Sexism in the Indian Cinema Industry

I opened bookmyshow today and guess what I saw? Four out of the five most recommended movies running in theatres right now have a title which is the name of a male. These were the titles of the movies:

- Leo

- Tiger Nageswara Rao

- Bhagavanth Kesari

- Ganapath - A Hero Is Born

Why do you think this is? I don't know either. I can only speculate. What I think is, maybe the writers of these movies are male and so they can only think from a male perspective. Okay, but then the director is the one who employs all these actors, writers, etc. So why can't they hire female writers? Maybe there are lesser female writers or maybe these directors are mostly male and so they like the stories with the male main character better. But why are there not many female writers and female directors? I came across an interesting fact, women directors are less invested upon when compared to male directors. And making a movie costs a lot of bucks. So since women directors are less invested upon, they leave direction and pursue something else, thus there are lesser female directors and more male directors. So what can male directors do? Maybe they can choose a story which has a female perspective for every story which they choose which has a male perspective. But some of you might think that is this all necessary? After all, it is just a movie. Who cares whose perspective it is from? But it is important. Females watch these movies too. We are made to believe that the male perspective is the main perspective. Is this fair in any way? Is female existence of no use to this world? Are we not making up half of the world's population? It is a well-known fact that women underestimate their skills whereas men overestimate their skills. Why do you think this is? Maybe one of the reasons is because men watch these movies with themselves (males) as the main character and believe that they are important. And women watch the same movies and see women in the side roles and believe themselves to be not that important. Be very watchful of what you watch. What we digest subconsciously matters. Watch movies with male protagonists but also watch movies with female protagonists. You as a woman matter. You as a man have the responsibility to make sure that you don't ever bring a woman down knowingly or unknowingly. The sexism in the Indian film industry does not stop here. The pay gap is very huge. Female actors are paid about 10% of what their male co-stars are paid. Is this fair? It is in one way only. And that is, the male characters are the main characters, even though we say 'female lead character' and 'male lead character', there is only one lead character and that is more times than not the male. So the male gets paid more because he is in more number of scenes. The female gets paid less because she is in lesser scenes. This problem will be solved if the stories are chosen with inclusivity in mind. Choose stories with female main characters too. Sexism exists in every industry and the issues are endless in each industry. In this article I just covered some issues, there are plenty other and plenty more that I do not even know about because I do not work in the cinema industry. Many people might not agree with my views mentioned in this article but I feel that my perspective matters and what I say matters. In fact many women also might not agree with what I say here but I still think that this is a valid viewpoint.