Women in Popular cultures with respect to Laura Mulvey's essay

 Women In Popular Cultures with respect to Laura Mulvey's essay

I first watched Grand Masti at the bud of my teen years and I still don’t remember who let me. Of course, it has been a while since but I vaguely remember the highlight(s) of the movie. Cleavages, sex, crass jokes, leering men and did I mention cleavages?

The fact that this stayed in my subconscious says something, well, apart from my poor taste in films anyway.  What stood out to me, engaged the audience of the day, and to this day, might I add. I was looking through some reviews posted and to my horror, people loved it (??) Well, most did anyway which is problematic because of its portrayal of women as objects and casual harassment.

The film is about Amar, Meet and Prem, three sex craving men of seductive housewives who plan to go to their college reunion to get some ‘fun’ and satisfy their middle-aged raging hormones. What continues further is a snooze fest of a plotline with as many gaps as the ages of the protagonist’s and their female counterparts, scantily clad women and dirty jokes, which seem to have been written by early-pubescent teens.

Laura Mulvey talks of male gaze, that is, the idea of women as objects, visual media that tends to sexualize women for a male viewer. Throughout the films, women are portrayed as bimbos with a supposed innocence to their unclad bodies that drives men crazy. The men are encouraged to act in a way so as to ‘claim’ their bodies. They engage in several acts of blatant voyeurism and justify it with the length of the woman’s dress. Surely, she was inviting the onlookers.

The trailer, the set, the music, even the poster, everything about the film is phallocentric and all the actresses present in every shot is for the man to gaze upon. The camera even moves with the actors, ‘checking out’ women which practically forces the audience to do so too which will later be applied in the real world, under different circumstances where women are not, do not wish to be objects of physical or sexual gratification. Women do not want to be objectified at all. This is something that is always overlooked or barely even considered.

 

Speaking of problematic Bollywood music, Gandi Baat is a very popular song from the film R…Rajkumar. The song features Shahid Kapoor and Sonakshi Sinha with occasional glimpses of Arjun Kapoor. The music is catchy which explains the wide audience and fan following the song received but the lyrics glorify stalking and catcalling women, amongst other things. The song advocates harassment and the women are treated as props on set, having long shots of flashing and admiring the attention women did not ask for. There is literally a shot of Arjun forcing a woman to kiss him.

Through the entire song the protagonist emphasizes that he has been a ‘good mannered man’ and now it’s time for him to ‘dirty talk and do dirty things’ which makes no sense at all except for the fact that the supposed ‘hero’ has the power to subjugate the woman, make her agree to his whims and wishes. He talks of stalking her near her house, waiting for her to reciprocate feelings and now that she hasn’t, he does not wish to wait any longer and do more to get her to be interested in him. As if the woman not into him was a concept so absurd, he wanted to subdue her. The woman is also shown to enjoy this display of ‘masculinity’ and suddenly feels like she is interested and wants to ‘mate’ with him which is the sole purpose of wanting to be a woman.

Sex positivity and non-consensual acts as harassment are not the same although that has been put forth as the same by the majority of Indian cinema.

Furthermore, it is set as an example for younger children to think that it’s okay to do the thing the celebrated and glorified actor is doing in the film popularly acclaimed. This is how deep sexism and patriarchy is ingrained in younger generations through these songs, films, even tv soaps that are aired have a clear distinction between genders, only male and female because along with misogyny and colourism, homosexuality is brushed under the carpet, being taboo topics and the man is always the bread winner and the woman in the kitchen, doing homely chores, gossiping about irrelevant topics, it’s like this is all people expect women to be. And any woman who wishes more for herself is shunned off the society and labelled as the ‘home wrecker’ and ‘spoilt modern woman’.

 

The Bechdel Test sometimes called the Mo Movie Measure or Bechdel Rule. It is a measure of the representation of women in fiction. The test has the three-following criterion

1.    It has to have at least two women in it

2.    Who talk to each other about

3.    Something besides a man.

This doesn’t test whether or not the movie that are something more than an object or prop for the men in the film and the audience. The test has nothing to do with the quality of the movie rather it is a test to see if the film has good female representation.