Equality in entertainment has long been a sensitive issue. Women are often underpaid as compared to their male counterparts or are written off as a sexy item numbers aimed at drawing in the masses. It’s no wonder that things are coming to a boil. With the #TimesUp movement holding offenders accountable in Hollywood, women all over the world are gaining courage to speak out against figures of power and authority. Most male celebrities have even expressed solidarity, disassociating themselves with the oppression of women that has gone on long enough.
But in all this talk of change have we lost sight of what this fight is for? AIB has long been known for pushing and propagating feminist beliefs. Writing female centric sketches that naturally star strong female leads. Videos that were funny and necessary because they made people listen.
But in a recent critique, Aayushi and Sumedh two video creators have brought to our attention that while AIB, in its fight for feminism, has shone a light on the plight of women. It hasn’t once painted a woman as her male counterpart’s equal. They weren’t attacking AIB, simply urging them to lead the way by casting female roles equal to those of males.
Watch the full video here.
In response AIB released a statement on their Facebook page:
“So we just saw this superb, very well-argued video by Aayushi and Sumedh. If you haven’t seen it, here’s the link. If you’re not going to watch it, the TL;DR is we don’t cast enough women in our sketches, and if and when we do, they’re either in a decisively “feminine” context (e.g. mother,sister), or put in situations that seldom pass the Bechdel test. We want to say that we hear you, we really do.We will actively work to fix this across our content, not just for the sake of social currency or likes, but because representation matters. We’d like to think we try hard to be inclusive, but we recognise that we fall short in some ways, and also that our own privilege stops us from seeing it. So thank you Aayushi and Sumedh for calling us out about this and forcing us to confront it. Creating more inclusive content is a constant process of evolution, and we’ll work much harder to tell stories that are representative of more”.
We’re sure AIB will be the ones to pioneer a more gender equal space as far as Indian entertainment on the internet is concerned. We can’t wait to see with what they come out with next.
