One thing that many women won’t say out loud is this: being visible as a woman, online or offline, often comes with a tax you never agreed to pay. It is the tax of unsolicited attention, of boundaries tested, and of the quiet assumption that access equals invitation. This belief has hardened into a kind of social consensus. Scroll through the comments when a wife praises her husband online and you will see it immediately. Other women descend, not to celebrate, but to mock. “You’re still naive,” they say. “You haven’t learned.” The subtext is grim and widely shared: most men cannot be trusted, and any woman who believes otherwise is simply yet to be disappointed.
Ironically, men echo a version of the same story in reverse, shrugging that “boys will be boys,” that girls mature faster, that daughters call home while sons drift. Even children of ten and thirteen are sorted into this script of waywardness and restraint, as if character were gendered at birth.
Nothing makes the cost of that script clearer than the raw frustration of a Nigerian businesswoman who goes by Facebook name “The Tonin Effect.” In a video that went viral, her voice cracked with exhaustion. “So a woman cannot have her phone number for business purposes online, and then men will respect that? If you’re chatting this number, it is for something serious.” She is married, she says so plainly, and yet her DM is full of “love you, bestie,” voice notes, WhatsApp calls, video calls, and men introducing themselves as “your Facebook fan. I love you.” She asks the question that stops you cold: if this is what married women get, what are you doing to single ladies? In days she has blocked numbers upon numbers, and the noise is drowning the real customers she is trying to serve. Her outburst is not an isolated vent. It is a mirror.
Across Nigeria’s public sphere, other women have held up the same mirror, often at great personal cost. Actress Damilola Oni told Oyinmomo TV in April 2026 that her Instagram DMs are flooded each morning with explicit photos and messages. “Men will send me their manhood, saying I am everything you need baby. All sorts of dicks are in my DM,” she said, adding that some even confess to using her image to masturbate after seeing her on television. Yetunde Bakare took to Instagram with a warning that has since circulated widely: “PLEASE TO Y’ALL SENDING NUDES TO MY DM KINDLY STOP BEFORE I DISGRACE YOU PUBLICLY! I DON’T CARE ABOUT LONG D**K.”
Reality star Ifu Ennada went further, saying she wished she could post the senders’ photos alongside their unsolicited images so “your family, friends and the whole world will know,” but platform rules tie her hands. These are not whispers. They are public testimonies, and they sit beside institutional acknowledgments. The Lagos State Police Command has warned repeatedly about online sexual exploitation and sextortion. In 2026 the Police Special Fraud Unit announced arrests in a cyber-extortion case where a woman was threatened with the release of private images unless she paid.
Scholars call this pattern technology-facilitated sexual violence, and research confirms what the testimonials suggest. Peer-reviewed studies consistently rank unsolicited sexual messages and unsolicited genital photographs among the most common forms of online harassment women experience on social media. Sociologists would place it within the framework of “routine activities theory”: when a motivated offender meets a suitable target in the absence of capable guardianship, harm follows. The internet collapses distance, strips away social cues, and lowers the cost of approach to nearly zero. Psychologists add the lens of “online disinhibition effect,” where anonymity and invisibility make people say and do things they would never attempt face to face. Criminologists talk about “low-risk, high-reward” behavior. For some men, the DM is a lottery ticket. Send fifty, get one reply, and the ego is fed.
Culture amplifies the algorithm. In many Nigerian conversations, persistence is romanticized as proof of seriousness, and marriage is treated as a porous boundary rather than a firm one. The logic goes: if affairs happen, then any woman might be persuadable. This is reinforced by what feminist scholars call the “male gaze” and what media theorists describe as the collapse of context. A woman who posts for business, who answers clients politely, who builds a following, is read by some as advertising herself. Confidence becomes suspicion. Visibility becomes consent. Even other women sometimes internalize it, reading boldness as compromise, which is why many women self-censor in public forums, groups, and political spaces. The result is a quiet narrowing of participation.
The incentives are not mysterious. There is validation. There is the thrill of the chase. There is entitlement dressed as fandom: “I support you, so you owe me attention.” There is ego, where winning the interest of a married or admired woman feels like a trophy. And there is impunity. At worst, a man is blocked. There is no crowd to shame him, no elder to call him aside, no immediate social price. Meanwhile the woman pays in time, in anxiety, in lost business, in the mental labor of filtering, muting, and deciding whether to speak up or stay silent to protect her family’s name. This is why the stories rarely come out until frustration boils over.
And it is not only online. The same dynamics spill into offices, campuses, transport, and even places of worship. The public allegations of sexual harassment in the National Assembly some time ago and the long-running conversations about “sex for marks” in universities point to the same underlying issue: power, opportunity, and the belief that some people can take without asking. When Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan raised allegations against Senator Akpabio, the public debate immediately swung to reputation, to family, to what should or should not be said aloud. That hesitation itself is part of the problem. Silence becomes survival.
What The Tonin Effect is demanding, then, is simple and radical at once: respect for context. A business number is not a flirtation. “I’m married” is not an opening line. “I’m not interested” is a full sentence. Consent is not only about physical contact. It is also about honoring a no-response, a closed door, a boundary stated clearly.
Until that is understood, women will continue to carry a burden they never chose. They will post less, share less, and calculate every word. And society will lose the voices, the businesses, and the leadership that never got a fair chance to breathe. The outburst we saw was not just frustration. It was a warning. And it is one that many women have been holding in for far too long.
Bagudu can be reached via bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com or 07034943575.
