There is a particular kind of cultural conditioning that operates invisibly — so embedded in entertainment habits that we mistake it for taste. Viewers arrive at films primed by years of storytelling, by algorithms, and by the ambient noise of social media to receive male suffering as tragic, male grievance as legitimate, and male entitlement as worthy of scrutiny. The sympathy is allocated before the first scene has even begun.
At a recent standup show, comedian Pranit More encountered a crowd member who casually revealed he had bought a woman a plate of biryani for Rs 370 and considered this a transaction, one that entitled him to her body. He said it openly, in a room full of people. What’s striking was his ease. A person who has never been told, by anything he has watched or laughed at, that this outlook requires examination. That ease has a supply chain.
Dacoit, a Tamil production featuring Anurag Kashyap as a cop, centres around vengeance against a woman who betrayed her partner. The emotional architecture asks spectators to understand his anger, follow his trajectory, and invest in his rage.
Bandar, Kashyap’s Bollywood follow-up, goes further, constructing a cinematic world where false allegations against men function less as an anomaly and more as atmosphere. Every thread points toward the same conclusion, that men are a persecuted class, that women wield courts as weapons, and that institutions have abandoned the former.
The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) recorded 4,41,534 crimes against women in 2024. Spousal and family cruelty alone accounted for over 1,20,000 cases, the single largest category of gender-based harm that year. These dynamics are sustained by social, institutional, and patriarchal structures that have historically rendered them ordinary.
Incidents where women commit crimes against men, however high-profile, however frequently cited, are neither systemic nor institutionalised in this way. Yet such examples get amplified, weaponised, and now cinematically immortalised.
Bandar constructs an entire universe in which the outlier is positioned as default, lending mainstream weight to a perspective that red-pill commentary and recommendation engines have spent years cultivating.
This pattern has recently found judicial expression. Stand-Up Comic Sanjay Rajoura filed a defamation suit in the Delhi High Court against several individuals and digital platforms, including Meta and Reddit, alleging a coordinated campaign that portrays him as a predator. The case is ongoing, and no ruling has been delivered on its merits. What it reveals, however, is how the scaffolding is built across cinema, audio circuits, and online spaces, where women calling out men is reframed as an orchestrated, defamatory campaign — now in courtroom vocabulary. The ecosystem is complete.
Obsession, a Hollywood horror, attempts to render masculine presumption as the monster and the protagonist as misunderstood, which audiences conditioned to sympathise with lonely, socially awkward men will connect with. The director reframes boundary violations as the main horror. What’s being assembled across these mediums is a coherent counter-narrative: that feminism has overreached, that men are the primary casualties, that women’s charges represent an existential threat to men’s safety. Piece by piece, the cumulative effect is a framework that makes men’s feelings feel like a universal crisis while documented harassment of women gets recast as overreaction.
The operative question is proportion, what gets funded, what gets widely distributed, and whose reality gets rendered as representative of larger truth. When a society consistently dramatises statistical exceptions while the pervasive danger women face remains peripheral, it is making a deliberate decision. What gets greenlit, what digital tools reward, and what legal mechanisms get deployed reflect whose interiority is considered universally legible, whose pain is deemed worthy of the screen, and whose precariousness is treated as a niche concern rather than a national crisis.
The crime records show a woman killed or driven to death by dowry pressure every 68 minutes in India. Women are murdered for rejecting men.
Women are slain for leaving. These are not exceptional stories. These are the norm. But the falsely accused figure in a rigged system is what’s getting the big screen, the airwaves, and now the dock. That inversion is worth examining carefully, without looking away.
In 2026, the cultural ground is shifting beneath safety gains that were never secure to begin with. Cinema positions male resentment as complexity. Standup stages generate laughs from transactional entitlement. Podcasts reframe women’s legal recourse as weaponised victimhood. Each medium reinforces the next, and the cumulative weight arrives as a revised social contract: women’s security is contingent on not making men uncomfortable.
Sharper cultural literacy is the first line of defence: reading the subtext before absorbing the text, asking whose anger is being rendered sympathetic, whose experience is conspicuously absent from the frame, and what worldview is being normalised under the cover of entertainment. The man on the standup stage is joking about what he is owed; the film is celebrating vengeance as a romantic complexity; the podcast guest is explaining why feminism went too far. The courtroom is where speaking publicly becomes grounds for litigation, where women who name harm find legal architecture deployed as a counter-weapon rather than recourse. None of these is isolated, but dispatches from the same address.
The screen has always reflected power. Right now, it is also rehearsing it, and women are the audience being asked to applaud.
Jha is an educator and freelance writer
Editor (Planning & Projects) Shalini Langer curates the fortnightly ‘She Said’ column
The screen has always reflected power. Right now, it is rehearsing it, and women are the audience being asked to applaud.
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