Apart from offering a platform to express opinions, social networking sites also enable people to maintain anonymity and express hatred. Women, particularly strong and opinionated ones, often fall prey to such revulsion. This investigation explores why and how women’s self-expression is curtailed in the virtual domain. To answer this question, thematic analysis has been carried out of Facebook comments and messages received by an Indian woman over a period of two years. Findings indicate that men responding to women’s online self-expression can fall into any of three emergent categories: self-proclaimed well-wishers, admirers turned abusers and the toxically masculine. While the first group silences women discreetly and typically by moral policing or invading women’s personal space, the latter two groups do so more blatantly. However, the three groups share a common patriarchal bias, believing that self-expression is a masculine privilege and women who try to democratise this privilege are cultural deviants.

除了提供表达意见的平台外，社交网站还使人们能够保持匿名和表达仇恨。女性，尤其是坚强和固执己见的女性，往往会成为这种反感的牺牲品。这项调查探讨了为什么以及如何在虚拟领域限制女性的自我表达。为了回答这个问题，我们对一名印度妇女两年来收到的 Facebook 评论和消息进行了专题分析。调查结果表明，男性对女性在线自我表达的回应可以归入三个新兴类别中的任何一个：自称是好心人、崇拜者变成施虐者和有毒的男性。第一组通常通过道德监管或侵犯女性的个人空间来谨慎地让女性保持沉默，而后两组则更加公然这样做。然而，