Casual sexism is one of the many pervasive problems that female actors encounter in Bollywood, including nepotism, invasion of privacy, and unpredictability of box office receipts. This occurs in a variety of settings, including interviews and movie promotional events, but the actresses hardly address the sexist remarks directly. Also, a few actresses have spoken out against the sexist statement, including Vidya Balan and Deepika Padukone.
Here are a few you should have a look at:
Deepika Padukone
During the promotional event for the film ‘Chhapaak', one of the reporters casually assumed that Ranveer Singh financed the film. This was casually assumed that because Deepika is the lead actress in the film, it is obvious that her husband will pay for it. The actress immediately called him out for making such comments. Even though she put it across very subtly and amicably, this still shows a lot what the mentality to date.
Vidya Balan
Vidya Balan gave an epic response to a question being raised on her weight loss/gain journey for a film that will be women-centric, where she initially cringed at the utter ridiculing stereotype and eventually bashed him, “I am here to work and will do whatever story inspires me and the people, what would be really helpful if you could work on your mentality.”
Rani Mukherjee
Another absurd comment made by a journalist was when he said earlier in films, women used to be the main traction for entertainment for the masses and he quoted them as “achaar(pickle)” in the films.
Actress Rani Mukherjee made sure that this comment was not taken lightly and made sure he was aware of how offensive this comment was. “Didn’t know actresses are Sindhi.”
Zareen Khan
Zareen Khan called out the blatant sexism when it was implied that she only works in “hot and steamy films”.
“You are the one paying to watch my films and very conveniently putting fingers at me.”
Priyanka Chopra
When someone claimed that a woman slapping a man who eve-teased her is “male-abuse”, Priyanka Chopra at a fundraiser, decided to them a crash course on feminism. “It’s not like we want to fight with them physically, what we want and are fighting for is – cerebral equality.”
Sunny Leone
A reporter asked Sunny Leone at a product launch that if he gave her 1 Crore and 1 Kiss, what would she choose? Sunny had to be the voice of the reason. And the fact that he had one opportunity to interact with her and this was the way he chose to pull the interaction. “You could’ve asked me anything and you chose to ask me that!”, she said.
A journalist claimed that girls ‘like it’ when they are young and scream when they are old. Parineeti schooled him on the concept of consent and rape and how insensitive that comment was.
“The only thing known as bodily explanation is rape.”
Katrina was asked if she felt ‘lucky’ to have been able to kiss Shah Rukh Khan, to which she replied, “He’s the one who is lucky.”
It might look very easy and sassy to the audience but casual sexism can lead to something that is extremely offensive and stereotypical.
Sanya Bhattacharjee is a final-year student currently studying at Bennett University, pursuing BA in Journalism and Mass Communication.