Dispatches from the manosphere

In 2022, a recording from a private chat on the audio-room app Clubhouse was leaked on social media. In it, several young men could be heard making violent, sexually explicit, and communal comments, saying things like sex with Muslim women was equal to building temples and destroying the Babri Masjid. There was national outrage, followed by arrests. Yet the men involved downplayed what they had done, saying it was “just fun” and they were simply “releasing frustration”.Such commentaries emerge from a much larger ecosystem of aggressive targeting of critical-thinking women—Muslim, Dalit, Savarna notwithstanding—who challenge the ruling regime and the larger Hindutva project on social media. What is scary is that this wide-ranging assault is normalised as amusement, mass produced on coordinated groups and circulated freely in daily discourse. Welcome to a small corner of the massive terrain that is the research site of Meena Kandasamy’s new novel, Fieldwork as a Sex Object.The narrative follows Amrita Chaturvedi, or Amy, an attractive, independent, outspoken Brahmin woman with intergenerational privilege who is a committed Marxist based in London. A pornographic deepfake of hers is released online, triggering an all-out, unrelenting attack. The weaponising of sexual intimacy and trust, the digital footprint of sexual desire, the anxiety generated by public gossip over private details leaked by confidants, all against the backdrop of shrill virtue-signaling—these are all very real things we navigate everyday in this era of digitally mediated orgasms.In India, the manosphere and inceldom from where these attacks primarily emerge are deeply embedded in the sociocultural and caste supremacist paradigm supporting the BJP’s ideological apparatus. But politically correct Savarna liberals and the mean-speaking, progressive-coded Gen Z are equally capable of inflicting terrible moral wounds in this battleground of public discourse.Fieldwork as a Sex ObjectBy Meena KandasamyHarperCollins IndiaPages: 240Price: Rs.599Kandasamy expertly takes us through the sights and sounds of the terrifying cosmos, making the experience of reading the novel akin to a walk through a minefield. Having been the target of many a hate campaign herself, Kandasamy uses the knowledge to steer the novel into the scariest and most anxiety-inducing locations. Further fueling the crisis are Amy’s own actions. Lurching through levels of escalation, she orchestrates a perfect digital lynch mob frenzy that keeps picking up momentum and leaves her with no cultural allies, personal friends, or support systems. She stands in the eye of the storm, alone.Haunting ideaBut Amy is neither a cautionary figure nor an object of pity. She is imperfect, impulsive, and self-centered but also capable of responding to situations with grace and sensitivity. In a frantic sweep, she drags us through intersections of power, showing us the messy intermingling of white saviour complex, sexist paternalism, Brahmin privilege, Savarna masculine fragility, shades of Tamil nationalism, echoes of the Sri Lankan civil war, and political correctness performed as public meanness on social media.Fieldwork as a Sex Object is Meena Kandasamy‘s fourth novel. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement As Amy uncovers the dark truths behind the witch hunt, the novel gives us a horrifying glimpse of the organised techno-political takeover of public discourse in India. It shows how a vast, decentralised web of opportunistic, ideologically conservative men harvest data and make hit lists, before going after individuals singled out as targets. Armed with state sanction, intent, and resources, they are almost invincible. Amy’s story could be that of any woman critical of the regime who is hounded into self-censorship or silenced through sexualised public humiliation.The novel is presented in crisp, bite-sized dispatches, which recreate the fragmentary nature of the time-jumping, slippery mental state during an online crisis, when one is simultaneously terminally online and wanting never to be online again. A consequence of this style is that the inner lives of the characters around Amy can seem monolithic at times. Her mother with her anxieties, Nimmi’s silences, Sivananthan’s pithy comments open windows through which we cannot see much.The dialogues with parents, friends, lovers, and strangers also threaten to become a quotable checklist of Marxist ideas on labour politics or protest while Hegel maxims are dropped like witty quips in a Marvel movie. All this might seem a bit heavy-handed, even for readers with strong Leftist sensibilities. But it works for the novel because of where Amy eventually ends up (no spoilers).In the end, after reflecting on the nature of the dispatches and the fragmented narrative, we realise that if we do not learn much about Amy’s interiority it is because we are not meant to. Amy is the algorithm-mediated, socially truncated, culturally debated patchwork of a woman whose identities in discourse are more relevant to the narrative than her personhood.Perhaps Kandasamy gives us a clue in the title itself. What we read is a fieldwork. By Amy as a sex object. So what we get are data entries, observational notes, and brief contextual commentary. It is not the final research publication. As such, this novel cannot yield a neat review and analysis for context-hungry readers.With all its sparseness, the idea of Amy haunts us. The novel leaves us with a psychic wound. We are dogged by the alarming sense that the unreal absurdity of digital lives can perhaps only be grasped in the gaps and missing pieces of urgent field dispatches.Ravikant Kisana, who is also known by his online moniker the “Buffalo Intellectual”, is the author of Meet the Savarnas: Indian Millennials Whose Mediocrity Broke Everything.Also Read | To Sri Lanka, with loveAlso Read | Interpreter of social maladies