Let's talk about consent: What the girl from Salem and Neha Mahajan have in common

If you type Neha Mahajan on your Google search bar, the first result to appear will be ‘Neha Mahajan MMS’. For the record, Neha Mahajan is an actress in Hindi and Marathi films, who found herself the victim of selective editing of clips from a Malayalam film that she was a part of (Chaayam Poosiya Veedu, 2015), which was reportedly put together to look like a nude MMS. This may seem like a small pawn in a sporadic spurge of MMS leaks, but it is not. A few months ago, the same thing happened to Radhika Apte  when reportedly nude pictures of hers were leaked from a film she was a part of, Hunterrr. [caption id=“attachment_2863562” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Neha Mahajan, a blurred image of the Salem girl who committed suicide. Images from twitter.[/caption] However, before we get into discussions about the morality of nudity, there’s a crucial thing to be remembered: consent (we should be posting this word on billboards and before movies instead of no-smoking ads, but that’s a conversation for another day). A couple of days ago Fergie (of Black Eyes Peas fame) was in the news because of a topless selfie she posted ahead of her album release. She captioned it, “this has just been leaked!” And of course, how can we forget Kim Kardashian, whose unabashed sharing of nude selfies has garnered quite the backlash on Twitter. Everyone is divided on what they think about her selfies. What classifies as freedom of expression, and should we be self-censoring our own bodies? Kardashian posed with model Emily Ratajkowski, who captioned the image as, “However sexual our bodies may be, we need to hve the freedom as women to choose whn & how we express our sexuality.” You may think all these women have something in common, but they don’t. One person’s celebration of sexuality is another woman’s cause of suicide. Take the case of this girl from Salem, who took her own life because her morphed pictures appeared on Facebook. Her fear of being ostracised was so high, she thought it was best to just kill herself. Neha, the Salem girl and Radhika are victims of manipulated content that they may or may not have been a part of. These images or video clips have been used without their consent. However, Fergie and Kim K have voluntarily uploaded images of themselves, and nude or topless, it doesn’t matter. But can we expect people to make this crucial difference? In an ideal world, yes. But the world wide web is hardly ideal. It’s bad enough that when you Google a woman celebrity’s name, nine out of ten times the first few results will be “hot pics” or “nude pics” or “kissing scene”. It’s a hypocritical world we live in where on the one hand Google searches will tell you the reality of objectification of women, and yet TV stars who pose in bikinis, or actresses who happen to have pictures revealing their inner garments, are trolled heavily on social media for breaching some sort of imaginary norm. Basically, if something is leaked, it’s fine, who cares about the woman in question anyway, right? But god forbid a woman put out an image of herself that shows anything remotely “objectionable”. The word consent is of utmost importance at a time when we talk about the Salem woman in the same breath as Neha Mahajan. Actually, scratch that. The word consent is of utmost importance, period.