Sex Appeal and Cultural Liberty: A Feminist Inquiry into MTV India

Frontiers, 2004 by Cullity, Jocelyn, Younger, Prakash

In the continuous stream of similarly formatted videos and ads, sexual images make a product stand out from the clutter. Sex sells the videos, which in turn are there to sell the viewer CDs and tapes.20 Most of the video storylines are male sexual dream worlds or fantasies about being desired and accepted by women, including older men's fantasies about younger women. Parties with lots of women, at times resembling orgies, are common. The not-so-implicit message is that women's bodies are fair game.21 Studies show that half of the women portrayed, as opposed to one tenth of the men, wear provocative clothing.22 In U.S. videos, women get in and out of clothes a lot, frequently strutting across the screen in undergarments. Camera angles reduce women to shapes and outlines, or to objects. Some devices for achieving this effect are panning over the body, looking down onto a woman's breasts, and fragmenting body parts, swooping over a leg, or, often with female artists, shooting between her legs.23 Sexual violence is made to appear normal: women are sometimes caged; and female flight, a woman running away from a man, always ends by turning into actual desire for the male pursuer. No really means yes. The way women are touched and handled is manipulative but made to look natural. Guns enhance the masculinity of their users.

All these dangerous qualities are not necessarily explicit but are subtle enough to fit in "normally."24 The question is what effect do all these images have on the real world, on how men and women think about each other and sex?25 Linking these images to crimes such as date rape, studies have concluded that MTV s portrayal of heterosexual sexual interaction constitutes a serious danger for young women and girls.26 On the basis of the images themselves, this danger is now being inadvertently welcomed into Indian middle-class culture.

WESTERN PATRIARCHY GOES LOCAL? A FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF IMAGES FROM MTV INDIA

For the purposes of this study, we selected and analyzed a sample of MTV India programming using, as a foundation, a list of dangerous types of images of women in the media produced by the organization Media Watch. A textual analysis of women's images, from the stream of Hindi film clips to the VJs and other on-air personnel, showed the following major themes or commonalities in programming content on MTV India.

The Female Body Focus

The female as a body is predominant in all facets of MTV India programming, often through an intense focus on clothes. In Hindi film clips, women frequently switch between, in particular, halter tops and short skirts and the salwar kamiz or sari. Although women do appear in clothes that cover more of the body than in Western videos, the emphasis in all videos is definitely on appearances in bikinis, or in minis and plastic bras. In both Indian and Western videos on MTV India, the male artist's "mate" frequently appears throughout his song in a man's shirt and nothing else. In almost all of the videos analyzed, men were fully dressed, wearing trousers, even if portrayed in a hot climate surrounded by women in bikinis. In one Hindi film clip, the female artist is in a dress so short that the viewer is allowed to glimpse her underwear throughout the song. On a promo for the MTV show Style Check, a woman holds a square of cardboard in front of her body with a bra and underwear painted on it. "You are what you wear," she says, while changing into a gold dress that stops at the top of her thighs. In the very popular video "Habibi," three women in three separate rooms fixate on what they themselves are wearing, eventually emerging to find they have all chosen the same outfit. This focus on attire makes for a very common storyline in videos featuring Indian female artists.