Stalked by the fairer sex
Women being stalked is a common enough story. Whether it’s a stranger off the street or a former flame, the media has a story on any given day of women who are at the receiving end of a stalker’s attentions. But what doesn’t receive as much attention is the phenomenon of men who are troubled by stalkers
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While women stalking men has been the subject of such films as the Michael Douglas-Glenn Close starrer Fatal Attraction, media attention is only focussed on the issue when a high profile case occurs, such as when Leonardo Dicaprio had his face slashed by a stalker in 2005 or when a woman broke into Brad Pitt’s home in 1999.
Twenty-nine-year-old Shreyas Damle has his own tale of horror. After the pilot’s relationship with a colleague went awry, Shreyas thought all he had to deal with was moving on. But his ex-girlfriend had other plans. “She involved all my friends in our break-up. After each fight, they would all get messages with lurid details, asking them to take her side. She would wrangle information about where I was supposed to be at a particular time and show up there. The behaviour only stopped when she moved abroad,” Shreyas recounts.
For HR executive Adit Menon, there was no such respite. “A classmate in college developed feelings for me and I was flattered. But then she began to show a streak of paranoia,” says Adit. “She would send me texts recounting something I’d said, putting an entirely different connotation on my words. Then there were the incessant calls. It became so bad that I had to confide in my parents,” he adds.
It’s not always a member of the opposite gender who does the stalking, as media professional Neil Singh’s case suggests. He says, “It was my girlfriend’s ‘admirer’ who stalked the both of us. It got creepy because after a while, everywhere we went, I found myself looking over my shoulder.”
For men in the glamour industry however, being hounded by female fans is a way of life and they say a lot depends on how you project your image. “Obviously, we all enjoy the attention,” says model Siddharth Rawal. “But when it crosses a certain line, then it’s not appreciated.”
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