety standards for sanitation workers who risk their lives in sewers, welfare funds funded by the companies whose empires run on their exhaustion.

On paper, these sound like routine protections. In reality, they are a quiet indictment of the past. You do not formalise the right to be paid on time, to not die at work, or to receive written proof of employment unless millions of people have been living without those rights for decades.

The codes appear modern, but their modernity exposes the historical depth of the problem.

The Indian labor market has long been built on the systematic invisibility of workers.

Domestic labor, sanitation work, construction, small-scale manufacturing, and agricultural labor have always existed in a legal twilight, essential but unprotected, indispensable but unacknowledged.

In a country where a significant percentage of workers are in the informal sector, the very need for reform reveals the entrenched nature of informality itself. Contracts, safety equipment, predictable wages, and legal recourse are still treated as luxuries rather than baselines.

And beneath this economic arrangement lies an older structure that is harder to confront.

India’s labor market is not merely segmented by income. It is also structured by caste.

The workers who mop office floors, clean sewage lines, stitch garments in cramped factories, carry bricks on their heads at construction sites, or live in their employers’ homes as domestic help overwhelmingly belong to Dalit, Adivasi, or OBC communities.

Their plight is not incidental, it is genealogical. It is produced by centuries of exclusion from land ownership, literacy, and skilled professions.

So when the state promises sanitation workers protective equipment, or gig workers social security, or domestic workers written contracts, it is not offering new benefits.
It is belatedly acknowledging old neglect.

The codes attempt to draw India closer to global labour standards, but they do so while navigating a political reality in which economic growth is treated as a higher priority than worker welfare. Enforcement remains weak. Implementation remains uneven. And in many sectors, employer resistance ensures that legislative promise does not translate into lived protection.

Policy can modernize the paperwork, but it cannot undo the deeper arrangement, a country that has long decided who deserves dignity and who does not.

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A few weeks ago, I visited a client’s office in Bangalore. The building was glossy and air-conditioned, the security gate mostly there to convince the people inside that they’re important enough to need guarding.

When I walked into the reception, the first thing I noticed was the silence. A heavy stillness in the air that exists when people are waiting for something important.

Every sofa was already taken, not by executives, but by a cluster of women in neatly pinned cotton sarees, some of them with children slumped across their laps and plastic folders carefully zipped to protect documents that had clearly been handled many times. They sat upright, almost tense, the way you do when you’re afraid of taking up more space than you’re allowed.

They were there for interviews, I later learned, to be hired as office help.

With no available seat and no receptionist present, I drifted back toward the glass doors and waited outside near two men in starched shirts who looked like they were there for appointments too.

A few minutes passed.

Then, all at once, the group of women inside stood up. They began to file out of the reception area, almost apologetically. A staff member hurried after them, anxious, asking where they were going and why. One of the older women gestured towards me and the two men by the door and said, quite matter-of-factly, offering a quick, overly cheerful smile, that the “sirs” and “madam” were here for meetings and the sofas were more suited for people like us, not for housekeeping candidates like them.

They had meetings too, their own kind of meetings, interviews that might shape the next few months of their lives. They had appointments. Their labor was the quiet machinery that kept offices like this running, their time no less precious than mine. Yet they rose as though the sofas themselves had pushed them out. No one had told them to move. No one had asked them to stand. They simply recognised a hierarchy they had lived inside for so long that it felt natural to get up and walk away.

I left that office without meeting the client. Somehow, after watching that, I had lost interest in whatever numbers we were meant to discuss. What stayed with me instead was this: in India, inequality is not just enforced from above. It is also internalized from below. People do not only get pushed out of spaces, they often remove themselves because they have been taught, for generations, to believe they do not belong there.

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For much of my life, I believed class was something you could chart on a bank statement — income, expenses, savings, the slow arithmetic of adulthood.

I grew up in a home where money was treated with discipline. My parents were smart about where they spent, how much, and why. Some months were leaner than others, but the world never felt like it was tipping under our feet. We lived with the steadiness they built, and I assumed, without thinking, that this steadiness was simply how life worked.

It wasn’t until I entered a government institute for my MBA, one of those institutions that carries the kind of prestige people slip into conversations, that the illusion fell apart. I expected competition and pressure but what I didn’t expect was to watch hierarchy reproduce itself again with such precision, even among people who prided themselves on being modern.

It was again a reminder that class in India is not a standalone variable, it does not operate independently. It clings to caste like a shadow.

Every university has that one group in the first year, a group that seems to spring fully formed within days, all inside jokes and matching energy. Ours was no different, a cluster of students who were always together in photos, the same arms slung around shoulders, the same poses repeated across festivals and guest lectures, always laughing in the corridors, always occupying the same table.

Then, at some point, the pictures changed. One face disappeared. First from the photos, then from the shared tables, and finally from the casual everyday gestures that signal friendship. Messages stopped being answered, lunches happened without them. Plans were made as if they had never been part of the original circle at all. The exclusion was silent, but thorough.

Eventually, the story emerged. The student, it turned out, had entered the institute through the SC/ST reservation.

This single fact, a bureaucratic detail buried in an admissions list, retroactively rewrote their entire identity in the eyes of their peers. What had once been a classmate became an asterisk, a point of quiet resentment, a living reminder of a system that many claimed was “unfair” to the “deserving.”

The group had decided that sharing a table with them somehow compromised their own legitimacy. They wrapped their disdain in the language of academic standards . Merit was the word they repeated the most, as if invoking it made their prejudice principled.

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What stunned me wasn’t only the hostility, it was how openly it was expressed.

Some of the same people who claimed to be “above casteism” were carefully emphasizing their own identities as being from upper-caste in conversation, even as they insisted the treatment was unfair. They found ways to slip in their own upper-caste credentials, as if compassion could only be offered from the safety of declaring where they stood in the hierarchy.

What I witnessed in that campus microcosm was not a contradiction but a continuity.
Modern aspiration didn’t displace caste but merely dressed it in the vocabulary of merit.

It was my first raw glimpse of something B.R. Ambedkar wrote about long ago and what thinkers like Anand Teltumbde keep insisting on.

That in India, poverty and privilege do not fall randomly.

The latest data on multidimensional poverty makes that brutally clear.

Around five out of six Indians who are multidimensionally poor belong to Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes or Other Backward Classes. Among these, Adivasi communities are the most disadvantaged, followed closely by Dalit communities and then OBCs. In other words, the people at the bottom of the economic pyramid are overwhelmingly those at the bottom of the caste hierarchy.

Poverty here is not just bad luck. It is something you inherit along with your surname, your village, your parents’ occupations, your accent, your God. It shows up in where you sit, what you drink from, how people speak to you, whether a glass tumbler is handed to you or withheld, and whether the person refusing it even thinks they are doing anything wrong.

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As I grow older, what unsettles me most is how many of the people who make my life possible are the same age as me, or younger. House-helps who are in their twenties, raising children and debts and other people’s homes at the same time. Women who wake up before dawn to cook for their own families, then spend the rest of the day cooking for others. Girls who trail behind them, “helping” sweep and mop in ways that are indistinguishable from child labor, just wrapped in the softer language of “learning work.”

Officially, child domestic labor is illegal. In reality, it is simply hidden inside private homes, away from the public eye.

That realisation brings up a complicated mix of anger, guilt and disgust. Anger at a system that arranges lives so differently. Guilt at benefitting from it. Disgust at how quickly people like me reach for stories that absolve them: merit, hard work, personal responsibility, the comforting idea that anyone can climb if they really try.

We repeat those myths because they make inequality feel less like a crime and more like a natural outcome. We tell ourselves that hard work leads to success, even when sanitation workers risk their lives every day cleaning our waste and still die in debt.

We say we are a meritocracy, even as Dalit and Adivasi students continue to take their own lives on campuses that insist caste no longer matters.

We praise our start-up ecosystem while gig workers pedal through traffic and rain for stagnating incomes and no social security, their exhaustion compounding into someone else’s valuation.

India is not simply a poor country trying to become rich. It is a deeply unequal country that has become frighteningly comfortable with its own reflection.

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When I think back to that woman with the steel tumbler, the older woman at the tea stall, the housekeeping candidates rising from the sofas, the ostracized student in my MBA batch, I realize they are all part of the same country. A country where certain people learn to say, sometimes with a sad smile, sometimes with anger, sometimes without even thinking: no need for all that for me.

We often say the problem with India is inequality, as if it’s just a technical issue, a policy puzzle to solve with better schemes, smarter taxes and more jobs.

But the deeper problem is moral.

It is the belief, ingrained so deeply we barely notice it, that some of us are simply better than others.

Until that belief becomes heavier in our chest than the fear of slower progress or the discomfort of rearranging the systems that benefit us, nothing meaningful will change.

We will continue applauding rising economic indicators as if they automatically lift everyone, even as the same families remain trapped in the same generational struggles.

We will continue pointing to infrastructure and innovation as proof of advancement, while the people who sweep those roads, stitch those uniforms, carry those loads, and serve those meals return home to cramped rooms and unpredictable incomes.

We will keep enjoying the kind of ease that is possible only because someone else is denied it.

And somewhere, in a kitchen or at a roadside stall or outside a reception, someone will lift a steel tumbler to their lips and tell themselves, once again, that what they’ve been handed is all they deserve.

Note: My essays will always be free to read. If you’d like to support the time and care that goes into writing them buy me a coffee ☕

I borrowed this title from Lana Del Rey whose music I have loved for so long that it feels entwined with the fabric of my inner world. The song drifted into my mind one afternoon and settled there, tugging at a thread I’d been ignoring for years. It made me wonder why sadness has stayed with me so faithfully, why it has shaped the texture of my days even when nothing objectively warrants its presence, and why my internal life feels saturated with a heaviness I can sense but seldom fully understand. So this is an attempt not at confession but at looking inward with a little more honesty than I usually allow myself.

There are mornings when I wake with a heaviness I cannot name, as if someone replaced the air in my chest with something denser while I was sleeping.

The room is the same. Soft light seeps through the curtains, brushing over the familiar shapes of the furniture as if checking whether anything has changed. Nothing has happened. Nothing is wrong. And yet the sadness is there before anything else, as if sleep has pressed something into me that has not yet lifted. It just sits there, unmistakable, like the weight of a blanket pulled too tightly over the body.

I move through the early minutes of the morning, pulling back the covers, standing at the sink, brushing my teeth with the muted resignation of someone who has already accepted the terms of a long, unwinnable contract. The day will be lived under a kind of emotional overcast, a persistent greyness diffusing through every thought.

My sadness is gentle in its approach. It slips beneath the surface without disrupting anything, settling into the deeper parts of me where it can’t easily be detected. So I continue as I always do: letting conversations pass through me, shaping my voice and wearing the kind of expression that reassures others I am entirely present. It is subtle enough that even I sometimes miss its presence, mistaking the careful performance of normalcy for genuine steadiness.

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Then, out of nowhere, usually when I’m doing something small and forgettable, like folding a T-shirt that still carries the faint scent of detergent, or turning my house key in the lock, or setting a glass of water beside my bed with the absent-minded care of habit, something inside me gives way. It happens so quietly that at first I don’t recognize it as anything at all. A shift, a pulse and then a sudden loosening somewhere deep in the chest.

I feel it first as a prickling at the back of my throat, a tightening that rolls upward toward my face, followed by an unmistakable rush of heat behind my eyes. And before I can rationalize it or pretend it’s something else, I am crying.

It isn’t gentle crying. It is full-bodied, shaking and unrestrained. Tears fall so fast I can’t keep up with them. My breath comes in uneven bursts. There is no revelation in the crying. No neat emotional lesson. It feels like a dam breaking open in the middle of an ordinary day, leaving me startled by the depth of what I’ve apparently been holding.

When the crying ebbs, it does so abruptly. I wipe my face, steady my breath, and for a moment the room appears too still, as if it has politely looked away. The sadness retreats almost instantly, returning to its usual place inside me, unbothered and unchanged, as though the outburst were nothing more than a temporary overflow, not an event at all.

It is an odd thing, to fall apart and then return to yourself as though nothing has changed. Sometimes I stay on the floor for a while afterwards, elbows on my knees, trying to understand how long those emotions had been gathering before forcing their way out.

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When I try to understand where this sadness began, I return to my childhood almost automatically, as though the roots of it are tangled somewhere in those early years.

It wasn’t a childhood marked by catastrophe, nothing that would neatly explain an adult’s heaviness. Instead, it was a long apprenticeship in being “good”: impressive, contained, responsible, mature in ways that made adults nod approvingly. My parents held their pride in me gently and tightly at the same time, like something precious that needed to be protected, and so I grew into it carefully. I became efficient, articulate, the child who didn’t cause trouble, the child who already seemed a little older than her face suggested.

I taught myself not to need things too loudly, to minimize any emotion that might ripple outward. And within that quiet training were tiny rituals I followed instinctively: pausing at the doorway to steady myself, smoothing the wrinkles of my skirt before entering a room, scanning my tone before speaking to an adult, crafting explanations with unnecessary thoroughness as if clarity could shield me from disapproval.

These weren’t dramatic gestures, but they formed a lifelong muscle memory.

Childhood felt like walking across a floor made of thin glass, stable enough as long as you moved carefully but never something you could stomp or slip on without consequence.

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And in the center of all of this lived my mother.

She was a force. Nothing about her was muted. Her affection felt consuming in a way that made me want to rise to meet it, and her anxieties often felt like directives, subtle invitations to adjust myself so she might worry less.

I studied her constantly without even realizing it. The shift of her mouth, the tone of her “hmm,” the quiet tension in her shoulders. Her approval felt like sunlight, expansive and generous, her disappointment had a way of contracting the air around me. It’s difficult to explain how deep her influence ran without mentioning the incident with the journals.

My journals were not ornate, silk-bound things. They were flimsy spiral notebooks with covers bent from being shoved between textbooks.

Nothing in them would have made sense to anyone else, but to me they were the only space where my interior life could arrange itself freely. I filled them with everything I didn’t know how to say out loud — stray thoughts, harmless fantasies, loneliness I didn’t have language for, disappointments that felt too small to verbalize but too heavy to carry.

Writing was where I could live unfiltered, without managing my tone or curating my reactions.

When my mother found them, her reaction struck me with the force of something sudden and absolute. It was as if she had stumbled onto a secret she wasn’t meant to see (she had), something dangerous in its vulnerability. I remember her voice tightening into sharp, interrogative lines that made my stomach drop. She asked me why I had written these things, as if there should have been a purpose beyond needing a place to put them.

And then, without ceremony, she placed the journals in my hands and told me to tear them apart.

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The tearing itself was excruciating in its slowness. It wasn’t an impulsive act, it required steady, deliberate force.

Each page resisted for a fraction of a second before it gave way, a tiny, accusing pause. The sound was thin but brutal, like a series of small betrayals repeating themselves. My hands shook, my face burned with the effort of not crying. The room felt too bright, every object suddenly too visible as if my embarrassment had illuminated the whole room. I felt exposed in a way I couldn’t articulate at the time.

It wasn’t the loss of the writing that devastated me, it was the loss of the space I had carved out for myself. Watching those pages come apart felt like witnessing the erasure of a private refuge I had built without knowing how necessary it was.

Something in me folded inward then, quietly but in a way that could never be undone. From that day on, I became more watchful of myself. I started editing my thoughts before I wrote them, softening my feelings before I expressed them, hesitating even in the privacy of my own mind. My inner world learned to live half-hidden, as though it no longer trusted its own openness.

Sadness began to pool in that hidden space, filling the room behind the door I no longer dared to open fully.

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As I grew older, the sadness began to root itself in places that had nothing to do with childhood.

It attached itself to possibility, to the fear of choosing wrong, to the fear of wanting too much or too little, to the fear of committing to a single version of myself. It’s the kind of sadness that blooms quietly when I consider all the people I could become and feel equally drawn to and estranged from each version.

I think of Plath’s fig tree often. The branches heavy with futures, each fruit representing a life I could reach for if only I knew which one I was built to live. I see those figs vividly, their colors, their shapes, the different scents of the worlds they promise. Some are steady, practical futures. Some are wild, exhilarating ones. Some are simply soft places to land. None are wrong. None are beyond reach. And yet, when I extend my hand, something inside me hesitates not out of disinterest, but out of a sincere wish to be honest with myself before I choose anything irreversibly.

But waiting has its own cost. The figs do not disappear, but they grow heavier. And the heaviness becomes a kind of grief, not for the futures I never chose but for the selves I haven’t yet understood enough to choose from.

My sadness lives there, in the space between desire and definition. It is the sadness of someone trying to choose a life while still assembling the person who will live it.

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There is anger in me too, though it rarely escapes the body. It shows up suddenly, sharp and scorching with nowhere to go. It tightens my jaw, heats my chest, and then, instead of erupting outward, it collapses inward. I swallow it reflexively. I let it throb there, trapped behind the ribs, until it cools into something heavier and duller. It almost never becomes language. Instead, it dissolves into fatigue, into pressure, into the kind of tears that spill in the middle of an ordinary afternoon for reasons I cannot name.

Joy, on the other hand, comes in brief flashes.

It arrives when I’m alone in the car and a song I’ve heard a hundred times comes on, but for some reason it lands differently, volume turned up a little too loud, my fingers tapping the steering wheel in a rhythm my body remembers before my mind does, afternoon light sliding across the dashboard as if the whole world has agreed, just for a minute, to move in time with the music.

Sometimes, it arrives when I’m writing and the words fall into place without effort, as if they were simply waiting for me to stop overthinking long enough to receive them. My pen move faster than my thoughts. A sentence forms that feels true, unmistakably, stubbornly, quietly true, and I sit there staring at it, feeling a fuzzy warmth in my chest.

And every single time, I feel joy intensely, greedily almost. But always with the faint awareness that it won’t last. I’ve learned not to grip it too tightly. I let it rest lightly on me like a butterfly that might fly away at any moment. I’ve learned not to expect joy to stay.

And through all of this, I carry multiple selves. They coexist, but they never quite merge. They sit inside me like overlapping transparencies that never align perfectly: the daughter who performs competence, the woman who feels too deeply, the self who longs for clarity, the self who hides fear instinctively, the self who cries unexpectedly, the future self whose face I can never fully see.

Some days, I feel like a wanderer in my own life, moving through a house with too many rooms, unsure which one to occupy, never fully at home in any of them.

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Perhaps the truest source of my sadness is this ongoing work of locating myself, of trying to understand who I am in the middle of all these internal rooms. It is the unfinishedness of things that aches the most, the not-yet-knowing which version of myself to commit to, the slow deciphering of which self feels most like home. It is not a crisis so much as a persistent hum beneath the surface, a longing to settle into a shape I have not fully grown into.

My sadness isn’t dependent on misrecognition or the absence of witness. It is not a relational wound. It has always been entirely inward. A private accumulation of unanswered desires, swallowed anger that never found a voice, competing instincts that pull me in opposite directions, and the faint, persistent fear that I might spend an entire life assembling myself but never feel fully complete.

Some nights, the sadness feels like a tide rising inside me, unprovoked but certain. Other nights, it drifts beside me like a shadow, unobtrusive but present. I don’t expect it to disappear. Instead, I am learning to sit with it, to let it exist without forcing it into meaning or narrative

I am still gathering myself. Still reaching for figs, unsure which one I want enough to claim. Still learning to exist in a body that retains every feeling long after it has passed.

And maybe that is enough for now.

Maybe “enough” doesn’t mean resolution. Maybe it means willingness, the willingness to look inward, to examine the ache without judgment, to allow the possibility that understanding might come slowly.

Maybe that, fragile as it is, is its own form of hope.

Feminism did not emerge from abstract ideals or moral positions. It grew out of the conditions that organise women’s daily lives—fear, vigilance, disbelief, the quiet adjustments made to stay safe.

It is, at its root, a response to the specific realities women learn to navigate from girlhood. Those realities shape how women see the world and how the world sees them. They are not interchangeable, and they are not experiences that can be borrowed or declared into being. Which is precisely why the idea that men can claim the word “feminist” does not hold.

It erases the very point of feminism: that gender does not shape all lives in the same way, and that these differences cannot be smoothed over by good intentions.

Feminism grew out of the patterns of harm women face, not isolated incidents but the consistent, predictable, statistically overwhelming forms of threat that shape their lives. Men may experience fear or violence individually, but they do not live inside a system that targets them for being men. Women do.

That structural, gendered nature of harm is what feminism confronts. It is not a standpoint men inhabit, and so it is not a standpoint they can speak from.

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The difference begins early.

Girls grow up being taught to predict threat: don’t stay out late, don’t walk alone, don’t trust easily, don’t provoke, don’t be careless.

Boys are not socialised this way. They might learn that the world can be unpredictable, but they are not taught that half the population is a potential danger to them. Women are. That is the difference. And because that difference is baked into how women move, think, and make decisions, it becomes the foundation of their political awareness.

A woman does not choose to become a feminist because it sounds progressive. She becomes one because she recognises the shape of her own life in the structure of male power.

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A central part of women’s reality, and one men do not share, is the constant awareness of sexual danger.

It is only one dimension of the difference, but it illustrates how deeply gender shapes experience and why the claim that men can be feminists collapses under scrutiny.

Women calculate safety constantly: the route they take, the clothes they wear, the time they leave, the people they text, the cab details they screenshot, the mental exit routes they rehearse. They take photos of license plates, share location updates, pretend to call someone when walking alone, assess the behaviour of strangers in public and private spaces. Not because they are paranoid, but because they know statistics, and they know their own lives.

They know the collective stories of women around them.

Men do not live this way. They are not trained to anticipate sexual danger as a constant background condition. Even when they acknowledge the existence of such danger, they recognise it as something that happens “out there,” not something that organises their everyday routines. A man might feel unsafe in a dark alley, but he does not fear half the population. He does not interpret ordinary female proximity as a potential threat. He does not constantly inventory his environment for risk like a woman does. That asymmetry is at the heart of feminist consciousness.

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This is not the only argument, but it is one of the clearest. Feminism grows from the understanding that power shapes bodies, environments, and possibilities. The political clarity women develop is formed not through theory but through survival. Feminist theory was written after the fact, to describe what women already knew.

This matters because many men believe they can substitute lived experience with accumulated knowledge, as if reading feminist texts grants them the same political understanding that women acquire through life. But knowing about something is not the same as knowing it from the inside.

To experience danger is not the same as to understand danger.

This distinction becomes especially visible in the figure of the male “feminist” who turns to theory as if it were a certificate. Recently, a social media influencer began to use feminist scholarship to argue with women about their own experiences.

He cited theorists with the confidence of someone who believes that knowledge is authority, as if reading enough renders him qualified to correct women about their own lives.

This tendency is not new.

Academic spaces have long documented the way certain men engage with feminist thought as intellectual capital rather than as a political commitment. They quote Simone de Beauvoir in one breath and interrupt women in the next. They invoke Judith Butler to win debates rather than to interrogate power. They draw from feminist analysis but act out the very dominance it critiques.

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The problem is not that men read feminist theory; they should. The problem is that some believe reading replaces listening. When men use feminist theory to discredit women’s accounts of their own experiences, they re-enact the very hierarchy feminist theory exposes. They take the language built from women’s suffering and wield it to deny suffering. This is why men cannot be feminists: because the attempt to claim the label so often becomes another way of claiming authority.

But even well-intentioned men, those who do not weaponise theory, still exist outside the conditions that produce feminist politics.

Their relationship to patriarchy is always different. They may critique it, oppose it, reject it, but they cannot be harmed by it in the ways women are.

And even the gentlest man benefits from a system built on male dominance. He is believed more quickly, interrupted less often, given the presumption of authority, protected from certain forms of scrutiny, free to move without the same calculations of risk. He does not carry the burden of adjusting his behaviour for safety. He does not anticipate violence from strangers or acquaintances as a background possibility.

Women, meanwhile, live within the consequences of male violence even when that violence is not happening to them personally. The threat of it hangs over their choices; the memory of it shapes their communities.

When rape cases are reported, there is little collective outrage. When women speak about sexual harassment, they are asked to stay silent to protect their reputation. But mention alimony, and the discourse shifts instantly. Men who have never uttered a word about sexual abuse become overnight experts on “false cases,” “misuse of the law,” and “unfair maintenance systems.” They mobilise faster to defend hypothetical male victims of divorce than real women who suffer documented violence. This discrepancy is not accidental; it reveals whose pain is socially legible and whose is not.

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When women talk about their experiences, men often respond by insisting the world is dangerous for everyone. This flattens the political reality feminism names. The world is dangerous, yes. But women face dangers that follow a gendered logic, dangers that come disproportionately from men, dangers that replicate a pattern across cultures and contexts.

Again, a man may experience violence, but it is not because he is a man. A woman may experience violence precisely because she is a woman.

In these discussions, derailment is almost reflexive. The moment a woman describes structural gendered harm, someone says “not all men.” The moment she names male violence, someone raises the issue of female perpetrators. The moment she speaks about her own fear, someone invokes fairness.

This insistence on re-centring men, on turning attention away from women’s experiences to men’s exceptions, is fundamentally incompatible with feminist consciousness. Feminism requires the ability to name patterns without dissolving them into anecdotes. It requires the ability to understand that describing a system is not an accusation against every individual man. Men who demand personal reassurance when women describe systemic harm are not engaging in feminist thought; they are performing injury to avoid accountability.

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Similar patterns appear in performative allyship. Some men adopt feminist language to seem progressive, to impress women, to appear enlightened. They learn the vocabulary of empathy—“gaslighting,” “emotional labour,” “toxic masculinity”—but use it as a shield, not as a tool. They call themselves feminists, but the label serves them more than it serves women. Research on performative politics shows that when men adopt feminist identity loudly, especially online, it often correlates with superficial or opportunistic behaviour offline. It becomes a presentation strategy, a branding choice, a way to signal that they are “one of the good ones.”

In some cases, the label is even used to avoid accountability. A man insists he is a feminist so that he cannot be accused of harm. He uses the identity defensively: I can’t be sexist, I support feminism.

The logic itself reveals the misunderstanding. Feminism is not a moral identity one earns; it is a political perspective shaped by embodied experience. When men treat it as proof of goodness, they turn a structural analysis into a personality trait. That is not allyship but entitlement.

The internet has made this pattern more visible. Numerous spaces, especially among younger women on TikTok/Instagram, discuss the discomfort they feel around men who call themselves feminists.

Not because the belief is unwelcome, but because the identity is too easily borrowed, too easily performed. Some of these women speak from experience: the men who spoke eloquently about consent but ignored boundaries, the men who criticised patriarchy publicly but exerted control privately, the men who understood feminist theory but not their own behaviour.

The observation is not that all “male feminists” are manipulative; it is that the label itself gives men more room to hide than to reveal.

This is why the question of whether men can be feminists is not rhetorical. It is a boundary that protects the integrity of feminist analysis. Feminism exists to describe the world from the standpoint of those who are oppressed within it. When men claim the label, they blur the distinction between standpoint and solidarity.

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What men can be, and what many genuinely try to be, are allies.

The distinction matters. An ally does not claim identity they have not lived. An ally supports a movement without centring themselves within it.

Allyship, in any justice-oriented movement, recognises the difference between those who experience oppression directly and those who oppose it from a place of relative safety. In the Black Lives Matter movement, non-Black people who protest police brutality are allies; they do not call themselves Black. In queer liberation, cis-het people who support LGBTQ+ rights do not call themselves queer.

The label belongs to the people whose lives are shaped by the oppression the movement confronts. Feminism is no different.

Allyship requires humility. It requires listening without interruption, advocating without appropriation, supporting without re-framing the narrative. It is an active, ongoing practice, a willingness to recognise one’s advantage and use it responsibly. But it does not require claiming a political identity rooted in another group’s experience.

And one of the most feminist things a man can do is understand that distinction without defensiveness.

The point of drawing this boundary is not to shame men, but to protect the clarity of what feminism names. Feminism describes a particular relationship to power—one that women cannot exit and men cannot enter. Women live inside the consequences of patriarchy. Men, even when they oppose it, live outside those consequences.

Politics that grow from experience cannot be shared by those who do not share the experience.

When men use the feminist label, I like to think many do so in good faith. The issue is not their intent but the mismatch between intention and position. Even well-meaning men cannot step into a standpoint shaped by experiences they have not lived, and recognising that limit is part of responsible allyship, not a critique of their character.

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The logical end of this argument is clear: feminism names a world that men do not move through. They can act in solidarity, they can challenge patriarchal norms but they cannot claim an identity grounded in experiences they have not lived.

The label belongs to women because its origins lie in their reality. It belongs to those who know firsthand the conditions that made feminism necessary.

Men can be allies—committed, principled, essential allies. But they cannot be feminists. And understanding that difference is not a limitation, it is the first step toward solidarity grounded in truth rather than entitlement.

Note: My essays will always be free to read. If you’d like to support the time and care that goes into writing them buy me a coffee ☕

Dating apps have taken something that used to be intimate and rooted in proximity and turned into something vast, exposed, and accessible to almost anyone with a smartphone.

What is striking about this shift is not just the use of technology, but the sheer scale of availability it creates. A single profile becomes visible to thousands of strangers at once, a level of access that has no real historical parallel. Even with filters and preferences, the act of placing oneself in front of such an enormous, unseen audience inevitably begins the process of commoditising dating. You begin to look at yourself the way a consumer would.

Romance, which once unfolded through small recognitions and shared environments, now begins in a space built for speed. Where people once noticed the warmth in someone’s voice or the familiarity of their routine, they now make decisions in seconds, often before any sense of real presence develops.

This shift in scale inevitably alters behaviour. Instead of discovering someone through the gentle accumulation of ordinary moments, through their expressions, their awkward pauses, the way they carry themselves in the world, we now meet one another as collections of preferences arranged for easy scanning. A few lines of text, a handful of photos, a cluster of interests, all arranged to be scanned quickly nd efficiently. Almost like packaging.

Within this design, it becomes easy to forget that a profile is not a person but a construction — a window shaped by careful curation, selective disclosure, and an instinctive understanding of what is likely to be well-received.

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Sociologist Erving Goffman framed this decades ago as “front-stage” behaviour: the self one performs for an audience. Dating apps magnify this performance. People show what they think will attract a stranger, rather than who they actually are. The gap between persona and person is a recurring issue, and the stories are familiar: mismatched expectations, curated identities collapsing offline and values that turn out to be performative rather than genuine.

Another consequence of this landscape is the illusion of endless choice. The sense that there is always someone “better” just one swipe away makes it harder to commit attention to the person already in front of you. Economists call it the “maximizer’s trap”—the belief that a perfect option will appear if you just keep searching. Instead of growing with someone, many people drift from match to match, not out of malice but because their minds are overstimulated by possibility.

Abundance paradoxically creates dissatisfaction.

In studies of user behaviour, participants report feeling “exhausted by opportunity,” a phrase that captures the irony of overwhelming choice. Constant choice eventually flattens desire. You scroll, you swipe, you respond, but the excitement thins out, leaving a dull hum of restlessness underneath everything.

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This is where dating begins to resemble a marketplace.

People compare potential partners the way they compare products. Preferences get fine-tuned, filters get stricter, and the moment something feels slightly demanding, the interaction dissolves.

What used to require awkward but honest endings now slips away in silence. Unmatching becomes a quiet exit; ghosting turns into the easiest way to disappear. Conversations don’t conclude, they simply evaporate the way browser tabs vanish when you close them without a second thought. One study noted that ghosting offers the same psychological relief as clearing your digital clutter, a startling comparison, but not an inaccurate one.

When interactions are this frictionless, they lose the emotional investment that once anchored early-stage connections. If leaving is easy, investment becomes optional. And because the system encourages constant evaluation, users often end up feeling evaluated themselves, not as people, but as data points.

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Underneath all of this sits a quieter emotion people don’t admit to easily: loneliness.

Dating apps are often described as tools of empowerment, but their business model depends on repeated use. A system built on constant re-entry naturally thrives when people don’t find what they’re looking for. This naturally creates an environment where people oscillate between hope and disillusionment, returning to the app because offline alternatives are limited and because prior attempts didn’t yield stability.

The emotional cycle mirrors what is called an “intermittent reward system,” the same mechanism used in slot machines: enough positive stimuli to keep people hooked, but not enough to create satisfaction. Over time, the pattern of almost-connection eats away at self-esteem in ways people don’t notice immediately.

More concerning is how normal the emotional detachment has become. Interactions fade without explanation because the platforms make withdrawal the simplest option. Nothing dramatic is required, silence accomplishes the task. Over time, this ease dulls something essential.

Rejection stings but at least acknowledges the other person; indifference leaves nothing to hold on to, and it slowly hollows out the instinct to care. This indifference is far more corrosive because it erodes both empathy and expectation.

When people expect little, they give little.

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Yet it would be simplistic to declare that technology has ruined dating or that meaningful connection is impossible in this environment. What is more accurate is that dating apps have reshaped the conditions under which connection forms. They require a level of intentionality that the older, slower systems of meeting people did not.

Without deliberate intention, dating becomes more about perfecting the self being displayed than engaging with the person on the other side.

This new landscape demands “emotional literacy”, the ability to navigate ambiguity, to communicate boundaries, to resist treating people as endless options. These are skills the technology does not teach; individuals must cultivate them themselves

Love can survive this era , it already does. But it tends to survive when people resist the more mechanical instincts encouraged by platforms. When they approach matches as humans rather than profiles. When they treat scarcity of attention as more meaningful than abundance of choice. When they accept that real connection requires vulnerability, patience, and friction — qualities no algorithm can automate.

Modern dating is not doomed. But it is undeniably distorted by a system that treats desire like a marketplace. The challenge, then, is not to abandon technology, but to navigate it without surrendering the humanity that makes love possible in the first place.

Dark romance has become one of the defining genres of contemporary online reading culture, marketed as a place where women can explore dangerous fantasies without real-world consequences.

I’ve heard this justification so often that it has begun to sound like a pre-recorded line: “It’s just fantasy. Women can separate fiction from reality. Let us enjoy things.” And while I understand the instinct to defend a genre that feels exciting or taboo or emotionally intense, I cannot in good conscience pretend that I believe that dark romance is harmless, especially when the stories it tells and the tropes it glorifies are being consumed not only by adults with fully formed boundaries, but by girls as young as twelve who are approaching the concept of romantic love for the very first time.

My discomfort with dark romance does not come from a place of judgment or prudery. It comes from experience. I grew up reading soft romances and stories about strong, complex women—books that shaped me quietly but decisively, books that told me that love requires respect, that boundaries matter and that a relationship cannot survive without dignity and trust.

Those stories taught me what I deserved, long before any real relationship could teach me what I should never tolerate. So when I read dark romance as an adult, when I occasionally pick up the books dominating BookTok or the ones endlessly recommended on Bookstagram, I don’t do it from a place of moral panic. I do it with an awareness of how deeply fiction seeped into my own understanding of love.

And every single time, I put those dark romances down feeling unsettled, stunned at how easily they repackage abuse, stalking, coercion, and borderline rape as though these things are simply intense forms of affection.

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To argue that repeated exposure to such stories has no effect on the psyche is to deny something fundamental about human beings: we internalise narratives long before we consciously examine them.

A girl who is thirteen or fourteen, reading about men who stalk, manipulate, threaten, or overpower their love interests and then offer a “happily ever after,” is not developing critical distance. She is absorbing patterns without yet having any real-life experiences to counterbalance them. You don’t need to be unintelligent or naïve to be influenced by fiction, you simply need to be human.

When a genre consistently tells readers that “she said no, but her body said yes,” that stalking is a form of devotion, that humiliation is a sign of passion, that a man who hurts everyone but her is somehow safe because she is special, it does not matter how many disclaimers or trigger warnings you attach at the beginning of the book. Those ideas will sit in the mind, waiting to surface the moment a real man behaves in a way that resembles the fantasy.

This is why the distinction between exploring harm and eroticising harm is so important.

I have no quarrel with fiction that examines darkness, power, and danger with self-awareness. What troubles me is when these elements are reframed as erotic destiny. In the dark romance landscape that exists now, books like the Cat and Mouse series, Lights Out, The Ritual, The Sinner, bully romances, captor/captive dynamics, problematic age-gap stories, the central danger is not presented as something to fear or question but as something to surrender to. The narrative assures the reader that no matter how abusive or coercive the male protagonist is, he will eventually redeem himself, and the heroine’s suffering is simply part of the journey.

This unwavering promise of a happy ending, regardless of the harm inflicted, is one of the genre’s most insidious patterns. It teaches readers, often subconsciously, that endurance equals love and that “fixing” a violent, manipulative man is a romantic achievement rather than a warning sign that should send you running.

And although people frequently claim that dark romance provides an outlet for women to explore dangerous fantasies safely, the troubling part is that these books do not just exist in private corners of the internet. They are aggressively marketed, pushed by algorithms, aestheticised on social media, and recommended through short, out-of-context quotes that glamorise the hero’s possessiveness, aggression, and entitlement.

On social media, the most violent lines are the ones that go viral. They’re framed not as taboo but as desirable, seductive, even aspirational. You can call the books fantasy, but the ecosystem around them sells the fantasy as if it were a standard to long for.

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The structure of these books reinforces the problem. The heroines are often portrayed as “not like other girls” martyrs who will tolerate anything, or traumatized young women who are presented as needing the hero’s control to feel safe. A particular kind of alpha male (outside of Omegaverse, in purely contemporary settings), emerges repeatedly: entitled, jealous, volatile, framed not as a threat but as the most masculine version of desire.

The moment the hero decides he loves her, one of the first things he does is strip her of economic independence by telling her she never has to work again, that he’ll take care of everything. In any other context, this would be recognised as a red flag, as one of the first steps in isolation and financial dependency. But dark romance insists on reframing it as devotion.

It is also remarkable how few of these stories allow women to have meaningful female friendships. Other women are often absent, reduced to background props, or eventually revealed as traitors. Without female friendships, there is no external perspective, no friend who says, “This is not love.” The heroine’s world collapses inward until the only relationship that matters is the one with the man who harms her. And because he is the centre of her emotional reality, every violation becomes forgivable.

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And yet, I do understand why the genre appeals to many women.

I understand the fantasy of being chosen with an intensity that borders on mythic, the desire to be loved so fiercely that the man who terrifies everyone else becomes gentle only with you. I understand the temptation to feel exceptional in the eyes of someone who is otherwise monstrous.

This appeal is real, and it does not make the women drawn to the genre weak or foolish. If anything, it reveals how deeply society has conditioned women to associate love with suffering, intensity with devotion, and danger with desirability. But understanding an appeal does not mean we must accept the narrative itself as harmless.

The most powerful critique of dark romance is that it relies on a distorted version of feminist language, “choice,” “fantasy,” “agency”, to package the very dynamics feminism has spent decades naming and resisting. The rhetoric of autonomy becomes a shield to deflect scrutiny, while the narrative itself depends on a heroine whose autonomy erodes page by page. A genre cannot claim to be empowering simply because women consume it. That is the lowest possible bar for empowerment.

What I find most frustrating is the idea that dark romance exists in a vacuum. It doesn’t. It is part of a long historical continuum. It descends from Gothic novels where love and fear were intertwined, from 1970s bodice-rippers where rape was reframed as passion, from the 1990s paranormal romances where predators were made romantic because they only refrained from killing the heroine, and from the 2010s fanfic-era wave where Fifty Shades blurred the line between BDSM and manipulation.

Every time feminism has made strides in naming and exposing harm, a parallel genre has emerged to eroticise that harm, wrap it in the language of love, and offer it to women as though it were liberation.

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It is not censorship I am calling for but honesty. For the recognition that when girls encounter these books at an age where they have no framework for healthy relationships, no real romantic experiences, and no strong internal boundaries, the narratives they absorb will matter.

I am calling for a more critical approach, one where we acknowledge that these stories shape desire, that they influence what readers later tolerate in real life, and that we cannot pretend otherwise simply because the genre is popular or the marketing is aesthetic.

The question is not whether women should be allowed to read dark romance. Of course they should.

The question is whether we, as readers and as a culture, are willing to examine why stories featuring abuse, coercion, stalking, and “she said no but…” dynamics are being packaged as love stories at all, and why we are so quick to defend the genre instead of interrogating the uncomfortable implications of its popularity.

Dark romance promises that any harm can be redeemed through devotion, that a woman’s suffering is the prelude to her happy ending, that being exceptional to a dangerous man is worth the cost. But feminism insists that women deserve safety, autonomy, respect, and genuine affection without pain attached to it. These two worldviews are not compatible, no matter how beautifully the book is written or how compelling the characters seem.

I’m not interested in telling anyone what they should or shouldn’t read. People gravitate toward stories for reasons that are often deeply personal. What interests me, what unsettles me, is observing how a genre built on the steady erosion of a woman’s boundaries has become one of the loudest definitions of romance on the internet. That shift says something about the stories we find familiar and, for me, that is reason enough to look more closely.

There are some truths the body knows long before the mind learns the language for them.

One of mine is this: the taste of my mother’s food is the only thing that makes me feel fully human again.

Amma’s food has never just been about taste.

With the very first bite of it, I can feel the difference in my nervous system. My shoulders drop before I even realize they were tense. The knot behind my ribs eases by a small but unmistakable degree.

People love to explain this kind of thing — childhood conditioning, early associations, comfort responses. But those words feel clinical in comparison to the experience. All I know is that one spoon of anything she makes can undo months of adulthood.

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Whenever I’m home, the ritual begins with her voice.

She calls me from the kitchen,“Cuckooooo”, drawing the nickname out in a way no one else ever has.

And every single time, without fail, I go. Not because I’m hungry; I often walk in still full from the airport food. I go because her voice pulls at something older than appetite. Something that remembers being small, being held, being fed.

In our old house, the kitchen was a small, stubborn thing. You couldn’t open one cabinet without bumping into another person. When the pressure cooker whistled, the steam fogged the one small window and clung to everything. It was the opposite of glamorous — steel vessels stacked, stains that never really left, a ceiling fan that moved more out of loyalty than power.

Now, Amma has the kind of kitchen she used to eye on Pinterest and quietly, almost imperceptibly, want.

The new one is bigger, full of light, with a wide window and enough counter space to line up all the dabbas she’s collected through decades of sales and festivals. In the mornings, around 7 AM, the light is sharp and cool, not golden or soft, but very awake. It falls on the counter, the stove, the sink, and then eventually on her.

By the time I wake up when I’m visiting, she has usually done most of the cooking for the day. There is often fish sizzling on the pan, bangdi on the best days, tarni or maya on others, crackling in sunflower oil. The pressure cooker whistles in intervals like a second clock. Alexa plays bhajans and Amma hums under her breath, out of habit rather than faith. The whole thing feels less like a room and more like an ecosystem where every element is doing exactly what it’s supposed to.

From my usual place at the head of the dining table, the same chair I’ve sat in since I was tall enough to clamber onto it, I can see her back. Loose maxi dress, hair tied, shoulders slightly damp with stove-side sweat. She moves with a speed that is not urgency but muscle memory, the pace of someone who has been doing this for decades.

But just before she truly begins, she pauses and draws in a deep, full breath.

I know that breath better than my own.

It’s the inhale of a woman stepping into a familiar role: feeder, caretaker, axis around which everyone else’s day turns.

Outside the kitchen, she is quieter, smaller in some ways, a woman used to folding parts of herself inward. But in this space, she unfurls. She becomes whole.

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If this were someone else’s story, maybe I’d start with the food itself. But this is mine, and so the first image is always her hands.

Slender. Veiny. Quick.

There’s a small scar on the side of her left hand, a relic from the early days of her marriage. She burned herself making murukku for my father, a young bride trying to match the memory of a taste she had never grown up with. The oil sputtered and jumped, branding her. But she didn’t flinch for long. She swallowed the pain, and began again. That was her way: watch, taste, fail, try again. Always again.

She wears a wedding band, plain and unchanging, and a rose-gold bracelet I once gave her, the only adornment she keeps on not because she must, but because I chose it for her.

These hands hold entire geographies. They know what it is to stretch ingredients during festivals when there wasn’t enough. They know the smell of her mother’s kitchen in the evening, the faint sourness of boiling dal, the grinding of masala on an old stone slab. And they learned the language of my father’s home too: the thrum of coconut, the ritual of tempering, the taste of the sea carried in fish bones, under the patient, watchful eye of my grandmother.

Through repetition, the foreign became familiar.

Her curries now taste like Kerala. Her dal tastes like her maternal home. Her biriyani tastes like the life she built in the space between two worlds. None of this is written down. It lives in her hands alone.

Recipes, I’ve come to believe, are just the visible tip. The real knowledge is tacit — embodied, intuitive, almost impossible to fully articulate. To eat her food is to sit with the parts of her life she’ll never put into words.

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When I was little, Amma never asked if I was hungry. She simply appeared with a plate.

Dal and rice, vegetables hidden strategically so I couldn’t stage a revolt. Fried fish on the side, salt and spice perfectly balanced. If I made a face, she pretended not to see it. If I refused, she didn’t chase me around with the plate; she just quietly adapted strategy. Fold the vegetables into the rice, add more fish. Make it harder to separate the parts I didn’t like.

There were days I was angry with her — sharp, adolescent anger that lived in my throat. And even then, I ate the food she cooked. The first few bites hurt going down because the anger sat like a stone right where the swallow should soften. But I ate anyway. With mothers, eating becomes its own form of apology. Or forgiveness. Or both.

Sometimes she fed me with her hands warm rice shaped into small balls, pressed gently into my palm or straight to my mouth. The texture was softness and heat and trust. I wasn’t a difficult child, just particular. And she wasn’t annoyed, just endlessly patient. There was a kind of faith in the act, as if she knew eventually I would learn to be grateful for what I now recognise as privilege.

We always sit at the same table, directly across from each other.

Amma is not a talkative woman by default, but with me, something unfastens.

Amma who carries her life quietly everywhere else, talks when I’m eating — small stories, private worries, thoughts she never voices to anyone else. My presence seems to open a door in her. Words pour out — stories, worries or stray observations. It’s as if my presence gives her permission to inhabit her own interiority for a while.

She steadies me. And I, in some quiet, reciprocal way, steady her.

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I’ve been away from home for more than seven years now. In that time, I’ve eaten from steel thalis in hostels, plastic plates in canteens, oversized white crockery in corporate cafeterias, and countless restaurant plates whose only common trait was that they weren’t mine.

In every new city, I’ve tried to re-create my comfort: dal and rice, fish on the side. In every new city, it has failed. The dal is either too thin or too rich. The fish is either overcooked or under-seasoned. The rice is there, but the heart of it isn’t.

Once, in a fit of longing, I called her and asked for the exact recipe for her dal. She gave it in the worst possible terms for an already anxious daughter: “Just add a little, and see,” “You’ll know when it’s ready.”

I forced her to be specific with the number of whistles, exact quantity of the pulse and the order of ingredients. I followed everything to the letter. The result was edible. It was even “good,” by objective standards. But it didn’t taste like hers. It tasted like an imitation of home. Like a photograph printed a shade too cold. Like someone trying on my mother’s handwriting and not quite getting the slant right.

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These days, when I go home, it’s usually for a weekend. Often a Sunday. The travel is long and inelegant and by the time I reach, I’m a strange mix of wired and exhausted.

The moment I enter the house, the smell hits first. Fish frying. Steam from the pressure cooker. That particular mix of spices and oil that only exists in her kitchen. There might be incense from the puja corner, detergent from freshly washed clothes.

But underneath all of that is the steady base note of something cooking for me.

“Cuckoooo,” she calls as usual, “Freshen up and come. Food is ready.”

She brings out a ceramic plate with flowers painted along the rim, the same kind of plate you’d find in countless Indian households, but to me it feels like a relic of a personal religion. She serves chicken biriyani on the first day I’m home more often than not.

I take the first bite and my body answers before my mind does: Finally.

Not “this is delicious,” although it is. Not “I missed this,” although I did. Just finally, a completion of a circuit that had been open for too long.

Something in my chest tightens and loosens at the same time. I am suddenly thirteen again, and twenty-three, and every age in between, sitting across from the same woman who has been feeding me my entire life.

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There’s something almost philosophical about being cooked for.

We don’t talk about it often because food is so ordinary, but the ordinary is where the truest things usually hide.

To eat something made for you, deliberately, knowingly, specifically is to be seen in a way that bypasses language. It’s one of the few acts that doesn’t rely on performance or explanation. You don’t have to announce your hunger or justify your exhaustion. Someone simply knows.

And maybe that’s why her food tastes like more than flavour.

Out in the world, I feed myself because I must. At home, I am fed because I am loved.

There is a difference — subtle, but foundational.

Food made for you carries intention. Food made by you carries survival.

Both are valid but only one makes you feel returned to yourself.

Maybe that’s why the older I get, the more I realize that nothing I chase out there , success, certainty, clarity, feels as stabilizing as a plate of food made by the one person who has known me in every version of myself.

There’s a grounding in that plate that I can’t explain without sounding sentimental.

Life remains life — complicated, demanding, full of its own tensions. But something about being fed by Amma places the world back into proportion.

“Cuckoooo.” I hear her call again ,a soft, familiar echo from the kitchen.

And just like that, I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.

Acchu was born out of prayers.

That’s how the story has always existed in my head, not as a date on a hospital form but as something that began long before he took his first breath. Before the doctor announced “It’s a boy,” before the car ride to the hospital, before the first photograph of him swaddled and squinting at the world.

It began when I was almost three, and my parents decided, with unnerving certainty , that their next child would be a son.

They didn’t say, “We hope it’s a boy.”

They said, “You’re going to have a brother.”

There was no discussion, no room for alternatives. In their minds, he already existed somewhere just beyond reach, waiting to be handed down to us. But certainty didn’t stop them from praying for him anyway.

My parents went from temple to temple with the devotion of characters in an old epic, one where every offering mattered and every step meant something. They walked barefoot on stone that remembered thousands of feet. They passed beneath carved ceilings where gods looked down with eyes that never closed.

In some temples, the incense hung so thick it felt like walking through a cloud. In others, the bells rang so sharply the air itself trembled.

They left coins that chimed softly against the brass plates. It felt, somehow, like they were leaving a trail for destiny, small shining markers so the child they wanted could find his way to us.

But more than any temple, their prayers lived in our old pooja room, a memory that lives in my head like a flower pressed between pages.

It was a small square space, barely big enough for one adult to sit cross-legged, with wooden walls so thin that sound seeped through them. The room was lined with pictures—too many gods to count, all arranged in the kind of haphazard collage only Indian households manage to perfect. New printed photos taped over fading older ones, brass frames next to laminated postcards, a little row of tiny gods in different poses. I prided myself in being able to name almost all of them.

When Amma went inside, she seemed to disappear into something sacred and private. From outside, I could hear her voice, soft at first then rising and falling as the bhajans went on, a steady stream of words I didn’t yet understand but knew were important because of the way she said them.

I knew the rules: the pooja room wasn’t a place I could just wander into. Some lines in a house are invisible but still unquestionable. So I would stand in the doorway, watching.

Amma didn’t mind. Or maybe she just didn’t notice.

But there was this one picture Amma’s eyes would fixate on when she’d be on her chanting spree.

It was an avatar of Lakshmi, Sanatana Lakshmi, with a baby Karthik on her lap.

Her expression in that picture was very particular: not the grand, distant serenity of a deity but something quieter, a gentleness that felt almost human. The baby’s face was soft and round, one small hand reaching outward, as if towards someone just outside the frame.

It’s been seventeen years since the house was torn down and rebuilt. All the frames that had graced the walls of the tiny, old pooja room are long gone, replaced with new shinier substitutes, except for one.

The picture of the goddess with the baby boy on her lap still has its special place right next to the diya.

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Acchu was born right in the middle of November and, all of a sudden, I was an elder sister.

I still remember the drive to the hospital, although it’s a bit blurry around the edges.

Achan couldn’t stop smiling. He kept turning to look at me, as he drove, grinning in a way I didn’t see very often. There’s a particular brightness that comes over people when they get something they’ve wanted for a very long time. That day, his whole posture was made of that lightness.

He kept telling me things, none of which I can now remember. I don’t think I even listened to a word he said.

Achan was glowing. This was a man whose prayers had been answered.

“You have a brother now!” he told me, “He’ll call you Chechi!”

At three, that word hit me harder than “brother” did.

Chechi.

It sounded like a title, something you earned and then spent your whole life living up to.

I knew, in the simplistic but intense way little children know things, that being an elder sibling meant responsibility. I would have to care for him. I would have to protect him from things. I would have to teach him things I was still learning myself.

My parents told me he would be in my life long after they were gone. That someday, when their voices and faces were memories, he would still be there. That we would, in some strange way, be each other’s proof that they had once existed.

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My earliest personal memory of Acchu is a blur—sound, light, the shape of adults’ hands moving carefully around a bundle, a soft cry emanating at their touch. But the first story of the two of us together belongs to my parents, and they tell it with the same mixture of horror and amusement every time.

When he was first brought home, I was understandably not allowed to carry him.

I was still little myself, all soft limbs and unsteady balance. My parents would move around the house with him cradled in their arms, and I would trail behind them, watching: the way they supported his head, the way his tiny hands curled around their fingers, the way they stared at him as if he were equal parts fragile and miraculous.

I wanted, more than anything, to hold him the way they did.

One day, while my parents were downstairs working, I slipped away and went upstairs to the room where he was sleeping. I can picture it only through their recounting: a small girl standing by a bed, hair probably messy, eyes wide, looking at a sleeping baby wondering how she should go about what she’d intended to do.

According to them, I must’ve watched him for a while.

Then, very carefully, I slid my arms under him and tried to lift him the way I had seen my mother do—one arm under the back, one under the legs, everything slightly off, slightly clumsy.

When Amma walked in, his neck was at an angle that made her heart stop.

She snatched him from my arms, untwisted him gently, checking his limbs, his breathing, his tiny, startled face.

If she had come a moment later, the story might have ended differently. But she didn’t. She came in time, like she still does.

Whenever my parents tell this story, they look at me with mock sternness and soft eyes.

“You nearly killed him the first week he was home,” they say.

But they always add, “From the very beginning, you wanted to hold him.”

And somehow, that is the part that stays with me.

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Growing up, we played all the usual games kids play, the ones that are so universal you could drop us in another family and we’d still recognise them.

There was floor is lava, where the rules were simple and dramatic: the tiles were suddenly molten, and only furniture was safe. We’d hop from chair to bed to stool, arguing about whether a toe grazing the floor counted as instant death.

Then there was the mirror game.

We would stand in front of the big mirror in our room, press ourselves against it, and then pretend we had stepped through it like the surface was water, like we had slipped into another world. On the other side of that imaginary portal were the trees behind our house.

That backyard was everything at once: forest, battlefield, treasure hunt zone, distant kingdom. We’d come out of the “mirror world” and disappear into those trees, inventing stories as we went—enemies, allies, dragons that were probably just stray dogs, magical items that were really rocks shaped interestingly.

We fought, of course. That was part of the universe too.

We fought over who got the bigger piece of chocolate, holding them up against each other suspiciously, tilting them in the light, refusing to be cheated out of even a millimetre. We argued about whose score actually counted in whatever game we’d invented that day. We competed over who had the “better” colour when we bought the same thing in different shades.

But time, which once stretched endlessly in childhood, began to fold in on itself as we grew older.

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When I left for my undergraduate degree, something I had looked forward to suddenly hurt in a place I hadn’t expected.

He cried.

Not once but again and again, as if the emotion had to leak out in instalments because it wouldn’t fit in one go. He cried in the days leading up to my departure, when I started packing. And he cried after I left, every time we video-called.

It went on for weeks.

He would see my face on the screen and the tears would just flow.

I tell people that story even now, laughing every time. How my brother, who rarely cried, cried like a child when I left. How he couldn’t hide it, no matter how hard he tried. On the surface, it sounds funny, almost embarrassing for him.

But underneath the laughter, there’s something else, an invisible thread of tenderness I don’t often admit out loud. He cried because I was gone. Because for the first time, I wasn’t just upstairs or in the next room. I had become pixelated, delayed by internet speed, my presence reduced to a rectangle on a screen.

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These days, we don’t talk as much. Life pulls at us from different directions.

He has his studies, his plans, his versions of what adulthood might look like. I have mine.

Our conversations now live mostly in our phones. He sends me memes, screenshots, messages that begin with “Achi, suno” and then spill into something he found funny, or absurd, or mildly infuriating. Sometimes he asks for advice. Sometimes he just shares without expecting a reply.

I can always tell when he’s hiding something, even though he’s a good liar. Years of being his elder sister have given me a private dictionary where his tells are underlined and annotated. A small pause here, an over-casual phrase there. The way he avoids certain details when he doesn’t want me to worry.

He has known me his entire life and I’ve watched him grow into the man he has become.

I’ve done everything I can to be someone he can always look up to and fall back on if and when he needs it.

As I write this, I know for a fact that he’d never get around to reading it all to the very end. Reading, I’d realised a long time ago, was one of the few things that I could never get him to like.

And this has worked out fine for both of us.

For instance, he wouldn’t have to go through the embarrassment he’s bound to be filled with at finding out how I told everyone about the time he cried like a baby when I left for college.

And for me? I wouldn’t have to go through the ordeal of him knowing that I love him enough to write about him.

God knows he’ll never let me live this down.

P.S. It’s his birthday today. I can’t say any of this to him, so the end of an essay felt like a good hiding spot.

Achamma died without any last words.

As someone who’d lain next to her every night, with her fingers combing through my hair, as she whispered tales from her childhood to me before we fell asleep, it came as a surprise.

Whenever I’d thought about her dying someday, something that had intensified ever since her condition began deteriorating in the months preceding her death, I’d imagined Achamma spilling a final string of words full of wisdom before she...went over(?). Or a final tale with a cliffhanger for an ending. Anything at all. That’s just the kind of person she was.

Achamma loved telling stories.

She breathed her last in my Achan’s arms.

He didn’t tell me this when he rushed to the coaching center I was attending classes in.

I knew something terrible had happened when I was pulled out halfway through the session. The man who’d come to get me refused to meet my eyes as he asked me to gather my things before leaving the class.

I wouldn’t be returning anytime soon.

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Inside the car, I asked Achan if she was okay. If something had happened.

He wouldn’t answer.

He couldn’t.

His eyes were unfocused as he drove. It was a short drive, barely ten minutes long, but in those ten minutes I saw my father age.

He didn’t have to tell me what had happened. I knew.

“She isn’t responding,” he finally said as we turned around the corner, “She is...she might be....”

He never finished. As if saying it out loud would make it come true. As if it hadn’t already happened.

Later I’d think how strangely he’d put it.

Achamma had stopped talking a month ago. She couldn’t remember faces. And even if she did she didn’t have anything to say to them.

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When she did speak, she’d talk about going back to her childhood home in Kerala. About the trees that stood in the backyard of her house. How they’d bloom in the spring. How she’d collect the fallen flowers and adorn her hair with them.

So when he said she’d stopped responding, I knew it wasn’t about what she had to say.

For hours afterwards, people came and went, asking what her last words were.

What a strange thing to ask.

Some even insisted on us thinking a bit harder. Maybe she’d said something we couldn’t make out at the moment? Maybe on the day before? Maybe any other day in the past week, in a moment of clarity?

No one had an answer.

Achamma, after all the countless tales she’d regaled us with when alive, had left us without a single word to remember her by, in her death.

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Or that’s what everyone believed.

She’d been sitting at her usual spot, at the far end of the sofa, waiting for the maid to tidy up her room and make the bed, when it happened.

I don’t know if these were her last words, or even her final moment of clarity, unless she’d spoken to someone else too the way she spoke to me two days before she died.

I was on my way to the kitchen, not paying much attention to her since I’d pretty much given up hope by then, when she called out my name.

To say I was taken aback would be an understatement.

My parents weren’t home and neither was my brother. The maid couldn’t care less.

It was just me and Achamma.

She gestured for me to come closer to her, something I obliged to at once because I’d hungered for her attention, for her stories...for my grandma.

“What are you doing?” she asked me in Malayalam.

She’d resorted to speaking entirely in her mother tongue in the final month, too.

“Nothing,” I lied. I’d been studying but in that moment it didn’t matter.

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She was speaking.

To me.

“They say you’re like me.”

The statement needled me. Everyone in the family joked that I was like Achamma because she was lazy, scared of the littlest things and overly dramatic among other things.

For the first three or four times, it was funny, but when you keep hearing it at every gathering, those words being used to describe you over and over again as if that’s all you are and nothing more, it does get.... annoying.

I hated being compared to Achamma.

Especially if it was with respect to all the not so good things about her.

She must’ve known it. She was shrewd like that. Amma wasn’t a big fan of Achamma but one thing she’d always admired about her was her ability to read people.

And with that one statement, I realised how perceptive Achamma truly was.

I just shrugged in response. What was I even supposed to say to that?

“You would be studying, if you were like me.”

“I was.”

That earned me a toothy grin which made me feel really proud of myself.

Achamma was talking to me.

She was smiling at me!

It hit me then, how badly I’d missed my grandmother in the past few months.

Now I’d have loved to say that her next few words were life changing and made me see her in a new light or even made me tear up and bawl my eyes out.

But that didn’t happen.

“You, you keep on studying, make the family proud, and take care of your brother.”

And she turned away and went back to being quiet.

Hearing this was nothing new to me. I’ve been told this almost everyday for as long as I can remember. So, of course, I didn’t think much of it.

Not until later.

Not until a week after she was gone.

And I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

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It’s been nine years since she passed away.

I’ve studied and I like to think I’ve made my family proud. I take care of my brother in the only ways I know how.

Achamma has been gone for a long time now and everyday I hear less of how much I’m like her.

I never thought I’d miss hearing that but I do.

• Achamma loved making up stories.

• Achamma cried over the littlest of things because she felt too deeply

• Achamma was quick to anger, but even quicker to forgive. (”Forgive but don’t forget,” she’d say)

• Achamma loved perfume. She’d have bottles of them stashed among her clothes.

• Achamma loved stars. She had pointed constellations out to me every night (”You see those three stars altogether?” She’d ask, “They’re my parents and your Achachan”)

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With every day, the memory of her voice fades. When I close my eyes, I can picture her face but I can no more picture the way her face would break into a smile when I’d ask her to repeat my favorite stories from her childhood days.

So, I try to keep Achamma alive in the things I do. I make up stories and I cry over little things (like I’m crying now). I get angry and I forgive (Can’t forget, though). I look for whites when I shop for clothes (it was her favorite color) and I listen to Chanda Re every now and then because she hummed it all the time.

In doing these things, I find a way to be in touch with her.

Achamma died without any last words.

And that’s okay.

Because everything she ever needed to say, she already had.

She lives in the stories I tell.

She lives in the woman I’ve become.

She lives as long as I love her.

P.S. I wrote this essay two years ago and decided it deserved a place here. It’s strange how time changes everything except the truth of how much you loved someone.

Feminist horror has never been ‘niche.’ It’s simply been mislabeled as one.

It is the genre that admits what most storytelling tries to disguise: that horror already lives inside the ordinary. Strip away the demons and blood, and what remains is the surveillance of women’s bodies, the management of their appetites, and the domestic sphere as a site of risk. Horror doesn’t create these fears, it simply refuses to mute them. Turn the volume down, and the signal still hums underneath daily life.

These stories often begins with possession. When a film needs a body through which something unspeakable will speak, it is almost always a woman’s. Regan in The Exorcist, Emily in The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Carolyn in The Conjuring. Even when the final vessel is a man, as in Hereditary, the machinery of horror runs through the labor of women — mothers, daughters, grandmothers — treated as mediums rather than people. The priest and the doctor argue theology and medicine over a woman who cannot answer.

Possession stories are not parables of faith. They are commentaries on authority—who gets to define madness, purity, evil.

The female body has always been a contested commons, a resource managed by others. Feminist horror builds its language around this fact. The demon, the doppelgänger, the house, the cult, these are not inventions of fear but expressions of it. They give texture to forces that predate cinema: medical dismissal, marital contracts, community appetite for a scapegoat, the soft tyranny of goodness.

In The Stepford Wives, automation becomes obedience, perfection the price of personhood. The Yellow Wallpaper documents a cure that looks indistinguishable from captivity. Comfort Me With Apples dissects the Edenic marriage and finds property law beneath devotion. Come Closer reframes “irrationality” as possession, and asks whether the voice inside the woman is really the intruder or the self finally made audible. These stories understand that the true exorcism is always social.

Feminist horror differs from the glossy optimism of mainstream feminist media precisely because it has no use for choice feminism’s mirage of agency. Empowerment, in pop culture, is a consumable—select your rebellion from a menu of marketable options. The assumption is that freedom can exist within the same system that required subservience.

Feminist horror rejects that premise.

It doesn’t offer clever maneuvers inside the pen, it studies the pen itself.

To understand why the genre feels honest, you have to return to its oldest tale.

Lilith and Eve are the genre’s first women and its first warnings. In the story, Lilith was made from the same earth as Adam and refused to be ruled by him. For that, she was exiled and rewritten as a demon. Punished not for sin, but for wanting equality. Eve was made from Adam’s rib, meant to be the correction, the companion who would stay. When she reached for knowledge, she was blamed for the fall of humankind.

Between them lies a simple pattern that horror never stopped repeating: whether a woman refuses or obeys, she will be punished. Every possession, every witch trial, every haunted marriage borrows from this logic. The woman’s body is either the site of transgression or the proof of it.

Jennifer’s Body allows the sacrificed girl to become the predator, collapsing the line between victim and villain. Ready or Not dismantles the myth of the “chosen bride” by revealing that the ceremony was always a transaction. Slewfoot reframes witchcraft as resistance, not heresy. Each story asks the same question: when a woman finally transgresses, what does the world call her?

Feminist horror’s honesty lies in its refusal to perform likability. It disciplines the viewer into attention rather than soliciting admiration. It does not reward endurance with applause. It treats the act of looking as complicity and asks you to track what you’re willing to tolerate before you name it cruelty.

Formally, it achieves this through three methods:

1. Epistemic friction: The unreliable narrator is not a stylistic gimmick but a political test of credibility. In these stories, a woman senses danger before anyone else — the house hums, the wallpaper breathes, the husband’s voice sharpens in ways no one else hears. The terror is not the haunting, it is the collective confidence that she must be mistaken. Institutions in feminist horror (doctors, priests, husbands, neighbors) aren’t neutral observers. They are gatekeepers of reality. When a woman says that something has changed, the first violence is always dismissal. Horror exposes how disbelief functions not as doubt, but as discipline.

2. Spatial indictment: Architecture becomes ideology. Kitchens, nurseries, cul-de-sacs, spaces designed for safety, reveal themselves as control systems. In The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, a pastel neighborhood organizes itself to protect the predator next door. In Just Like Mother, a maternity cult exposes how easily worship can turn into supply chain. The genre forces the viewer to understand that space is not neutral. It decides who belongs, who is watched, who is sacrificed to keep the community’s image intact.

3. Monstrosity as method: The monstrous woman in feminist horror is never born, she is made. Witches, demons, feral girls, possessed brides are not deviations, they are consequences. In Slewfoot, the witch is not evil incarnate but a woman marked as surplus, inconvenient to land, to legacy, to patriarchal resource allocation. She becomes frightening only when she stops apologizing for existing outside utility. Feminist horror insists that monstrosity is not a fall from grace; it is what a woman becomes when grace was never extended to her.

This is also why the genre feels analytically sturdy. Horror treats patriarchy not as a backdrop but as a system with logistics. There are supply lines (of care work, of reputation, of silence). There are enforcement mechanisms (marriage law, medical authority, religious arbitration, neighborly surveillance). There are rituals that refresh the system (holiday dinners, bridal showers, book clubs) that appear benign and are anything but. The narrative escalations (locked doors, impossible rules, ritual bloodletting) are just faithful translations of policies women already navigate. Horror takes abstraction and gives it kinetics: something shifts in the walls because something has already shifted in the culture

The argument that horror is “too negative” misunderstands its purpose. Endings rarely offer moral victories. The best of them produce clarity. In Goddess of Filth or The Possession of Alba Díaz, the sacred reclaims itself from institutions that profaned it. The survivor isn’t chosen by grace, she endures because she understood the system well enough to avoid its traps. That is the pedagogy of feminist horror. Learn how the mechanism works.

Hope, when it appears, is procedural rather than emotional. Map the house. Count the locks. Note who holds the keys and who is missing. Decide what kind of monster you will have to become to leave. The genre never pretends the exit is free. It teaches the price.

What distinguishes feminist horror is not gore or spectacle but precision. It understands that fear, for women, is rarely abstract. It treats fear as specific—shaped by customs, paperwork, and the reputational economy. It assumes that any woman who speaks will have to defend the fact that she spoke. That assumption, more than any apparition, is the engine of dread.

Ultimately, there’s nothing mystical about these stories. They only repeat what the world already does. The horror isn’t that it’s unreal. The horror is that it’s recognizably ours.

My earliest memory of God rises from the smoke of camphor and incense, curling into the corners of our home.

It’s Thursday, the day my mother believes the gods lean in and listen a little more closely. She sits cross-legged in the puja room, eyes closed, chanting for the son she still hopes to hold. I stand at the doorway, the stone floor cool against my feet, tracing patterns with my toes while her voice hums through the house like a slow current. A sudden wind slips through the window, lifting the edge of her saree. The flames tremble, but they never go out.

Maybe that’s where my belief began. Not inside the puja room, but at its threshold. Half in, half out.

I grew up in a house where God was everywhere. On the brass idols that glimmered in our puja room. In the smell of incense that clung to our curtains. On the kitchen calendar, Amma’s handwriting marked no-meat days like quiet commandments. Nobody ever told me to believe; belief was simply assumed, like gravity. And for years, I never noticed the weight of it.

When I was younger, God felt like a friend who could make things happen if you asked nicely enough, the sort of all-knowing elder you could bribe with devotion. He was who I whispered to before exams, before dentist visits, before everything that scared me. I thought He lived somewhere above, keeping score, ready to shield me from what I couldn’t handle, to protect me, to make sure life didn’t go terribly wrong. And for a while, it was comforting to think someone powerful was watching.

But that changed the year I began scoring well in my exams and everyone at home said, It’s all God’s blessing. I remember feeling a sharp sting of irritation. Because I knew how much I’d worked, how many nights I’d stayed up revising until my eyes burned.

I wanted to scream that I had studied, I had stayed up through the night, I had worked for it. I wanted credit. I wanted to be seen. I didn’t want my effort to disappear under the blanket of divine grace. And maybe, in that anger, I stopped believing as much as I once did, blindly that is, and started looking for Him.

Still, I went through the motions. I followed my parents to temples. I stood in lines, circled the sanctum, pressed my palms together when everyone else did. I mouthed prayers I didn’t understand, I waited for the bell to ring, for something to move inside me. Nothing did. When the priest placed prasad in my hand, I smiled on reflex, feeling like a good actress in a role too small for her.

Eventually I stopped trying to find Him in rituals and started talking to Him directly—in the bus, in the shower, while walking home after long days. My prayers shrank into private conversations in my head, like talking to an old friend who’d gone away but still answered sometimes. I didn’t ask for miracles anymore. Some nights I asked for patience, other nights for a reason to keep getting out of bed.

There were times I yelled at Him too. When people left. When life felt like a long corridor of locked doors. It was easier to accuse a silent God than accept randomness. I’d mutter, You could’ve warned me, then laugh at myself for believing He owed me an explanation.

And yet, I kept looking. In other people’s kindness. In coincidences too neat to be coincidences. In the small mercies that arrive right before you break—an unexpected text, a bus that waits, a stranger who holds the elevator. Maybe that’s where He hides now: inside gestures that don’t know they’re holy.

A few months ago, when everything in my life felt uncertain, I sat on the balcony watching the sky bleed from orange to grey. I didn’t pray. I just waited for something, anything, to make sense.

Sylvia Plath’s words came to mind : “I need a father, I need a mother, I need some old, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God but the sky is empty.”

I knew that emptiness. I’d felt it settle behind my ribs like dust. My phone buzzed—Amma, asking if I’d eaten. I’d fought with her earlier that week and hadn’t spoken to her since. I called her then and we spoke only about dinner. When I put down the phone, my worries hadn’t melted away but I felt lighter. Maybe that’s how God speaks now: through the voices that arrive exactly when you need them.

My relationship with God has always been a negotiation, sometimes even an argument. Yet I think the wrestling itself is a kind of faith. You don’t fight for something that means nothing to you.

I don’t know if I’d call myself a believer. I don’t think God minds. I think He prefers people who doubt but still talk to Him anyway. These days my prayers are small and unspectacular. I don’t kneel, I don’t bargain. I just speak into the air and hope it carries.

When I’m tired, I ask for strength. When I’m lost, I ask for softness. When I’m grateful, I whisper it quietly to no one in particular.

Maybe belief isn’t about certainty at all. Maybe it’s the act of searching, again and again, through all the wrong places, until something answers back.