Online spaces now play a critical role in the performance of intimacy. From social media sites to news websites, online spaces offer venues where emotional, sexual, and relational lives increasingly take place. Online spaces promise connection, self-expression, or liberation. At the same time, online spaces also exist as a locale of surveillance, exposure, or punishment for many women where their intimacy gets made public without consent, as a means of judging it against strict moral parameters.
One can observe a pattern in the media landscape and online discourse over the past several years in which intimacy is decontextualized and transformed into viral content. Women’s experience is parsed into fragments: screenshots of private conversations between women or their partners, strategically posted photographs selected from their personal album or engagement rings from their marriage album or divorce settlements, alimony payments, or charges that are isolated from their structural contexts.
This is how the very notion of intimacy is constructed afresh. Feelings, sexual experiences, are no longer located, relational, dynamic. They are reduced to narratives that serve as prompts. A woman’s assertion of her boundaries is construed as arrogance, independence in finance as greed, pain as manipulation. These representations of women not just mislead, they also cause harm as they sustain the intrusion of the public into the private.
Digital intimacy is therefore heavily imbued with the emotion of fear. It is by no means easy for women to remain invisible on the Internet. It takes little time for women to understand that their choice on the Net can result in either harassment or danger across multiple domains – family, employment, and broader social networks. In this context, authenticity is constrained not because women are compelled to perform themselves in particular ways, but because there is little social or structural space that requires or supports genuine self-expression. The digital medium itself, marked by distance and partial visibility rather than embodied presence, further limits the possibility of being fully authentic.
The climate of fear and risk surrounding women’s digital intimacy is sustained by repeated behaviours of digital interaction. The comments section is often a lay court on morality, where women’s sexuality, status, or life itself is assessed as it pertains to morality. The alarming thing is how soon ‘normalcy’ is normalized – harmful behaviour becomes routine, acceptable, and invisible through repetition. Aggression is labelled opinion; harassment is labelled discussion. Gender-based harassment on platforms is not addressed by systems of moderation if it is conveyed either in regional or coded forms of speech.
News media is also a significant contributor to the prominence of this violence. Rather than reporting on structural inequalities—such as unequal caregiving burdens, lack of equitable representation in the workforce, inadequate mental health support, and systemic relationship violence—news media often prioritises ‘interesting’ stories of divorce. Divorce figures are reduced to quantifiable spectacles, relationship support is framed as exploitation, and women’s accusations are routinely met with scepticism. In doing so, the socio-economic conditions that shape intimate vulnerability remain largely unexamined. As a result, intimacy is once again transformed into a spectacle rather than understood as embedded within structures of inequality.
Let’s look at some examples to illustrate the points above.
Example 1: Divorce / Alimony framing
Problematic headline (example):
“Court asks woman seeking alimony to find a job”
Why it causes harm:
- Frames legal support as laziness or entitlement
- Erases unpaid care work, career gaps, and structural barriers
- Invites digital hate against women seeking justice
How it could be reframed:
“Court hearing highlights challenges faced by women re-entering the workforce after marriage”
What changes:
- Shifts focus from judgement to context
- Recognises systemic barriers, not individual failure
- Encourages understanding instead of outrage
Example 2: Moral outrage over women’s choices
Problematic headline (example):
“Woman rejects groom over lifestyle differences, sparks debate online”
Why it causes harm:
- Turns a personal boundary into public controversy
- Frames choice as arrogance or moral decline
- Encourages comment-section policing
How it could be reframed:
“Online reactions reveal how women’s personal choices are subjected to public scrutiny”
What changes:
- Makes the story not about the woman, but about social response
- Shifts attention from societal and moral judgment to gendered norms
Example 3: Sexual violence framed without accountability
Problematic headline (example):
“Unnatural sex led to wife’s death, court observes”
Why it causes harm:
- Sensationalises violence
- Normalises non-consensual sex within marriage
- Erases questions of marital rape and legal gaps
How it could be reframed:
“Case exposes absence of legal recognition of marital sexual violence”
What changes:
- Names the structural issue
- Centres women’s rights and legal accountability
- Avoids voyeuristic language
Example 4: Community control disguised as protection
Problematic headline (example):
“Community leader urges girls to marry within caste to protect tradition”
Why it causes harm:
- Normalises control over women’s autonomy
- Frames restriction as cultural responsibility
- Erases women’s consent
How it could be reframed:
“Calls to restrict women’s marriage choices raise concerns about consent and autonomy”
What changes:
- Introduces critical distance
- Recentres women’s rights
- Challenges power instead of amplifying it
Likewise, these power relations renew the regime of narrow definitions of respectability. Women who refuse to comply – whether through the delay of marriage, the rejection of the institution, sexual freedom, or speaking out against problems within the institution of marriage – are labelled as immoral or problematic. Sometimes, the surveillance even reaches outside the normative audits, applying instead to queer positionalities, unmarried women, and women who through caste, class, or geographical location have become already ‘problematic’. The Internet, rather than challenging such power relations, actually continues to consolidate them.
Consent, which is integral to the discourses of sexuality and rights, is effaced in this procedure. Images, messages, or personal histories are shared without consent, often under the pretext of public interest or freedom of expression. In this process, crucial contextual elements are erased: who is circulating the material, how it is being framed and disseminated, and for what purpose. When such context is stripped away, intimacy becomes detached from consent, allowing intimate material to circulate as content rather than as a relational act governed by rights and agency.
The effect of such erosion is cumulative. Online stories do not stay within the realms of cyberspace; instead, they bleed into offline spaces. Viral stories impact family dynamics, job prospects, or status. In many women’s experiences, the online/offline binary is not distinct but, instead, intersects. Online intimacy is no longer about desire or pleasure but about reducing risks.
Worst of all, perhaps, is how infrequently media and digital platforms stop to consider the basic questions: What is the harm produced in this exposure? Who profits from this circulation? What intimacies are lost in the service of high engagement or an attention-maximising click? The thinking seems to be that the more visible it is, the truer it is, and the more shocking it is, the more real it is. Dignity, care, or nuance has little place in such reasoning.
Re-imagining digital intimacy requires more than individual caution; it requires a shift in media ethics and platform accountability. Intimacy – whether sexual, emotional, or relational – cannot be treated as raw material for consumption without consequence. It has to be contextual, embodied, and worthy of protection. Slowing down media practices, questioning headline economies, and foregrounding consent are not acts of censorship but of responsibility.
With the increasing impact of digital environments on the experience of intimacy, it no longer remains a concern of whether they are to have any influence on personal lives, but rather how they are to have that influence. Will the experience of intimacy be conditioned by care, context, and respect? Or will it remain one of spectacle, punishment, and domination? This would determine whether women are treated as active subjects with agency or merely as stories that are constructed about them, rather than with them.
Cover image by Jess Yuwono on Unsplash
