This Tuesday, I woke up early and before heading to work, treated myself to some “man candy”. 

As I gaped at the sculpted V peeking out of Alexander Skarsgard’s pelvis deep in the jungles of Congo, it struck me that as sexually charged as the Tarzan-Jane tale is, The Legend of Tarzan isn’t much interested in the male gaze. This despite having hottie Margot Robbie as Jane. But it’s not really surprising, seeing how, as The New York Times said in its review of The Legend of Tarzan, “…its most special and spectacular effect is Tarzan, one of those characters who have always complicated the familiar argument that visual pleasure in Hollywood cinema is hinged on women being objects of male desire. Johnny Weissmuller, the most famous screen Tarzan (of the 1930s), was an exemplary fetishised object of desire.” 

True that. One of the big joys of watching a Tarzan movie is being able to feast your eyes on a beefcake, unencumbered by modern clothing. And here the wait till John Clayton III peeled off his shirt to fight his ape brother Akut was agonisingly long. For me, The Legend of Tarzan became a different movie once the shirt was dropped. 

THROWBACK TIME
It took me back to the first time I became aware that the camera was moving for my benefit. I was ‘cutting’ school and drinking in the sheer beauty of a Bollywood newcomer. The object of my teenaged desire was wearing a yellow singlet and strumming a guitar. His fluid dance moves, his rippling muscles, those long legs and that eye-wateringly handsome face, framed by unruly dark curls — all were on display, just for my viewing pleasure. Kaho Naa… Pyaar Hai may have had Ameesha Patel in short skirts and tank tops but none had any illusion about the central purpose of the movie — to show off every asset of star son Hrithik Roshan. 

Funnily, in both films the eye behind the camera was a man’s. While for Hrithik it was his own dad (erm, wonder how Rakesh Roshan wrote his scenes), Tarzan has been helmed by David Yates, most famous for directing the last four Harry Potter movies, which though masterpieces, have the sex quotient of cotton granny pants. 

OGLING AND GOOGLING
It is heart-warming (*wink*) to see notoriously sexist moviedoms like Hollywood and Bollywood thinking about the female gaze. And it is an emotional journey for us, who write for a lifestyle paper that started its life with a keen eye on the male eye, to now be allowed to let loose the t2 girl gang’s collective gaze on all the men we seem to be ogling and googling all day! No week goes by without us drooling over Colin Firth showing a hint of nipple as he emerges from a pond in a white 
see-through shirt in Pride & Prejudice. Or Tom Hiddleston’s bum, the shirtless Ronaldo screen saver on one of our desktops, Ranveer Singh’s abs or Abir Chatterjee’s dimples. 

As I write this, Tollywood girl Parno Mittra is standing up against body trolls after her picture on Instagram attracted filthy comments from men on Monday night. One wonders, do women fantasising about male celebrities reduce them to pieces of meat too?

MAD MEN AND WOMEN
Kit Harington, who plays Jon Snow on the super-popular TV show Game of Thrones, spoke out last year about this objectification by his female fandom. “To always be put on a pedestal as a hunk is slightly demeaning… It really is, and it’s in the same way as it is for women. When an actor is seen only for her physical beauty, it can be quite offensive,” the actor said, adding that the focus on his looks takes away from his acting talent. What talent? some might ask, but that is a different debate for a different time. 

Jon Hamm, who seems to be more famous for his junk than his TV show, Mad Men, too is pissed off with all the penile talk.
His penis even has a name given by fan sites — Hammaconda. There are Facebook pages and Tumblr accounts dedicated to it. But Hamm, who started out by describing the brouhaha over his nether regions as “tongue-in-cheek”, soon grew tired of the “Jon Hamm’s penis walks into a room five minutes before him” jokes.

“I’m wearing pants, for f**k’s sake. Lay off…. when people feel the freedom to create Tumblr accounts about my c**k, I feel like that wasn’t part of the deal.…,” he told Rolling Stone magazine in 2013.

The boys being put off at being reduced to just a body is understandable. And seriously, Facebook pages on a penis (or Twitter handles on Angelina Jolie’s exposed leg) are quite offensive. But does the female gaze cause the kind of damaging hurt the male gaze is capable of?

HER LUST VS HIS LUST
Even at the risk of being dubbed a feminazi, I am going to stick out my neck and say, No. The female gaze may be just as superficial as the male gaze but centuries of patriarchal conditioning means that women’s lust or women’s language lacks the bite when it comes to sex. However much a woman may be sexually objectifying a man, rare is the instance when she will say (or write online) something that will reek of the kind of male entitlement that women face on a daily basis. 

We may have a fight with all things patriarchal, but do we want to change how women express their lust? Hell, no! If we are lusting after a man, we want him to feel good about it, not shrink away from our gaze. 


Which Holly/Bolly film do you feel is made for the female  gaze? Tell t2@abp.in