In the six months since the coup, thousands of women have been arrested, sexually assaulted and socially marginalized in the name of a political cause. Spiced up with the political justifications and messaging, Myanmar’s current crisis has allowed this human indecency to flourish. Indeed, in many ways this has magnified the impact on women as a whole, as participation in social punishment campaigns is just a click away.
#Porn myanmar portable#
Similar, if less physical, tactics have now migrated into the portable devices that millions of Myanmar people now carrying around with them. While the anti-coup resistance has seen efforts by Myanmar women’s rights organizations to challenge the patriarchy underpinning conservative authoritarianism - one good example is the Sarong Campaign - such efforts undercut this progress, demonstrating that patriarchal norms continue to be weaponized - by both sides of Myanmar’s political struggle.įor decades, rape as a weapon of war in frontier Myanmar has been amply documented, as has the use other forms of sexual assault.
In this way of thinking, a decent person’s basic morality and ethics are justified according to the righteousness of the political cause for which they stand. Many opponents of the military junta have justified the sharing of these images and information on the grounds that “everything is fair and justified when the people’s voice is ignored and invalidated.” The pages frequently publish women’s addresses and other personal information, and revenge porn is always part of the mix. Since the coup, numbers of “social punishment” pages have sprang up on Facebook and Telegram, which have targeted hundreds of women, from celebrities to teenage university students. In subsequent weeks, the same thing happened to other women who were labelled as sympathizers of the military regime, or failed to speak out sufficiently in opposition to it, in what quickly became known to anti-coup protesters as “social punishment” campaigns. Explicit videos and photos of the woman were well circulated and intentionally spread by opponents of the coup. In early February, a week after the military overthrew Myanmar’s elected government, the daughter of a minister on the junta’s State Administration Council became the first well-known victim of this tactic. Since the Myanmar armed forces, or Tatmadaw, overthrew the country’s elected civilian government, revenge porn has become a weapon employed used by both the military junta and its opponents, who are currently engaged in a heated war of attrition. Instead, it’s to distribute intimate photos - both real and faked - of young female activists opposing Myanmar’s February military coup. But these days, the contents are not about celebrities, as before. The account belongs to Han Nyein Oo, once considered one of the main sources for celebrity gossip and yellow journalism in Myanmar.