The Vijay-Rashmika Backlash Has A Misogyny Problem Of Its Own

Let me tell you a story. It takes place in this tight-knit community, the kind where you wouldn't expect anything to go wrong. Except that one day, in a fit of rage, one man shoots another to death in broad daylight, right in the town square. The news spreads like wildfire. People are angry. Town elders give speeches about the dangers of gun violence. Poets and playwrights make art about the politics of killing someone so publicly. When the murderer is apprehended, people discuss how to bring this killer to justice.

Finally, they decide to shoot him down in a public execution. The whole town comes to witness. Children spectate as justice is served to this murderer. The victim stays dead; the gun is disposed of, while the whole incident is made into an example. Guns are not banned completely, though, because the next time someone is shot, the whole town will need to take up arms to shoot the shooter.

If you have been online lately, you would not even need to have watched the Vijay Deverakonda - Rashmika Mandanna Koffee With Karan episode to know of the vitriol that followed (although we really suggest you watch it before forming your opinions). A lot is being said about the controversy that resulted after the two actors spoke about their relationship and their approach to the industry. Both actors have since issued statements about said outrage to break down misconceptions about what they said during the episode, and how it may have been perceived.

But this isn't about the dynamic between a married celebrity couple. What it is more concerned with is how, in it's attempt at online vigilantism, the internet has lost the plot on how it is deriding the actors.

I’m sure you must have come across a comment, if not a post, outright calling Mandanna “the man in the relationship”, or Vijay Deverakonda a “princess”, a fragile “diva” whose nakhre are supposed to be borne by said man, Rashmika. “Vijay is the woman I aspire to be” has become a joking tagline in this outrage. He is now held as a “man in a women-dominated field” because he made his partner propose to him a hundred times before finally saying yes.

Now, just hold on to these quotations for a second and think, for once, about what they mean. How, in criticising Deverakonda’s toxic behaviour by calling him a woman and her a man, the internet is so swift in declaring women and femininity as the lesser, more worldly gender. It’s the same kind of argument we see so often, where the easiest way to call a man weak is to call him a woman, to say that he’s the “kind to wear bangles”. We also saw this recently when Ranveer Singh and Deepika Padukone (funnily another couple whose KWK appearance raised a storm on the internet) introduced their newborn daughter as Devi Padukone Singh, and comment sections were quick to make fun of the couple for choosing to keep the mother’s surname for their kids.

It’s as if the worst thing that can happen to a man is for him to be emasculated for all to see. Meanwhile, a woman rising up to the occasion is called the man. Not that in our case this tag comes with appreciation and empowerment, because how dare a woman become a man?

It’s very easy to argue that this name-calling is just semantics. Words change meaning with context, sure, but sit in any linguistics class, and one of the first topics they introduce you to is the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis and linguistic relativity, or the never-ending debate of how language can influence how we perceive things around us. A good way to understand this is when you see how, say, the German and the Spanish describe a bridge.

Germans, who address a bridge as female, often use adjectives like beautiful, elegant and fragile when asked to describe it. The Spanish, on the other hand, see a bridge as male, and as a result, they see it as strong, sturdy and heavy. If you’re a Hindi speaker, try to use English loan words like car (or gaadi, if you will) and truck in a sentence. The general consensus is that a car is female and a truck is male. Now picture the two together, and think of the first words that come to mind when describing and comparing the two.

All this is to say that feminism and moral superiority are not some flashlight that you can turn on and use to highlight something that offends you, while conveniently ignoring the darkness on the other end of the torch’s head. Criticising Rashmika for being a misogynist in how she views other actors, or Vijay for how he looks down on his partner, all the while using bigoted language, is nothing short of hypocrisy and an upholding of the same kind of male chauvinism that consistently stops men from being better men.

After all, you cannot keep the gun laws intact and act surprised when gun violence rises in your town, can you?