There are three kinds of women associated with Tamil cinema. One, the actors, objectified and hyper-sexualized, wanted by all till she becomes either too old or a man’s wife. The second group is the women technicians, the dreamers who come in wanting to change cinema, leave a legacy behind. For a lot of them, their dreams turn dreary after continuously being perceived not as skilled workers but as a body with b**bs and booty amongst preying men.
The third kind is the movie watcher, the male-lead fan, and the woman who is not old enough to make the family audience league. There are broadly two classifications I have for men in the industry –—the predator with power and privilege of varying degrees, and the man who does not use that which he possess to prey on women. I’m not going into persons of other gender preferences and sexualities in the industry — about why there isn’t diversity needs a column in itself!
If you’re wondering why I’m making boxes of the men and women in the industry, it is to reinstate after a crabby week of discussion nothing but sexual harassment online and offline, that Tamil cinema has got its share of ‘Harvey Weinsteins. Or for those who kick up a fuss for Christian names, let me safely refer to them as the Harahara Mahadevakis.
Well, of course you always had a clue though you didn’t invest in that trail of thought. Because if you assumed every woman in the industry had to ‘compromise’ to land that role or job, you didn’t think about the man who asked for those favours. When you heard about that man, the woman who was with him and then went on to say ‘he’s married, why is she with him?’ you didn’t think about him because you busy assassinating her character.
What we have done is to normalise harassment in the industry and take it with a pinch of salt that we have failed to think about these Harahara Mahadevakis. What we do by referring to it as a male-dominated industry is that we keep women out, at a safe distance away from ‘those’ men. About the nice men we hear the facts — “he’s the guy who’s never knocked on a heroine’s door”, they say. About the predators, we hear nothing. If we do by chance, the power and privilege will work to ensure that the news is a figment of imagination. Or madness. Oh, or hacked accounts.
Why am I angry? Because I know these women and I know of these men. There’s the aspiring actor who had been asked for favours multiple times till she met one of the nice men who gave her a chance for her talent. There’s the technician who got kissed by a star — she was so star struck by it that it took a days for her to see that she was hardly in a position of power to initiate it. There is the celebrity that made a pass at a friend even after she firmly declined, and this is why I talk about the audience as well — the predatory man believes he’s entitled to every woman that his popularity will give him access to and sometimes will not take no for an answer.
I’m not victimising every woman here. But agency and power influence consent, and sometimes a career hanging on the line too. That is not consent. That is harassment. A woman may enjoy and be willing to have sex, but if it is necessary to land that big break, then it is harassment at the workplace. It is not part of the job because the job is about glamour — if it’s not okay in an IT company, it’s not okay on a film set. If it not okay by a random man at a club, it is also not okay by a celebrity.
It’s not like actors haven’t spoken out before. But we need to listen to them when they do, we need to encourage them to speak when it happens rather than much later when they will be taken seriously, we need to have more women with jobs in the industry, and teach all our women to challenge that power. When they do, and we support them, the predators will fall off their pedestals.
Archanaa Seker
seker.archanaa@gmail.com
(The writer is a city-based activist, in-your-face feminist and a media glutton)