Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, former Miss World, actor, brand ambassador, mother, wife and a successful, self-made public figure, walked the ramp at the Paris Fashion Week about a fortnight ago in a golden cape gown. Sadly, instead of admiring the fact that she joined a select group of beautiful and successful women from around the world and represented our country, people went on to leave cruel comments about her weight, her looks and even alleged that she had used cosmetic procedures on her face.
Even before her Paris Fashion Week appearance, Aishwarya was trolled for her choice of clothes, hairstyle and her weight at the Cannes Film Festival. Instead of admiring her for attending the festival year after year and staying relevant in an ageist business, people were instead consumed by the desire to peck at her like a bunch of frenzied birds.
It makes one wonder, were we always this mean and nasty, or did social media unearth a latent reservoir of pure evil residing within each one of us? Why is it so perversely satisfying for so many of us to criticise women we don’t know? Most frighteningly, why does the insensitivity feel justified and even satisfying to some people online?
But Aishwarya is not alone. Just google ‘Bollywood actresses getting trolled’ and you will find a plethora of articles about actresses who got trolled for what they wore, what they said, their personal lives and of course the constant comments on their dimensions. Whether it’s Malaika Arora’s gait, Vidya Balan’s waistline, Anushka Sharma’s lips, or Janhvi Kapoor’s alleged cosmetic procedures; there are innumerable examples of women in the public eye being subject to unrelenting and frankly unnecessary public scrutiny.
Saba Azad is a talented singer and actor who received a shocking amount of hatred and negativity from social media users after her appearance at the Lakme Fashion week. While she responded to some of the haters, it’s sadly like brushing away a few drops of water from an incessantly leaking roof. In an earlier interview to India Today, Saba spoke about dealing with hatred online and said, “It’s taken me quite some time to come to a place where I treat everything else as white noise because hatred is palpable. I am not made of stone, it hits you. You feel like sh*t. There are days when you wake up and you wonder ‘What did I do to anyone?”
Parineeti Chopra who got married recently, was trolled for her choice of bridal couture at her wedding. From the colour of her lehenga to the song she made her entry on, netizens found fault with every aspect of her wedding. While the homogenisation of celebrity weddings may be a topic that the wedding planner fraternity to debate on, making a person feel bad about the way she looked on her wedding day is perhaps as awful as people can get.
Sadly, this pressure to look constantly pretty is a reflection of how we treat women. Just walk into a departmental store and see the range of creams, lotions, concealers, primers, anti-ageing creams, fine line reducers, wrinkle removers and dark spot reduction serums being sold at varying prices to ensure our appearance checks off all the boxes of attractiveness.
In the meanwhile, Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan, Akshay Kumar and Salman Khan, all closer to 60 than 50, continue to play characters who are never their actual age. All our male superstars have aged and it’s getting harder and harder to hide the fact that they aren’t the 25, 35 or 40 year olds they insist on playing on screen. Whether it is Shah Rukh Khan trying to look like a man in his late thirties in Jawan, Aamir’s disastrous de-ageing in Laal Singh Chaddha, Salman Khan romancing Pooja Hegde who is half his age in Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan, or Akshay Kumar working with younger and younger actresses with every film; the denial is bordering on delusion when it comes to Bollywood’s leading men. Their former leading ladies on the other hand, have moved on to doing films that release on OTT platforms and playing mothers because big screens demand women only from a certain age bracket to play the girlfriend.
The question then really is, what is it about a woman’s appearance that is so triggering to so many people? Aishwarya, Priyanka, Vidya, Parineeti, Malaika, Anushka- these aren’t just names for us to verbally molest in conversations online or offline. These are real women who have hearts and minds like the rest of us and their worthiness is not determined by their age, dress size, or any other statistic. Sadly with cruelty becoming almost endemic to social media platforms, we will soon need a cosmetic treatment that could erase the fine lines of hurt and humiliation from our hearts and minds.
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Aishwarya Rai, Anushka Sharma, Parineeti Chopra: Why Bollywood actresses are subjected to endless trolling, public scrutiny? – The Indian Express
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