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Hypermasculinity in Films and Fate of Women

By on August 30, 2021
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By Sangeeta Boruah

Films are a major source of entertainment for people of all ages. Most of the films are fictional and others are non fictional. These films have an immense degree of influence on the minds of young boys and girls. As a girl I too have grown up watching films. Films were an escape for me like many other kids from study hours. Little did I realize that those films immensely shaped the way I think about myself as a girl.

Portrayal of women in films, always helpless, weak and dependent, made me think that women are meant to be guarded by men. Moreover, men depicted as courageous, brave, and fighters made me think that every man is more powerful than women. But now as a grown up adult I realized how my childhood and teenage years have been afflicted with the absurd ideas endorsed by those films that made me feel weak and vulnerable all the time.

It is actually very funny to see male actors in films fighting against ten to twenty male villains to protect a woman. How on earth can a single man bare-handedly fight against ten to twenty men without almost dying? Such type of hypermasculinity is one of the reasons why most of the girls grew up believing they are weak. They rob the women of self-confidence. Here what I am emphasizing is not solely physical weakness but emotional and mental weakness too.

Maybe that’s the reason why a sixteen year old girl is often advised to be at least accompanied by her 10 year old brother while going out in the evening. I genuinely don’t understand what a ten year old boy could do and what a sixteen year girl couldn’t do to protect herself from dangers. In the end, when the situation becomes extreme, both of them are anyway going to face the same fate.

My intent is not to overlook the fact that society also constitutes men in the form of harassers. But we should not deny that these harassers are brought up in the same society where victims (girls) are brought up. So what makes one section harassers and the other victims? The blame unequivocally lies on the ways our society has been operating. The same society breeds both harassers and victims. Here also comes the role of those films that never shy away from depicting hypermasculinity. Promotion of such hypermasculinity in a society where patriarchy is so intrinsic further deteriorates the fate of women. These films are partly responsible for breeding men with unnecessary pride in their self claimed superiority to women. They conceive women as weaker, vulnerable and gullible gender who fall prey to their abusive intentions. Women too who grew up acknowledging the invincible superiority of men and their hypermasculinity as delineated in films undertake their submissive roles.

Last year, I had a conversation with one of my friends who speaks highly of sports and martial art forms. She believed that women in most of the films are portrayed as housewives doing only household chores. On the other hand men are depicted in films as sports persons.

Therefore, girls never get the motivation to pursue sports as their career and end up getting stuck in household chores. She also added that it hampered women from becoming physically fit and stronger. But was not her comment meant to devalue women doing household chores? I do reckon the physical and mental benefits of engaging oneself in sports. Yet one should not brush aside the fact that household chores require immense levels of stamina too. Those women working at home for twenty four hours incessantly are not doing some easy tasks.

Nonetheless, I do believe that the distribution of roles and activities on the basis of gender is a way to paralyze individuals from realizing their potential.

Self-defence tactics: An excuse for society?

In today’s world self-defence has become a buzzword. Girls are heaped with an additional responsibility to learn various martial art forms to protect themselves. I reckon that every individual irrespective of their gender should be encouraged to master such martial art forms owing to their physical and mental benefits. But when it comes to women, society coax them to learn it for the sake of their own protection and self-defence. I would like to opine that self-defence tactics (while not devaluing martial art forms) have become an excuse for the society to shy away from its responsibility to undo what it sowed systematically years ago. In fact self-defence has been orchestrated into a tactic to continue the systematic sowing of patriarchal and hypermasculine seeds by the society without any pause. Why can society not take the responsibility of bringing up their children in an environment which is less patriarchal and less guided by gendered norms? Why are pursuits of gender equal society being pushed away under the garb of the espousal of self-defence for girls? Does it not indicate a green signal to the perpetual exploitation of women in society?

It is also very imperative to acknowledge that not every man or woman wants to behave in the manner prescribed by the society as universal and uniform. Society should be complacent when a man or woman wants to oscillate between the two binaries of masculinity and femininity. Indeed, society needs to break the binary of masculinity and femininity. The attitudes, behaviors and choices should not be restrained owing to the gendered norms and rules of masculinity and femininity. Without breaking this binary, how are we supposed to offer space to those people who don’t want to be placed in a single gendered norm? Imagine the life of a bisexual or homosexual person. We know what kind of repercussions they have to bear owing to the existing gendered norms of the society. In such a situation, depiction of hypermasculinity further deteriorates their lot.

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Picture2A keen observer of politics in India, International politics, Gender issues and environment. I am a realist as well as an idealist. I dwell in my own world of fiction which is partly non-fictional.

I have done my master’s in Political Science from Jawaharlal Nehru University.

~Link to my Facebook profile: https://www.facebook.com/sangeeta.boruah.923 

 

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