Comments On The ‘Dolly Kitty’ Trailer Prove Women Exploring Their Sexuality Makes People Uncomfortable. Suck It Up!
September seems like a really promising month to me. There’s some pretty interesting content that is coming our way, from Netflix’s Enola Holmes movie to Amazon Prime Video’s The Boys Season 2. What needs to be highlighted is how all of these movies and shows seem to bring forth incredible, hitherto unseen nuances in female characters. Just today, the trailer for Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare, starring Konkona Sen Sharma and Bhumi Pednekar, was released by Netflix. And it is an out and out female empowerment film, but not in a token way. It’s got a refreshing take on women’s liberation from the shackles of gender roles, and it tackles it majorly via the stories of two cousin sisters, both of whom set off to explore their sexuality in some way.
When I saw the trailer of Dolly Kitty, which also stars Vikrant Massey, Amol Parashar, Kubbra Sait, Aamir Bashir, Karan Kundra and Mushtaq Khan, I was quite excited (pun unintended). There are few mainstream movies that explore female sexuality without making it look too frivolous or titillating for the heck of it. This one was helmed by Alankrita Shrivastava, who has previous handled this subject rather deftly in Lipstick Under My Burkha and even Made In Heaven. So we can all assume that there’s a much more layered story being told her, and Dolly and Kitty’s sexcapades with their respective partners are not inserted here for shock value, but as essential character development.
Also Read: 5 Thoughts I Had While Watching ‘Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare’ Trailer: Konkona, Bhumi Bat For Women’s Sexual Freedom!
Alas, I made the colossal mistake of peeking into the comments section of the trailer on Instagram and YouTube. What I came across reinstilled my bleak outlook about our country’s youth. Turns out, surprise surprise NOT, women exploring their sexuality and experimenting with it makes people uncomfortable! The comments ranged from calling it a ‘sex story’, to comparing Netflix to ‘Alt Balaji’ which hosts a lot of shows that tackle sexual themes.
A few sage folks wondered why adultery was being marketed as women’s freedom, and how the film’s exploration of sexuality is against our culture, and actually encourages sexual crimes against women. You know, the usual complaints.
At first glance, all of this enraged me. But then I realised, isn’t this precisely why we need more films like Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare to be made? In India, as in the world, the cinema and television we watch shapes our world view to such a great extent. Considering the portrayal of women as sexual fantasies of men instead of individuals having their own sexual fantasies in our movies and TV shows, no wonder it makes people uncomfortable. For years, we have been okay with polygamy as long as it was the men who were doing it. Even in our scriptures and mythologies, any time a woman indulged in any kind of polyamorous relationship, it was often cloaked as ‘deceit’ or ‘trance’ or boon from the gods’. Their purity was so important in body and thought, that to think a regular woman who was a wife and a mother could harbour any fantasies, be unsatisfied or want to explore outside of marriage was considered blasphemous.
The irony here is that the very people who cringe at a public display of female sexuality are the ones who secretly watch porn where the women are all about pushing the boundaries of sex beyond conventional norms. Haven’t we always known how people frown upon LGBTQ relationships but have secret ‘lesbians making out’ fantasy.
It is in fact rather evident from the Bhumi Pednekar’s character, Kitty’s job, that men would rather that women be ‘adarsh nari‘ in public, but a sexual deviant in private.
And so, to all those people defecating in the comments, luckily nobody is force feeding you this content. If you do not want to watch it, by all means, don’t. Or, you know, do and live with the fact that you are a hypocrite. But if and when you do watch it, do so with open minds, and you’ll probably understand that sex isn’t all that shocking a deal that it is made out to be. It’s just a part, albeit a very, very pleasurable part, of every individual’s story, male or female.
