Deepika Padukone vs TOI: Here's what the storm in the D-cup says about us

Even as Deepika Padukone is talking about her new film Finding Fanny, the Times of India has “found” Deepika Padukone’s cleavage. The “cleavage show” headline turned into a storm in a D-cup when Deepika hit back hard. “Yes! I am a woman. I have breasts and a cleavage! You got a problem!!??” she shot back. TOI tried damage control. Sort of. “It’s a compliment! You look so great that we want to make sure everyone knew! :)” But sometimes a (presumably shame-faced) smiley isn’t enough. The non-apology just stirred the pot further. TOI pulled the story as more celebrities jumped into the Twitter fray. [caption id=“attachment_1713311” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Deepika Padukone. AFP.[/caption] Karan Johar was “appalled…shocked and disgusted.” Homi Adjania, her Finding Fanny director called it “regressive shit”. Arjun Kapoor called it “ a new low”. Not such a “new low” really. TOI had not that long ago already done a “nip slip” on the same Deepika Padukone. Of course, it’s a little rich for Bollywood’s celeb brigade to put on an indignant #IStandWithDeepika act. It’s a path-leader when it comes to treating women as peek-a-boo commodities. If wrapping them in white sarees and dousing them in waterfalls and monsoon showers or hypersexualized item numbers were not enough, it has even turned rape into titillation and created stars who have built entire careers as filmi rapists. The rape counter might be lower in films these days than those old bachao bachao heaving bosom rape scenes but speaking of cleavage the film Grand Masti had strings of dialogues about darshan of “doodh factories” and erections setting off burglar alarms. But that does not excuse the media either. Our media wants to have it both ways. There are high-pedestal uplifting values of empowerment and fighting misogyny reserved for our front pages and op-ed pages. And even the film review page which will wag its fingers at movies for catering to the lowest common denominator. But the entertainment pages come with a wholly different standard – a booby trap. Women empowerment and sensitivity are virtues we have discovered especially after the spurt of gang rapes and we emblazon them all over the front pages. We take politicians and khap panchayats to task for sexist comments and rightly so. It’s the media who piously gave the December gang rape victim the name Nirbhaya. All that is grist for front-page outrage. But in the entertainment pages we are still leering as we wonder choli ke peechhey kiya hai. Deepika’s cleavage is just the latest example. And hardly the exception. The entertainment pages remain a bastion for almost everything retrograde. A few days ago there was a photo slide show about Mix and Match celebrities entirely premised on fairer stars in relationships with darker stars which proved that “love is blind”. Clearly! Otherwise why would Shah Rukh Khan marry a dusky Gauri? These are the poster children of colour crusaders – “the most well-known and powerful duos who have sealed their relation despite the difference in colour.” While the media comes down on Shah Rukh Khan for endorsing Fair and Handsome and wrings its hands about India’s never-ending love affair with skin whiteners, it sees no problems with creating a slide show about the complexion differences between Ajay Devgn and Kajol, Dhanush and Aishwarya, Shah Rukh Khan and Gauri. Even more egregious, it throws interracial foreign couples like Naomi Campbell and her ex Vladimir Doronin into the mix as if a relationship across race lines (something that was taboo and even legally forbidden in the United States till Loving vs Virginia in 1967) is the same as a relationship across complexion tones. Now that complete slide show seems blacked out – inadvertently adding a whole another layer of race baggage and colour blindspots to the entire sorry project. Perhaps the much maligned British tabloids that splashed scantily-clad women and salacious sexy stories all over their front pages were more honest and upfront in a way. They made no pretence of virtue. Stars are public figures and to some extent have to play a cat-and-mouse game with the media when it comes to their private affairs. They wear outfits at galas to draw attention and the media has every right to comment on it, diss it if they think it deserves dissing. Paparazzi went to town recently with pictures of what looked like an exceptionally well-endowed Idris Elba. They went utterly viral. Elba clarified the bulge was a mic wire not natural but joked ““Calvin Klein called my mobile, they want me in their next campaign.” But there’s a difference between commenting and leering. What its “OMG! Cleavage show” headline actually revealed was that while the entertainment pages try to act very adult and mature, they are stuck in some kind of hormonal tee-hee-teenager mindset where cleavage becomes worthy of a headline simply because it’s cleavage and OMG it can be seen. It actually reveals more about our inherent prudishness than anything about our alleged permissiveness. Media richly deserves to be called out on this especially because it spends so much energy calling others out on exactly this kind of sexist rubbish. Sometimes it needs to look into the mirror as well. But then Humshakals where dwarves chomp on genitals, women are squeezed into absurdly short tight dresses and Riteish Deshmukh pretends he is a dog and dry humps an actor’s leg made Rs 40 crore in its opening weekend. So the question for the rest of us is do we get the Grand Masti entertainment media we deserve?