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- Gautaman Bhaskaran "Much like religion, the images on the screen, however fleeting they may be, can be as addictive as opium – to borrow a time-worn phrase. How many, many times we have seen the young and the impressionable copy the dare-devil acts they watch in movies – or even in advertisements – and how they impersonate their heroes and heroines." [source]
- Radhika Apte ‘sex tape’ proves India can’t make its peace with sex in cinema : The reason: Bikinis and sex scenes might have finally come to India, but Bollywood’s approach on women’s bodies and their sexuality remains centred around titillation. And it is an approach that continues to make money, so why bother changing it?
- Amala Paul-Vijay Split: Why do film families want mega serial bahus? Why does marriage come with compromising a career for female actors?
Jothika fell off the radar for several years after their wedding but made a come-back through advertisements and ‘36 Vayathiniley’, the remake of the Malayalam ‘How Old Are You?’ At the audio launch of the film, however, Sivakumar was quick to stress that despite his happiness at Jothika’s return, her priorities would be ‘Family, Child, Husband, and then Cinema’. Aishwarya Rai, ever since she became part of the Bachchan family, has stayed away from doing intimate scenes. According to reports, the Bachchan family clout was enough for Karan Johar to drop a kissing scene between Ash and Ranbir Kapoor in his forthcoming film ‘Ae Dil Hai Mushkil’.
BBC Full Documentary- 'India's Daughter' on Nirbhaya Delhi Gang Rap | banned | public review -- See also BBC site
- Actresses now object to being objectified: Vidya Balan (IANS Interview)
- Why We Should Use Our Outrage For Good
Look at a 2014 study of attitudes among youth conducted across 11 major cities in India which found that the importance of “gender equality” scored the lowest. Here are a few other findings (Source: Firstpost article):- “52% of Young India thinks a woman’s place is in the kitchen”
- “39% of girls and 43% of boys, agreed that women have no choice but to accept a certain degree of violence”
- “55% women and 59% men, whether a woman wears jeans or a sari, her clothing is to blame if a man chooses to manhandle her”
- “A whopping 43% of the men are under the impression that well, tough luck women, you had that coming, now suck it up and accept it (on sexual violence)”
- Does Bollywood normalise stalking? -- A defence lawyer in Australia successfully claimed that his client’s aggressive pursuit of women was ‘quite normal behaviour’ for Bollywood fans. Sadly, it’s all too easy to concur
- Dressing to kill, not thrill -- Film and TV heroines seem to have finally shunned the impractical sexy dresses and slipped into something more befitting their action [see also: U2 - Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me (Live)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxngIpxYLdM]
- Opinionline: Will rape protests change India?
- 5 reasons why Indian men rape South Asian Observer
- 10 Ridiculous Ideas About Rape That I Got From The Movies, Devishobha Ramanan, The Huffington Post
- 10 reasons why India has a sexual violence problem washingtonpost.com
- The bizarre reasons why men rape in India Rediff.com -- Yet at such a time, short skirts, mobile phones and Western culture are blamed for these incidents.
By Dinesh K. Sharma
NEW DELHI
India - rather whole of south Asia - has given the world a term called eve teasing. So why do Indian men tease eves? Why do they rape?
In a land which elevated women to the status of a goddess and gave the world its first sex treatise in the form of the Kamasutra, there are a myriad deep-rooted religious, cultural and social reasons for sexual perversion prevalent today. Sex is such a potent force which, if not channelized properly, can be destructive. In India, it has become a destructive force.
Here are five reasons why:
1: Sex, which was well integrated with daily life in ancient India (as old rituals show), was driven underground with the advent of Islam and later Victorian British rule. We are reaping the harvest today.
2: As mentioned above, sex was so integral to daily life that India that wife-sharing enjoyed so sort of social sanction. One brother would marry a woman and all his brothers would have sexual relations with her. That's why bhabhi (brother's wife) is the focus raunchiness in our society. This habit with Indian men has not spilled on to streets in the form of sexual attacks and rapes.
3. Indian entertainment industry thrives on titillation and eve teasing. Not surprisingly, when you bombard young people with so much lewdness they will give vent to their sexual frustration somewhere.
4: India today is overpopulated and cramped families leave no privacy release their pent-up sexual energy. This is more so with poor people who have no space in their family homes to indulge their sexual fantasies.
5: Most rapes are committed by poor migrate people in big cities such as Delhi. It happens because suddenly these sexually frustrated men find anonymity and space to give vent to their fantasies.
So what is the solution? There is no solution until India becomes a sexually liberated society. But right now, sex has just been reduced to a procreative tool - a far cry from the Kamasutra.
Yoshita Singh | United Nations | Sep 23, 2014
India tops the chart in showing attractive women in its movies and as much as 35 per cent of these female characters are shown with some nudity, finds a first-ever UN sponsored global study of female characters in popular films across the world.
The study, commissioned by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, with support from UN Women and The Rockefeller Foundation, reveals deep-seated discrimination, pervasive stereotyping, sexualisation of women and their underrepresentation in powerful roles by the international film industry.
Indian films, the study finds, have a significantly higher prevalence of sexualisation of female characters and the movies score low in depicting women in significant speaking roles and as engineers and scientists.
While women represent nearly half of the world's population, less than one third of all speaking characters in films are female and UK-US collaborations and Indian films are at the bottom of the pack.
Both, the American/British hybrid films (23.6 per cent) and Indian films (24.9 per cent) show female characters in less than one-quarter of all speaking roles. Even the frontrunners (UK, Brazil and South Korea) feature female characters in 35.9-38 per cent of all speaking roles on screen.
>>> Google lights up a candle to honour the Delhi braveheart
>>> President Pranab Mukherjee called her a "true hero";
>>> In Memory of The Unknown Citizen by Shuddhabrata Sengupta @ Kafila, Run from the big media
>>> Nirbhaya (the symbolic name given to the girl by The Times of India);
>>> Delhi gang-rape victim given symbolic name 'Damini' (seen on a banner, is a symbolic name given to the victim, taken from a Bollywood film of the same name about a woman's fight against society for justice for a rape victim);
>>> Amanat (“treasure”); whose gang rape triggered mass protests ... was first trapped in the name of love and friendship and then raped...leading to her death...
>>> Demand for revealing her name grows, The Hindu, Gaurav Vivek Bhatnagar -- but there is a legal issue: "Under Section 228A of the Indian Penal Code, disclosure of a rape victim’s name is punishable with a two-year jail and a fine."
The six criminals who have been charged for the murder are listed @ Wikipedia:"Last week I wrote this in response to a Hindu Human Rights posting on Facebook: In the US the pro-gun lobby blames Hollywood for the periodic massacre of school children. In India, the Hindu Human Rights blames ‘Bollywood’ for the rape of women. Now, two important voices - Mahesh Dattani and Swaminathan Anklesaria Aiyar have also blamed Indian movies." quotes Mayank Bhatt. Mayank commented on his FB page: "Just to clarify: I don't agree with this view at all. And I find it surprising that Dattani and Iyer should hold a view similar to a right wing religion-based organization"
Ram Singh, the bus driver, and his brother, Mukesh Singh, were both arrested in Rajasthan; Vinay Sharma, an assistant gym instructor, was arrested in Delhi, as was Pawan Gupta, a fruit seller; Raju, a minor, and native of Uttar Pradesh was arrested by the police at Anand Vihar terminal in Delhi; and Akshay Thakur, a man who had gone to Delhi seeking work, who was arrested in Aurangabad in Bihar.
>> There is enormous sexual frustration in India's underclass which has been left out of the liberalisation process, By Palash Krishna Mehrotra, Daily Mail (UK)
>> "Everyone is demanding reforms in the judicial system, but we must first go to the root cause of such incidents. The government must stop promoting liquor and put restriction on nudity and pornography on national television and Internet," said Swosti Sangeeta Dalei of Democratic Students' Organization.
>> Rape death sorrow spills over on Odisha roads, Dec 30, 2012 Times of India
>> "The researchers may state various reasons from drugs, alcohol, violent projection on the silver screen to an addiction to porn or difficult childhood but ultimately the it’s the victim that suffers more. Rape: A Woman’s Worst Nightmare, Society
>> "How has it happened that India — a country that hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus was sexually progressive enough to give the world the “Kama Sutra” and the concept that lovemaking and sexual pleasure could be an avenue to closeness to God — is now described in travel guides as a place where women must take great care?" In India and beyond, shock at a woman’s death, Jamila Bey on December 29, 2012 Washington Post (blog)
A clash of two cultures as women are left out of India's bright new future, The horrific Delhi gang rape reveals a painfully divided society, writes Jason Burke, The Observer, Saturday 29 December 2012
Extracts:
First there is the acutely unhappy coexistence of mutually incompatible social norms: those of a deeply conservative patriarchal rural society and those of a modern urban city where hierarchies that have been in place for centuries are fast breaking down... Urbanisation has brought the two cultures together in an unprecedented way....
A second element is a continuing inability to see women in any role other than mother, child or spouse. A third is the violence so endemic in so much of India. Alongside the dozens of rapes discovered by reporters last week across the country, local newspapers reported a tea planter burned to death in Assam and an alleged petty criminal blinded with acid by villagers. Continue reading The Observer
On the same shelf:
Extract: At the very onset, let's clarify that it will be highly presumptuous to assume that Hindi cinema is the root cause of a spike in sexual assaults. But Bollywood and regional cinema in equal parts, because of their reach, scope and influence, have a larger role to play in assuming responsibility for the message it sends out to millions of audience - some highly impressionable.
Films are not only a reflection of the society but also a powerful tool that shapes social engagement, culture and behaviour. For millions in India, Bollywood movies are about escapism from the struggle that surround their daily lives. And in a rapidly modernising India, where women have started to break free from their traditional shackles, regressive themes in films that include subjugation of women provide men with moral reinforcement to perpetuate gender stereotypes and sanction acts of domestic violence.
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