Woman as a human being

Simranpreet Kaur
Gender: A Socio-cultural Edifice
Culture is male and our myths are for heroes, not heroines. Since ages, whatever folktales, conventional stories or myths have been narrated to us have Hard-drinking, Hard-fighting heroes and imagining them with a heroine has always been a failure.  If anywhere a female becomes hard and unfeminine or competes with men; our society relegates her as a slut. So Gender one can say is merely a socio-cultural construction of female and male identity.
Socializing the Gender Stereotypes: Who is the culprit?
Being a girl, I am supposed to be fragile, submissive, shy, and emotional. And if I am a boy I need to be strong, dude, assertive, and masculine. I am not supposed to express my emotions, am not supposed to cry at all because a boy cannot cry. When a baby is born, he or she is expected and taught to behave in a certain manner that is acceptable in our society. Say for instance; Toys which we receive as children are by default trucks and football for boys, Barbie dolls and ‘pink’ color dresses for girls. These traditional roles are gifted to us rather imposed on us by our society. And yes it keeps a check as to whether we are fulfilling our responsibility or not.
Movies and other media scripts: a representative of or influential on society?
Gender stereotypes get circulated in the society through the medium of newspaper, magazines, movies, and many more. Earlier in Indian cinema, women had limited roles. They were either projected as the ideal mothers like the one in Karan Arjun who is till date mimicked for her famous dialogue ‘Mere Karan Arjun Kab Aayenge’ who is not bad actually but why limited to only this role? Okey! Then we had the submissive housewives like the one in Naseeb Apna Apna who had no problem at all if her husband married twice but still no matter what she waited for him to return to her. We also had helpless widows like the one in Prem Rog who was ever ready to listen to those taunts as if it was her fault to be a widow.
We also had fragile woman hiding in the corner, screaming for help, waiting for a macho man to rescue her from a bunch of criminals. If we observe keenly, Bollywood, since its very beginning, has portrayed women as dependent upon her male counterparts suggesting the prevalence of omnipotent patriarchy which is nothing but a social system which is dominated by males.
But if we take a glance at recent times we can observe that there has been a shift from those submissive housewives, ever ideal mothers, or dependent widows towards independent singletons. From Mother India to Mary Kom, Indian cinema has underwent a change, be it Mary Kom who rebels against her family to become an Olympic champion or be it the independent Rani in Queen deciding to go for a solo honeymoon after her fiancée ditches her or be it Shivani in Mardaani who challenges the myth that only men can fight and rescue the actress from a mob of criminals.  Yes, Bollywood has moved from those stereotypical representations of women.
But! despite these advances, the construction of females on-screen largely remains problematic. They are still viewed as an object in the hands of patriarchy. Recent movies like The Dirty Picture, Grand Masti, Hate Story 3, and the  movies like Kya Cool hain hum, Mastizaade, etc all focus upon the main job of female i.e., to be an eye candy for their male counterparts.
Apart from these, they are also given five minutes item songs like Chikni Chameli, Halkat jawaani, fevicol se, kamli, lovely and many more where they are bunged in purely for visual pleasure. They are essentially hero’s props.
Are we the Victims?
The clarion call here is that do these images actually have adverse effect up on the psyche of individuals? And the answer is a big yes… youngsters as media victims become the easy targets. They start identifying themselves with such characters, re enact them in their day to day life and start addressing these gender stereotypes which are attached to them in these films.
In the nexus of such practice, a girl starts recognizing herself as an object of display and a boy as objectifier who possesses her. The main objective here is that Indian cinema should focus up on woman not as an object of display, not as a stereotype or as a prisoner of patriarchy, not even as an object of pleasure; but as a human being who has her own individuality, choice and freedom. That is all what we need to understand and make our society a better place to live on.
The author is Research Scholar Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University Katra (J&K)
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