Last night, as I was making my placard for Slut Walk and tweeting, a random person on Twitter who barely knows me told me this.

I was a tad bombed, but for the life of me I can’t figure out what my drinking had to do with anything. I tweet the same regardless of the presence or lack of alcohol in my blood. 

But what gave this stranger the right to say a thing like that to a woman? 

What gives men and women the right to judge a woman’s sexuality or her expression of it and shame her for it?

I refuse to believe I offended this person. I refuse to hold back from expressing myself the way I want to and in a manner I feel is completely natural for me.

Just because I’m a woman/wife/someone’s daughter/sister etc. doesn’t mean I have to shove my thoughts and opinions under the folds of some mental veil spun out from someone’s ridiculous and outdated notions of propriety.

As a girl brought up in an Indian small-town, I have heard notions like these bandied about nearly all of my growing life. They hurt, they cage, they anger, they suffocate.

I may be living in a different country now, but thanks to last night, I realised that this warped mentality still hounds me.

I’ve had enough.