Male vs. Female Representation within Movies

Myriad times with dialogues, a lot of adjectives used within to describe males is not exactly equaled with the ones used for females. The word graph below describes how compact storylines in movies limit women to only a certain level of adjectives. “Beautiful” is the most used word for females while “wealthy” is the most used for males. Other adjectives such as “strong” and “successful” characterize the male cast while the female cast survives on the same old “attractive” or “widowed.” This tells us just how diversified the storyline of Bollywood movies are. Not at all. The story may be different, but the message ends up being the same for the way women are represented.

The chart below emphasizes various Bollywood movies through which we can see the screen time given to men versus women. The blue represents males while the red represents females. Majority of the movies showcase men having more screen time and dialogues. This shows the under- representation of females and the movies they occupy. One circle stands out the most which is the iconic movie, Queen. This movie was a breakthrough of misogyny, highlighting the freedom and strength of a woman without a man. 

  

The chart below emphasizes the emotions aspect. Males have much more freedom within their roles and the type of roles given to them offers a variety of emotions. However women are signified to specific emotions, mainly consisting of only being happy as this shows them being “pious” and “respectful.” The chart displays that the angry emotion is at an all time low for women across the span of years and being happy is the highest. For men both emotions are about equal. This accumulates the whole representation of women in general. With movies providing these outlooks, a wrong idea of how women “should be” is presented leading men to have a set mentality about women. 

 

Rape cases in India are at an all time high. India records the highest number of rape cases. Everyday about 88 new cases are reported and some do not even get to reach that level of being reported. Many blame the way Bollywood portrays women to the high number of cases. Strong representation of women is needed to show they are not terrified of men.

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