A recent talk show on Clubhouse, a voice-based social network app, had a female hostess playfully lamenting how many Indian women are bombarded with unsolicited dick pics.

What was striking about the conversation was how she chose to trivialise the whole thing, almost accepting dick pics as a fact of life, rather than showing any moral outrage, as many listeners would have expected.

Is this because we automatically assume that all women have to be repulsed by unsolicited dick pics?

Sending photographs of your penis to unsuspecting women is a form of sexual harassment like street flashing, which is a punishable offence under the law. Many Indian courts regard flashing (street version) as a crime even when there is no physical harm caused on grounds that it can “scar a victim’s mind” for the rest of her life.

Yet the truth is many women, like the talk show hostess, tend to look at “cyber” flashing differently from “real” flashing, and sometimes as nothing more than an annoyance.

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