Rage Of Betrayals: Why Are Women Angry?

“I will not give birth to a life that will discriminate against my gender. 

My own flesh and blood must not become a blade and turn against me. 

If the world born from my body oppresses me I will not let that world exist.” 

This is a popular poem often shared when anyone talks of the 4B movement in South Korea. The women in this movement boycott the world of men; boycott heterosexual marriage, relationships, sex, and giving birth.

It may seem quite radical, quite an overreaction to an untrained eye. But based on my experience, almost every woman I know will resonate with this, even if they don’t explicitly want to follow it. And why wouldn’t they? All women have seen their entire lives are betrayals. Betrayals from society. From men. From family. From their own sisterhood.  

Radical is a word that usually means inconvenient to power. To many women, it simply feels honest.

Because long before we learn the language for injustice, we learn the feeling of it. 

I live in a country where marital rape is legal; politicians argue false liars will fill the courtroom if it is criminalised. Because what woman wouldn’t want to go through the trauma and humiliation of being a rape victim, right?

Stories of women harmed, blamed, discarded fills our news feeds on social media and are yet ignored by the mainstream. It is newsworthy when a woman kills a man, ‘blue drum’ becomes a horror, it will be debated for decades. But 137 women being killed every day by an intimate partner globally? That’s just statistics from the culture we live in.

I have been told I was responsible for being stalked. I have watched sisters fed less than brothers, girls erased before birth. My family saw a daughter burned alive without any resolution. My mother mourned her sister. My mother mourned herself, for the woman she was before she was trapped in marriage. My grandma mourned her freedom when married at age 10. My neighbour mourned silently when pulled by the hair and beaten on the floor— only for the neighbours to suddenly become deaf, and the family to become one of Gandhiji’s three monkeys. 

I live in a world where if you are privileged enough to have a house party with your women friends, the conversation, drunk and uninhibited, turns to stories of sexual assault. Often from the same week. With echoes of, it happened to me too. And brushed off in the hangover of the morning.

Rage, in this landscape, is not an overreaction. It is free-flowing in the veins. And yet smothered immediately by expectations from a ‘lady’ who preserves the honour of the family.

Even as I sat down to write this—and my hand itched to reach for my phone to satiate the addiction we all have to our screens—my phone showed me the following on Instagram: children were raped on Epstein island, a woman was found murdered for dowry (actually three such posts follow), a deaf-mute girl was raped in her shelter home, a girl was being called a whore in the comment sections because she criticised the government.

A memory, unbidden, takes me to the early 2000s. When I saw a male genital for the first time. I was barely eight or nine. Playing in my backyard which had a gate towards a lane. A drunk man, looking for a place to urinate in the backroad, spotted me and pulled his pants down to his ankles. He made a squishing noise, that sound is still fresh in my ears, it was the first time I felt afraid. The man, barely able to stand, took his member in his hand and signaled me to approach with his other hand. I was nine. He ran when my dogs came out looking for me. I don’t know how long I stood there when they came for me. I didn’t understand the gravity of the situation till I was 15 or 16. But my dogs did, for their bark saved me that evening. I shudder to think, what if I didn’t have dogs? Would I have been another headline, barely read for 30 seconds then forgotten, in the ‘jungle raj’ era of Bihar?

So, I wonder what people mean when they claim women are hyperbolic on social media regarding safety. Regarding fear. Regarding men.

When they ask women to be reasonable. To compromise. To “settle.” As if settling is not an act of blind faith. As if the man beside me has not been shaped by the same world that taught boys entitlement and taught girls’ endurance.

Coming back to the poem from South Korea, its origins are deeply cultural. In 2024, the world learned of the Humiliation Rooms—Telegram spaces where men shared intimate videos of women taken without consent.

Wives. Sisters. Mothers. Some videos were real; others were deepfakes. Women bathing, changing, having sex. And sometimes, the deepfakes were of their own mothers. Over 70,000 men participated.

The scale of this betrayal fails words. These were sons, brothers, who couldn’t see their mom or sister beyond their genital identity. They learned from their society, women were disposable. Women were not living, breathing humans.

So why wouldn’t the women in this country refuse to birth a life that would violate them in ways unimaginable.

In the case of Giselle Pelicot from France, she chose to have her identity revealed in public because ‘change must shame sides’. Her husband, the one who took the holy vows of marriage to protect and love her, would drug her and invite men over to rape her.

Are there even any words for this betrayal?

Then there is the WHO study, a woman is killed every 17 minutes by an intimate partner. Again, husbands and boyfriends that the society desperately wants women to settle for.

When Nirbhaya’s violent rape shook the nation in 2012, and thousands outraged on roads or on social media, the chief minister of Delhi at the time exclaimed, ‘but why was she out so late at night?’ Firstly, she was out barely around 7 or 8 PM. and Sheila Dixit, a woman herself, betrayed all the women in the country with that one short line. In UP, in 2014, Mulayam Singh Yadav claimed ‘boys make mistakes and shouldn’t be awarded death penalty for rapes’.

These people weren’t misinformed or ignorant. Just like the hundreds, thousands, or millions who immediately try to justify a rape or assault by looking at the clock, the length of girl’s dress, or the number of male friends she has. These questions came from authority. And a ‘tradition’ to lay blame on the woman, the child, or the teen and let the men have a way out. 

Microbetrayals That Shape Our Worldview

An argument can be made here that my examples are, well, extremes.

That everyday life is not so brutal. But everyday life is where the brutalities are rehearsed. India is estimated to have 86 rapes a day. That is three rapes every hour. And rape is not an event that ends. It ends a woman's world. There is before and after and the after a continuous, burning, painful, hell. It follows how a woman walks home, how she trusts, how she speaks, how she is spoken about.

Still, it becomes a joke.

I remember being 19, sitting among friends as someone joked that India had “raped” Pakistan in a cricket match. The word was tossed lightly, like a metaphor with no weight. When I objected, I was told not to bring feminism into everything. It was just humour.

One of them, then inspired by the topic of rape, commenced a discussion on which of the girls in our class were not virgins. The way a girl walks, how tight her jeggings were, the way her knees rest when she sits—all were used as evidence. The term ‘slut’ was used a couple of times, desperate and easy were also repeated.

I left the room. I regret not saying anything at the moment. These were ‘friends’, after all.

It was the horrid year that began the reign of Trump, a few weeks before the painful US elections of 2016. The same friend group called Hilary Clinton a murder apologist and claimed Trump should win because he is a better man. ‘Hillary wants women to have abortions, how sick is she’ was their argument. I mentioned claims of sexual misconduct for Trump, one boy argued these claims cannot be trusted, another said he is a billionaire (that was supposed to be an explanation, as in women flock towards money), and the combined sentiment was Trump, as a man, could never be as bad as a woman. That was 2016, my last year of college. We are now in 2026, we have seen how Trump’s ‘goodness’ turned out, we have seen there is a cabal of (alleged) child molesters and rapists surrounding Trump. I have not spoken to these friends since graduation.  

Sl*ts All Around Us

The first time I witnessed an explicit act of slut shaming was in Bihar, in 2009. A distant relative, over chai and biscuit, was going on and on about a 15-year-old girl, also a relative. He spoke of sanskaar a lot. “She wears lip gloss. And she goes to coaching with lip gloss. Is the father blind and not seeing that she must be characterless inside the class, if she is daring to wear lip gloss and sleeveless outside?”

I couldn’t resist and pointed out, “But why are you following her around so much?” He tried to call me disrespectful, but thankfully, my mother told him not to talk about the girl that way. I am sure, in his next visit to the next relative, I would have been the characterless girl.

Calling women characterless was ordinary where I grew up. Lipstick meant infidelity. Short socks in high school girls meant experience. Hostel girls were sex workers. Girls who dressed well and studied well slept with professors. A professor once called my classmate a whore because she wore red lipstick every day.

These were not strangers. They were relatives, teachers, friends. Each informs a person on culture, traditions, worldview. The boys and girls alike learn one thing from these conversations—boys can do no wrong, and girls are sexual deviants waiting to trap a boy.

And yet, these weren’t ‘learnings’. These were betrayals by my teacher, relatives, and friends against my sisterhood. My gender. My existence. 

Not much has changed between my 13-16 and 30s age experience. Only, the medium is different.

Open any social media app, go to any woman’s page who is prominent, and you will see ‘rand*’ in the comment sections. Calling a woman ‘whore’ is actually rather mild. Others go around threatening these women with ‘iron rod’ rapes (this I see is quite common in Indian rape threats). His idea is not to just humiliate a woman, but to make it as painful as possible for her.

Go on Reddit and visit any of the dating subs. The misogyny is so baffling, it doesn’t even make sense half of the time. There is an assumption which is a codified rule among men—A) women are frivolous B) All women are sluts who open their legs for rich dudes C) All ‘nice’ men are suffering because of these slutty feminists D) Arranged marriage with a village girl is best because she will not object to anything.

After all these betrayals, am I supposed to be a part of the system that is built on the graves of the women who came before me? Whose desires were smothered before they could be even expressed?

Platonic Or Romantic—Men Always Disappoint

Yes, I am generalising, but this is about my experience. 

From friends to romantic partners—no man has failed to show subtle signs, the micro acts of misogynistic aggression. 

When I dared to speak about my assault, my women, the Goddesses around me ran to shield me. To protect me. To hug me. My partner at the time asked, why was I alone with a man. And before that, there were no signs of explicit misogyny. After that, there wasn’t a moment without it. The casual remark on a mutual friend’s ‘habits’. The sly comment to another friend on her clothes and a joke about ‘lustful men’.

Male friends, with their comfort and confidence that I am a friend, calling all exes ‘crazy’. Women are crazy ‘wh*res’. Men in office. Married with kids. Trying to flirt with every female-looking body. Commenting on how an intern is dressing. On how a girl laughs too much she must ‘want it’.

Being in the media, we see the worst of the worst. Rapes. Murders. Thefts. Genocides. And in between all that, men use power to manipulate and misuse women. In politics. In IT. In my own industry.

Comments on women supervisors—she either reached here by sleeping with male superiors or she is too uptight and ‘unf***able.

Bitch. Whore. Slut. Bossy. Woman. Female. 

Betrayed By Gender, Betrayed By Birth

I didn’t see it explicitly as a young girl, but I felt it. 

I felt the pity people felt for my parents for not having a son. My grandmother’s anxiety about dowry, the loss of my father’s lineage. The silence when a daughter was born anywhere; whether in the family or in the neighbourhood. The way women stood for hours in kitchens while men waited to be served. I once saw a man throw hot tea on his wife. I remember the sound more than the sight.

I had a father who loved me without condition. And still, I watched girls compete for chicken legs because the best pieces were already claimed.

Sure, another argument can be made that it was decades ago. And yet, in the 2020s, when my niece was born, the paternal grandmother organised a pseudo-mourning in the hospital. She didn’t get off the bench. With teary eyes, she lamented, ‘someone has cursed my family’. The girl was labelled a curse before she had even opened her eyes.  

So, when women say they are angry, I don’t hear bitterness. I hear memories. I hear fear. I hear a lifetime of lessons learned without consent.

And when a woman says she refuses—to marry, to bear children, to offer her body to a system built on women’s endurance—I do not see rejection of life.

When I meet women in their 30s or 40s, choosing to stay single, I don’t feel an urge to ask ‘why’. I know why, I have lived that ‘why’, that ‘why’ is the continued erasure of a woman’s identity. Her desire. Her right to live. Her humanity.

So, I refuse the system. To be a part of it. I choose peace. I choose me.

A shorter, edited version of this appeared in Outlook's February 21 issue titled Seeking Equity which brought together ground reports, analysis and commentary to examine UGC’s recent equity rules and the claims of misuse raised by privileged groups.