Falstaff: if you don’t think that this blog post could affect my future employment, you live in a different world than I do. Anti-abortion feeling can get in the way of a good impression and, in a tight job market, everything matters. I don’t have a visa to work in India, but when I return to the US I fully expect some (not all) prospective employers to Google me. I wrote and posted that story with the full knowledge that it could cost me in the real world.

Toughen up? Yeah – because fighting sexism doesn’t take enough energy in my life as it is. I chose to post this story because I have a large network of supportive friends and family. But knowing how I debated, all the while I wrote it, the wisdom of posting it…I know that speaking out is a brave thing to do, but I also believe that not speaking out isn’t a cowardly thing. Sometimes, it’s merely picking one’s battles, directing one’s energy to the most useful and powerful ends.

For me, I’ve worked on freeing women’s sexuality, encouraging women to take ownership and learn about themselves. I decided that my short pregnancy was, in many ways, a sexual issue and that it fit in my feminist focus.

Does that mean I won’t write about other feminist issues? No. Does it mean that I won’t write about other issues that could result in stalking, job loss, and personal danger. Maybe. It really depends on how much energy I have for the effort. Because some days, it’s all I can do to do the regular chores, without putting myself out there on the front lines of a contentious issue.

Self-censorship is most dangerous when it’s unconscious. Consciously done, I call it picking my battles and I consider it the task of every human being in this world of endless battles. This is my answer to the questions raised at the end of this article.

As rants go, I think that you (Meena) expressed your feelings well.

Like others, I’m not sure how to read your comments about defamation. I think there’s a classist/casteist problem you’re explaining, where powerful people get to stop people who lie about them while people like you and me get no attention from the authorities who are supposed to protect us all. If not, if you are encouraging stiffer legal penalties for insulting (not just lying) speech, I hope that you will keep in mind that censorship is a knife wielded by the powerful. I believe that it will always hurt more than it will help. But that’s a whole other conversation…

Some things have not been still addressed to the community.

I had posted this song on my blog and had mentioned “SO true.. I feel the same way and I can relate so well to this song”

I was slap-dashed by a male chauvinist who responded back with crap saying that “throwing attitude is cool but burning-bra is so un-cool. You call yourself a bitch which is shows the abject values in an Indian woman”

All this was just because the first line of the song was “I am a bitch”. So, for this gentleman I turned into a bitch.

I think sometimes people are just too shallow and go by the words without really understanding the context behind those words.

Meena: I hope by this point these stalkings in the offline world have ceased or if they havent, you have approached the police and goaded them into action. Most often, institutions are slow to respond and it is only with some steely action, not just for our personal cause but also for what it means in a larger sense, that we must push them to do their duty, isnt it?

as for writing about something personal yet political, if unsavoury responses were to affect us, and I m sure most of us could not be oblivious to their negativity… some are overwhelming after all…perhaps then we must look at why we write at all.

do we write for our arguments to be well received, to be argued out in polite terms… or do we accept that ours is not the only truth and that what we are writing is to put forward what we believe is just and have it out in public domain.

*shakes head in frustrated disgust*

Did I take legal action? Not this time around, because my previous experience of approaching the police was not all that worth the effort.

On such abuse leading to trouble on the job – a) I find that a little hard to believe – what kind of employer makes judgments based on random Internet gossip? b) Even if that’s true, however, I would argue that legal redress needed is against the employer – terminating someone because of Internet gossip that has no bearing (presumably) on their ability to do their job is unacceptable.

Finally, the point about parents is not that their caring about society means that they don’t love us. The point is that caring more about what your parents think than about the ideas and principles you claim to champion is a fundamentally childish response. People should have more courage in their convictions. Obviously you’re welcome to limit your own self-expression because you’re afraid of what your parents may think, but if you’re going to do that then I, for one, am going to find it hard to take the claim that you value self-expression seriously.