“The All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA) welcomes the release of the Hema Committee Report which has painstakingly conducted an inquiry into the shocking atrocities against women in the film industry. It is the first time that a state government has formed a committee to study the malpractices in the film industry and harassment that women have to undergo.
“It is a known fact that women working in the film industry are victimised everywhere. But except in Kerala, such an intervention has not been made by any government to take steps to give justice to the women victims. AIDWA commends the efforts made by the LDF government in Kerala to help the women complainants.
“After the release of the Hema Committee Report, many women working in the film industry have come out fearlessly and are openly speaking about their ordeals. AIDWA expresses total solidarity with all the women who have experienced such traumatic situations and will also help them avail legal support in their struggle for justice.
“The Hema Committee (HC) report commissioned by the Chief Minister of Kerala to examine the issues at the workplace faced by women in the Malayalam film industry came out amidst massive media and public furore on August 19. It took seven years, four months and two days of the Women in Cinema Collective (WCC) members’ activism — and being cast out in varied ways.”
Above is an abstract from the media statement issued by AIDWA. However, it is necessary to go deeper into the subject of sexual harassment specially for women who wish to enter or have already entered into the film industry.
In Hollywood, Bollywood, Tollywood or any other film industry across the globe, both the point of entry, and the duration of a woman in the industry, is marked by the mandatory readiness among ambitious girls to part with sexual favours.
This might sound shocking and absurd but it is true through decades of film-making that one cannot imagine making a film without women stepping into it as actors, dancers, cameo characters and even junior artists. Obviously, they are young, sexually attractive and assumed to be ‘willing’.
Is this sexual harassment? Is this coercion? Is this sexual blackmail? Yes, it is all that and much more. Every profession that engages women, works on the unwritten assumption that if forced, they will surrender to sexual demands. The “or else” is kept dangling in the air, the answer, a given.
Some professions are more open to bartering sexual favours for work, higher pay, a better role, big banner production house, or a promotion. These are professions that demand youth, and beauty.
“‘Degi Kya?’ (will she give?)’” asks a filmmaker of an assistant who approaches him to espouse the cause of a young girl aspiring for stardom. He brushes away her talent and beauty with two words.
This scene from Madhur Bhandarkar’s ‘Page 3’ exposes the ugly face of stardom, especially for the females of the species. The starlet, who refuses to compromise, is seen cavorting with the same filmmaker later in the film.
Interestingly, Bhandarkar himself happened to be in the eye of a storm when an aspiring actor Preeti Jain accused him of ‘using’ her under false promises of marriage. Why did the furore against Bhandarkar fade away with the girl being made to look as if she was making false accusations?
It was because Bhandarkar was famous, powerful and married, while no one had heard of Jain, till she came out with this accusation. Bhandarkar gave up his plans to go ahead with his film ‘Casting Couch’, a logical extension of ‘Page 3’. But this came out in a later film ‘Fashion’.
What exactly is the ‘casting couch?’ During the so-called "Golden Age" of Hollywood, it was not uncommon for would-be-stars to grant sexual favours to directors and/or producers in return for a role.
These favours were usually rumoured to be on a couch in the filmmaker's office. This is how the phrase "Casting Couch" came in currency. Though the practice is veiled with a conspiracy of collective silence, concealed under thick layers of celluloid hypocrisy, the term and the practice are rampant.
Many young girls, with stardust in their eyes, and now, even young men who aspire for a career in films or modelling, become ‘cry-babies’ after the fact screaming their lungs out accusing men in the industry, from the producer to the make-up man, of forcing themselves on these youngsters. The casting couch is structured into the construct of the careers described above.
So, nothing comes of these complaints after the fact because the perpetrators, more powerful than their so-called victims, run scot free claiming that it was consensual sex and there was no force involved.
“The casting couch is no myth. It exists, though its relevance and power have been magnified. A lot of starlets fall onto the 'couch' and get signed repeatedly by one producer or the other,” a veteran journalist who is on first-name terms with top stars of Bollywood, wrote.
Yukta Mukhey whose career in films and modelling did not go the way her beauty title did, went on record to say that “the casting couch does exist and it depends on the person concerned to surrender or to opt out.”
A young girl has the option of walking out when someone within the film industry makes a pass at her. By the time the girl actually reaches the door of the producer/director/financier, she is desperate to get in, never mind the price she now knows she must pay just to get through that door.
After having cooled her heels at producer’s offices, living off salads for months, preparing for endless auditions, the quid pro quo involving a night with the right man for a role in his film does not seem to be too heavy a price. During the long months of waiting, she has learnt the hidden rules of the game and somewhere along the way, her defences come down, her values mutate.
In her article ‘Harvey Weinstein and the Economics of Consent’, Brit Marling writes in ‘The Atlantic’, “Acting felt like a noble pursuit and maybe even a small act of resistance. Hollywood was, of course, a rude awakening to that kind of idealism.
“I quickly realised that a large portion of the town functioned inside a soft and sometimes literal trafficking or prostitution of young women (a commodity with an endless supply and an endless demand).”
Marling rightly points out: “Once, when I was standing in line for some open-call audition for a horror film, I remember catching my reflection in the mirror and realising that I was dressed like a sex object.
“Every woman in line to audition for “Nurse” was, it seemed. We had all internalised at some level the idea that if we were going to be cast we’d better sell what was desired, not our artistry, not our imaginations, but our bodies.”
The casting couch in films or politics or advertising or modelling operates much before one even steps into a given area such as films. Sexual harassment happens most often, when a man senior to the woman in the organisation, holds her job as ransom for not agreeing to compromise on sexual favours.
One cannot be judgmental about this if the woman agrees because there are extraneous forces at work that force some women to adjust to sexual demands.
A daily-wage labourer at a construction site is forced to sleep with the overseer because if she does not, she will be wiped out of the roster. She has children waiting to be fed, clothed and sheltered.
This can happen to a single woman working in a bank who has no support for her family, or, a top brass in a corporate organisation. Research scholars have a tough time with their supervisors who often pressurise them for sexual favours.
They find it almost impossible to opt out because their research would remain incomplete or get a bad grade thus blocking their future in academia forever. This is an impasse that is really tough to solve.
The lines between consensual sexual activity and forced sex sometimes overlap or get blurred and ambiguous. The main difference between sexual harassment at the workplace and the casting couch lies in the difference between forced sex and consensual sex.
But in some cases, as Harvey Weinstein’s victims have stated, “consensual sex” can also be forced. If this is true, then is it not the responsibility of the victim to take her cause further through legal and social rebellion?
But then, it becomes a question of the powerful versus the vulnerable. In these cases, sexual pressure and blackmail is a war between the powerful and the vulnerable, where, however, the ‘vulnerable’ is not necessarily weak and without options.
Harvey Weinstein is not the only man in the world to pressurise stars and would-be stars to give him sex for work and money. Nor is he the first, and is certainly not the last. But he is most certainly the first man in the world to be on the firing line of accusations of sexual harassment attacking him from every side, including men even beyond United States’ shores.
Whether he is guilty, or much of it is a media creation, is not the question. There is no question that he is guilty. The moot question is the conspiracy of silence his victims were unified by for so many years.
Why did they bear it quietly? Why did they take so long to open up this horrible Pandora’s Box we all know was already there, waiting to be opened though everyone knows what was inside?
Weinstein went one better. He had the actresses sign a non-disclosure agreement which bonded them to him in every way. He is both diabolic and intelligent.
He does not blink before abusing his power. If you have never heard of a “non-disclosure agreement” neither had I, till now.
Zelda Perkins, a former assistant to Harvey Weinstein who signed such an agreement before accepting a monetary settlement from him broke the rules of the agreement, and came out with horrendous details of years of sexual harassment and abuse.
She is one of the eight alleged victims to sign such NDAs with Weinstein. In an interview with the ‘Financial Times’, Perkins said that Weinstein’s sexual misconduct began the very first day she ended up with him while working out of his London office!
The skeletons began tumbling out and Weinstein was thrown out of the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences. But will this bring back the honour his victims lost?
The latest on Weinstein is that he remains set to face a retrial for the overturned New York convictions in the fall of 2024. His earlier conviction was overturned.
During a court hearing on July 19, 2024, Judge Curtis Farber ruled that Weinstein would be retried and tentatively set for the retrial to start on November 12, 2024. Despite this, Farber also ruled that previous plans to have the retrial start in September 2024 were still an option, and the start date of the retrial would depend on pretrial discoveries.
In India, the AIDWA welcomes the immediate steps taken by the state government towards identifying and penalising the accused to stop this exploitation of women.
However, it is disgusting that the Opposition is trying to take political mileage instead of aiding the process of gender justice. This will compound the trauma of the victims.
Ranjith resigned as chairman of the Kerala State Chalachitra Academy at the right time before things got murkier for him. The question is, will this bring a halt to the sex racket going on in the Indian film industry in general and the Malayalam film industry in particular?