You’ve probably heard about revenge porn, where jilted exes post compromising nude pics of their former lovers to be gawked at in the worst parts of the Internet. This happens in Bangladesh, too, only replace the naked pictures with pictures of women wearing jeans and suits, or even just not wearing hijabs. If someone shares a photo of a woman who isn’t covered from head to toe, she’ll be shamed as a slut. And while “slut” is a nasty word everywhere, there it’s a prelude to straight-up violence — our extremists consider things like this to be stoneable offenses. I should note that a picture of the health minister’s daughter ended up on one of these sites, and that time it was the photographers who went to jail. Funny how that works.

Once, a friend of mine was driving a scooter past a madrassa with a bunch of kids out in front of it. As she passed, they pelted her with bricks and stones, calling her a slut. We came out there and asked what the hell they were doing, and they told us this was all part of comedic play, intended to teach proper values via hitting people with stones. We called the cops, and they told us the kids would probably stop on their own, eventually. We just needed to give it a few hours.

And that’s the thing — once the extremists know the police won’t respond to their craziness (or might even back it up), all sense of proportion vanishes. In 2012, a single Buddhist man insulting Islam was enough to get hundreds of people rioting and burning temples in the street. Living in the shadow of religious extremism is like having an invisible beehive hovering above your bed, and also being the kid from My Girl.