Gender Differences In Bollywood Films

As one of the film industries with a large annual production number, Bollywood plays a crucial role in reflecting the local culture through its films’ storylines and themes. In general, the belief in male preference influences the local culture in India. As research in 2012 showed, 59.8 percent of married women who were living in the countryside in India considered two or more sons favorable, while only 23.3 percent of women preferred to have two or more daughters (Pande). The beliefs that men can bring more economic returns and girls require more supervision when they are growing up lead to this phenomenon. First of all, sons can sustain their families especially when their parents are old, while parents need to pay for their daughters’ dowries

Actresses think they are unqualified products when they compare themselves with the strict criteria of perfect women. The public is consistently exposed to an environment where a wonderful female needs to be young, slim, and fair. Nevertheless, only one out of 40,000 females could attain a model’s physical appearance; therefore, it is prevalent for actresses to feel shame for their bodies (Fredrickson 181). Consequently, anxiety occurs when they receive negative judgments about their looks (Fredrickson 182). On one hand, actresses worry they are powerless, which results in depression, due to the learned helpless theory which states that people feel depressed when they realize they cannot control anything. Actresses are powerless in controlling their own physical characteristics, and they cannot manage others’ opinions about them (Fredrickson 188). On the other hand, actresses choose to restrain their true characteristics as a way to be liked by audiences. As a result, they get depressed, for they constantly behave in a way that others feel content about, but it is not the way that they want to be (Fredrickson 187). Deepika Padukone, a notable Bollywood actress who experienced depression, claimed that she had to pretend to be fine when she was not (Padukone). Similar to the causes of depression, self-objectification leads to the hope of a slim body and

The belief of females that they are objects provides males an excuse to do anything to them, for they don’t view themselves as independent people (Stoltenberg 39). A victim of rape once said the rapist told her he could rape her not only because she was a woman, but also because she was absent when he wanted her (Stoltenberg 12). Specifically, this phenomenon has a higher possibility to occur in the film industry. The jobs of actresses are unsecured, for they need to satisfy the director of each new film under the collective knowledge of exchange between jobs and sexual affairs. In addition, the workplace is competitive with tens of thousands of new workforces coming each year. Swara Bhaskar, an outstand Bollywood actress, lost her character when she declared she would not get her job by having a sexual affair with any directors. Furthermore, directors have multiple excuses that are hard to be rejected to meet with specific actresses such as pretending to see her for auditions and to communicate with her about the scenes that will be shot in the films (Safi). However, there is little news about sexual harassments in Bollywood, for actresses rarely stand against it in public due to the potential destruction of their careers (Koechlin). A film director named Sohan Thakur touched a Bollywood actress when he called her for an audition, and she could not tell