Dropping the F Bomb. Troll style.

Rana Ayyub, the journalist who was recently trolled by a Kerala expat, is not the only woman to have received violent, sexually explicit threats. For most men on social media, the easiest way to terrorise, demoralise, and silence any woman who has an opinion, is to unleash a volley of sexual threats. Or at least that is what they think.

This is 'psychological warfare' for the Instagram generation, first used during World War II by the Germans and the Japanese. There was no computer or internet or even television at that time; so the armies either air-dropped the provocative, sexually explicit pamphlets or distributed them among the Allied Force soldiers who were exhausted, hungry, injured or completely messed up in some way or the other. At a glance, the images were pornographic, titillating pop art. But the messaging was far more sinister: "It was much better to stay home and get laid rather than risk your neck fighting Fascism." After all, every man's worst nightmare is his girlfriend or wife back home having a great time in his absence. That Hitler's strategy was working became evident when the British and Americans too began to come up with their versions of the bawdy pamphlets. Even for a trained soldier in the battlefield, the only way you could communicate with him, is by talking dirty.

So here we are. More than seven decades and innumerable milestones and mishaps in the narrative of evolution past, when threatened or challenged, men can only think of sex. Talk dirty. The enemy on the other side of the trench is no army, but a woman. There are no thunderbolts, spitfires, mustangs, or messerschmitts to air-drop their abuse bombs. But this war is usually fought in the dead of the night, in the quiet of a home where the doting wife and loving children have gone off to sleep, leaving the laptop or the phone in the hands of a dedicated psychological warrior, all aglow in the anticipation of an arousal brought on by the pleasure of taking on a strong, unfamiliar, intellectually superior woman. Albeit virtually.

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