Able, not abla: On-screen portrayals we need to do away with this Women’s Day

Sidekick syndrome

Stars come and stars go, but a female actor playing the love interest or inconsequential sidekick to a male actor just never goes out of fashion. Apart from Gangubai Kathiawadi, most of the successful films last year such as RRR, Kantara, Brahmastra and KGF 2 were male-dominated narratives with female characters languishing at the margins of the story. Women actors, some of them A-list stars like Alia Bhatt, played parts which were woefully underwritten or of little consequence to the film. Women need to stop making cameo appearances in their own lives and those of men on screen. The sidekick syndrome needs to be sidelined asap.

Matrimonial martyr

I was 15 years old when the daily soap became a huge phenomenon. Tulsi, Parvati and Prerna became household names and content on the Indian small screen became synonymous with suhaag, sindoor and suffering. While the daily soap now has a protagonist who at least expresses professional ambitions in the launch promos, sadly all she ends up becoming is a matrimonial martyr. Even two decades after they first became popular, shape-shifting naagins and venomous mothers-in-law still slither across small screens, watching in glee as the bahu drowns in a whirlpool of tears, clutching her mangaltura like a life raft. Can 2023 be the year women on television don’t build a life around the men they marry? Matrimonial martyrs are two decades too old now.

Successful cautionary tale

When OTT platforms launched, audiences fervently hoped that this time things would be different. While streaming platforms have truly expanded the scope of storytelling and given us some well-written shows with memorable performances, they have also given the successful woman who serves as a cautionary tale. Bombay Begums, Human, Fame Game, Aranyak and Hush Hush are some examples of shows where the female protagonists are shown to be deeply miserable inspite of having professional success and financial independence. These were privileges that only men were entitled to earlier, so when women start living as men have for centuries, a caveat of ‘hey you may think she is happy, but she is not’ presumably had to be attached. Perhaps social media has made it necessary for us to explain that no one has a picture-perfect life. However, creating stories where a woman’s success at the workplace comes with statutory warnings is something we need to do away with immediately.

The edgy girl

She has tattoos, coloured hair, piercings, a traumatic past and is quite possibly still in the closet. While none of these characteristics is wrong or deserving of criticism, what is problematic is when they come together and form a whole new stereotype. Across multiple shows on OTT platforms, a female character’s appearance and intensity of kohl is used to indicate her sexual orientation, or that she is battling demons from her past.

Disturbingly, child sexual abuse as a backstory showed up in three different shows on Netflix – Guilty, She and What the Love in the span of a few months in early 2020. Though the physical and psychological abuse of women is an issue that needs to be addressed, and we could always do with more representation in content, neither of these issues should be undermined by turning them into convenient backstory devices or tropes to make the character ‘interesting’, ‘edgy’ or ‘modern’.