Entertainment Industrys War On Statistical Reality

There is a particular kind of cultural conditioning that operates invisibly — so embedded in entertainment habits that we mistake it for taste. Viewers arrive at films primed by years of storytelling, by algorithms, and by the ambient noise of social media to receive male suffering as tragic, male grievance as legitimate, and male entitlement as worthy of scrutiny. The sympathy is allocated before the first scene has even begun. At a standup show, comedian Pranit More encountered a crowd member who casually revealed he had bought a woman biryani for Rs 370 and considered this a transaction that entitled him to her body. He said it openly, in a room full of people. What’s striking was his ease. A person who has never been told, by anything he has watched or laughed at, that this outlook requires examination. That ease has a supply chain. Dacoit, a Tamil production featuring Anurag Kashyap as a cop, centres around vengeance against a woman who betrayed her partner. The emotional architecture asks spectators to understand his anger, follow his trajectory, and invest in his rage. Bandar, Kashyap’s Bollywood follow-up goes further, constructing a world where false allegations against men function less as an anomaly and more as atmosphere. Every thread points to the same conclusion: men are a persecuted class, women wield courts as weapons, and institutions have abandoned the former. The NCRB logged 4,41,534 crimes against women in 2024. Spousal and family cruelty alone accounted for over 1,20,000 cases, the single largest category of gender-based harm that year. These dynamics are sustained by social, institutional, and patriarchal structures that have historically rendered them ordinary. Incidents where women commit crimes against men, however high-profile, however frequently cited, are neither systemic nor institutionalised in this way. Yet such examples get amplified, weaponised, and now cinematically immortalised. The operative question is proportion, what gets funded, what gets widely distributed, and whose reality gets rendered as representative of larger truth. When a society consistently dramatises statistical exceptions while the pervasive danger women face remains peripheral, it is making a deliberate decision. What gets greenlit, what digital tools reward, and what legal mechanisms get deployed reflect whose interiority is considered universally legible, whose pain is deemed worthy of the screen, and whose precariousness is treated as a niche concern rather than a national crisis. A woman is killed or driven to death by dowry pressure every 68 minutes in India. Women are murdered for rejecting men. Women are slain for leaving. These are not exceptional stories. These are the norm. But the falsely accused figure in a rigged system is what’s getting the big screen, the airwaves, and now the dock. That inversion is worth examining carefully, without looking away. In 2026, the cultural ground is shifting beneath safety gains that were never secure to begin with. Cinema positions male resentment as complexity. Standup stages generate laughs from transactional entitlement. Podcasts reframe women’s legal recourse as weaponised victimhood. Each medium reinforces the next, and the cumulative weight arrives as a revised social contract: women’s security is contingent on not making men uncomfortable. Sharper cultural literacy is the first line of defence: reading the subtext before absorbing the text, asking whose anger is being rendered sympathetic, whose experience is conspicuously absent from the frame, and what worldview is being normalised under the cover of entertainment. The screen has always reflected power. Right now, it is rehearsing it, and women are the audience being asked to applaud. Jha is an educator and freelance writer Editor (Planning & Projects) Shalini Langer curates the fortnightly ‘She Said’ column