Sexual objectification is the act of treating a person as a mere object of sexual desire– one that serves another’s sexual pleasure.

The phrase “sexual objectification” has been around since the 1970s. Women have been objectified for as long as women have been used for men’s sexual pleasure. If earlier it meant strip tease shows, brothels, and pornographic art, today, it is rampant in our mainstream pop-culture.

A classic question that you can ask is:

Does the image suggest that sexual availability is the defining characteristic of the person? 

.@NandosIndia disgusting, disappointing, disturbing, absolute rubbish# u need sensible marketers @unwomenindia pic.twitter.com/TL8VtKUXQM

— Nishtha Satyam (@SatyamNishtha) March 26, 2016

There are several ways women are objectified in ads. Read this article to find out more. 

Watch this funny video to understand the extents we go to sell a product. 

This video perfectly portrays what I am talking about. Not only do we objectify women everyday…by not saying anything and consuming such content, we normalize it. 

In her thesis for Doctor of Philosophy, Ms. Madhusmita Das analysed 268 advertisements and corroborated the findings with the perceptions of people by surveying 500 respondents to understand the ‘Portrayal of Women in Indian Television Advertisements’. The study found that women in Indian TV advertisements are mostly portrayed in decorative and family role, and rarely as working and free wheeler (Where the decorative role of woman in advertisements refers to the portrayal of women as concern for physical beauty and as sex object and freewheeler as independent decision maker). 

We see it in our movies, our TV shows and our web-series. The only place where we see a few real people and character thankfully are in our short films. What does that mean? That everything that’s commercial needs a sex element to sell it?

Men are also sexually objectified

We have all seen these underwear ads. The man has washboard abs and lip marks all over his body. This ad actually objectifies both men and women. The underlining (pun not intended) idea here is that men who are strong, well-groomed and have a good physique attract women whose job is to then shower the men with attention. 

Our images, ads, movies etc. make people feel that their job is to ‘be wanted’. 

The ‘six—pack’ objectification of men results in men wanting to spend too much time in the gym or driving for perfection. It drives many men to consume steroids or body enhancement drugs. Little do they know that unsupervised consumption of such drugs could be fatal. Often in films, if you see an unfit guy, he will play the role of the hero’s friend and is usually funny. The message to men: if you are not good-looking, you better be funny!

While men are objectified, the extent of it is limited. Also, as we saw in the above ad, the power-play between men and women still tends to be intact with the man shown as the more dominant one. 

The effect of sexual objectification on women on the other hand, has more far-reaching impact. The need to be viewed as sexual objects creates tremendous pressure. In case one does not measure up to the impossible standards set out by these ads…then it negatively affects your self-worth. This leads to several issues:

Read about what NYU Steinhardt Department of Applied Psychology has to say on the effects of sexual objectification on the victim.

An extensive and terrifying study published in Archives Of Sexual Behavior in 2016 points out how this link tends to work. According to the scientists behind it,

It is this sense of entitlement that men feel, that leads to sexual assault and rapes. 

Recently Hindi Film actress, Vidya Balan revealed that- “Once an Army official came in front of her while I was standing at a station and he was staring at my breasts continuously which made her feel very uncomfortable.”

What followed next will shock you. Army officer named Rahul Sangwan created a video to respond to Vidya Balan’s statement in a poetic manner. The Army Jawan gave an argument that rather than tarnishing the entire defense forces, the actor could have chosen to ignore the man who stared at her. He references her role in Dirty Picture in order to imply that sexual harassment more as a result of female provocation and less as male aggression.

You cannot negate sexual objectification by arguing the right and freedom for women to wear what they want

When PETA India ran the above ad, with the ex-porn start lying alluringly on a bed of chillies to encourage the public to stop eating meat. (in line with their international campaigns which are also equally provocative), Sowmya Rajendran from TheNewsMinute wrote an article: ‘PETA India’s Sunny Leone ad: Is it ok to objectify women to save animals?’

PETA India CEO Poorva Joshipura wrote a rejoinder to her article. I have placed an extract of it below:

Sowmya wrote back and defended her stand by saying:

One can never talk about the objectification of the female body in any media if we’re going to equate this with someone dictating a woman’s choice of dress. The women we see in films and advertisements are performing with their full consent but that doesn’t mean that there is no objectification involved in these representations and that they cannot be subjected to feminist critique. Or that the companies and organisations who run these campaigns cannot be questioned. 

Patriarchy is an invisible monster and as a society we need to put an end to the power struggles it propagates. When we trust and believe in one another, we will all be able to grow. It’s not idealism, it’s practicality. More women in the workforce will only lead to more prosperity. 

As per this year’s Economic Survey, we have made significant improvements in gender inequality in a lot of aspects. But on close inspection, we still have a deep-rooted gender bias against women. This is reflective in our “meta preference” for sons. Parents have children until they have a desired number of sons – taking the number of “unwanted” girls to 2.1 crores according to this year’s Economic Survey. Mind you, before you begin to think that this happens only in impoverished rural families, the Survey pointed that it prevails also in middle and upper-middle class families as well. 

Sex determination is an offense. No problem! We still have a way to circumvent it…keep having kids till we have a son! 

Our workplace statistics are startling: 

a. The labour force participation rate for women is falling: from 37% in 2004-05 to 28% in 2016. 

b. The Pipeline for Women Starts Small and Continues to Shrink 

c. Women earn 57% of what their male colleagues earn for performing the same work with the gender pay gap widening with her education and advancement in her career. 

d. Read more about the pay gap issue in Women’s Cricket here. 

I have already spoken about the representation of women or lack thereof in our films and the Indian legal system. 

Whether a woman has the right to go out or the right to raise her voice against assault or name her assaulter or change her name, it is not a decision for the system to make – it is hers and hers alone. We need to abort the growing sexism. 

I need to start this post with an apology to the third gender. This post shall focus on how women are under-represented in Hindi Films in India. The category of people that associate neither with the male or the female genders are also largely ignored by mainstream cinema even though they represent a decent section of the population. Unfortunately when stories have tracks for the third gender or the LGBTQ community in their stories, they are usually incorporated for comic relief.  Please go through the earlier hyperlinks to read about studies that analyse the under-representation of the third gender in our films.

Now there are every few households that don’t have any women in them. Our villages, towns and cities are filled with women. And yet our films don’t seem to reflect this too well.

Cinema in India enjoys a lot of love and has a very wide audience. This gives a lot of power to the filmmakers. But do they put their power to good use? Not really.

Last year, IBM and two New Delhi-based institutions released a public study of over 4,000 Hindi films to understand the extent of gender bias in the industry.

Here is a summary of the study findings (all graphs and images are snapshots from the report that you can read here):

1) Cast mentions in the Movie Plot: Right from 1970 to 2017, the data indicates that the male character has double the number of mentions as compared to a female character.

 2) Cast Appearance in a Movie Plot: The adjectives most associated with males are: rich and wealthy while the verbs associated with them are kills and shoots. On the other hand, women characters are often described as beautiful and attractive while the verbs associated with them are marries and loves.

3) Cast Introductions in a Movie Plot: Male characters are usually introduced by referencing their professions e.g. famous singer, an honest police officer, a successful scientist etc. while a woman character is invariably introduced in relation to a male character

 4) Occupation as a Stereotype: Women characters tend to have lower level occupations e.g. teacher or student while the male character tends to have higher level occupations such as lawyer or doctor.

5) Cast Dialogues and Gender Gap in Movie Scripts: On studying the ratio of male to female dialogues in 13 scripts, it was found that Raman Raghav was the least biased while Kaminey and Aligarh showed the most bias.

Female dialogues are presented on X-axis and Male dialogues on Y-axis

6) Movie Poster and Plot mentions: Publicizing a movie is biased towards a female on advertising material like posters, and they end up having an even smaller or inconsequential role in the movie. 50% of movie posters had female representation but 80% of the movies had more male mentions than female. Notably, 3 movies – GangaaJal 2 , Platform 3 , Raees 4 had almost 100+ male mentions in the plot but no female mentions whereas in all 3 posters females were prominently present on posters.

                 Source- Pixabay

7) Movie Trailers: The screen time for women characters in movie trailers has consistently been half that of men for over a decade!

8)  Female Centricity: The good news is that the female centric movies and female mentions in our movies are on a rise.

9) Singers and gender distribution in soundtracks: Since the female actors have a lesser role to play, so do their voices. Right from 2010 to 2017, the female singers have sung consistently less songs as compared to their male counterparts. The duration of the song sung by the female singer has not been considered here but it is more likely to be lopsided. This fact was also corroborated in a recent interview with the top female singers in the country.

Sexism not covered by the study above

 

The report concludes by suggesting that the primary steps one can take to narrow the gap of gender bias in Hindi Films is by:

This brings us to the second part of my post…

First let us understand…

It was created by American cartoonist, Alison Bechdel in her 1985 comic, “Dykes to Watch Out For”. It is also known as the Bechdel-Wallace test.

Women’s Web, a forum for women requires contributors to submit short stories that pass the Bechdel Test for its Monthly Muse contest. The measure is used widely across the globe.

Many people across the world including the creator of the test, Alison Bechdel acknowledge that the test isn’t perfect and may not always work. It definitely highlights the problem but its simplicity can be its undoing. Let us break the test down to highlight its failings:

In a recently released short film produced by Anurag Kashyap and Shlok Sharma, the viewer takes the same emotional journey as the characters in the film take after a very traumatic event. There were no dialogues and yet the film makes you empathize with a woman’s anguish.

There are various scenarios where two women could talk about a man and yet have a feminist flavour.  One important scenario could be conversations about abuse. A woman pushing her friend/ colleague/ daughter to stand up for her rights cannot take place without mentioning the man! Such empowering conversations will fail the Bechdel test!         

The film Gravity does not pass the Bechdel Test even though it revolves around a woman astronaut who survives in space owing to her intelligence and grit.  Read here on how even though most of the highest grossing films in Hollywood passed the Bechdel Test, the issue of gender bias remains largely unsolved.

The Bechdel Test may still be the most popular measure but there are other tests that could be used to supplement it to get a clearer picture of gender biasedness in films.

Script-reader Ross Putman highlighted the sexism that prevails in Hollywood by sharing the character descriptions for the female lead from actual scripts in a feed on Twitter using the handle @femscriptintros. It was found that most of the descriptions only focussed on how the character looked. He replaced all the names with ‘Jane’ which is why it is called the Jane Test. According to Ross 3 questions must be asked by writers before crafting the female lead:

                a.            Does the introduction focus on the external attributes of the character?

                b.            Is he a twenty- or thirty something?

                c.            Is she dating someone decades older than her?

If your answer is ‘Yes’ to all the questions above, then the script fails the Jane Test.

2)  Samantha Ellis, a feminist playwright in Hollywood, devised the ‘Sphinx Test’ that also involved asking a series of questions for playwrights to consider while creating a female character:

                a            Is there a woman centre stage?

                b.           Is she active rather than reactive?

                c.           Is she compelling and complex?

3)  Read here to know 12 tests that checks gender bias across 4 main aspects of movie-making:

               a.            Behind the Camera

               b.            Intersectional

               c.            Protagonists

               d.            Supporting Cast

These tests emerged when FiveThirtyEight (a website that focuses on opinion poll analysis, politics, economics, and sports blogging) asked 13 people in the entertainment industry to come up with personal standards for representation in cinema.

Gender Inequality behind the scenes

The study on Hindi Films doesn’t touch upon the lack of women film makers (directors, producers, editors, camerawomen etc.) in the industry. According to this article in 2016, there were only around 60 women working behind the scenes in big ticket movies. Here is a quote from a cinematographer who happens to be a woman explaining the reason–

This was in response to a comment by a reviewer who was surprised that the cinematographer was a woman. Also do read Shit People Say To Women Directors and other Women in Film.

When a movie like ‘Masaan’ is made, portraying a strong and independent girl from the small-town of Benares, I am sure it inspires women everywhere. Of course we know the love that ‘Queen’ or even the ‘Tanu weds Manu’ films have received from the audience. But I don’t think the makers set out to make ‘feminist’ films. They wrote stories that they themselves believed in. Richa Chaddha praises the makers of Masaan in a recent interview: ‘Neeraj Ghaywan and Varun Grover are possibly the most progressive (and) intelligent men I know who are so non-judgemental, understanding and humane…’ Neeraj Ghaywan followed Masaan with an amazing short film ‘Juice’ starring Shefali Shah that focussed on the sexism and patriarchy that still pervades our Indian homes. There are several other short films that aim to highlight the sexism that exists in India.

You may argue that the above films and short films are all made on relatively low budgets. Without the financial risks that a big-budget movie faces, these inspirational stories can afford to lend themselves to feminist ideals. True. But there is a glimmer of hope. I think that the reason why you saw the improving trends in female centric movies recently in the study earlier is because data suggests that half of the movie-goers are women today! This was not the case in the 80’s or 90’s where the movies catered primarily to men. As the women audience members watch more women centric films they will drive the demand upwards for such films. The consistent success of these films will make film-makers less wary of creating such films.

At the end of the day, no matter how many tests, questions and studies we subject our movies to, the fact is that writers want to share stories about the world around them. And unfortunately as long as sexism prevails in India, you can’t blame cinema or stories for mirroring the reality. Let’s try and make our women feel more as equals. Then our stories will also reflect it.