Men of Bollywood Talk About Facing Casting Couch In the Industry

There's a lot of good and bad in the times we live in. 

Bad because women still have to come forward and say #MeToo, and in a weird way good (or better) because women finally have the courage, acceptance and backing to say the words...'#MeToo.' 

Just this week Tanushree Dutta came forward with a story that involved Nana Patekar sexually harassing her on a film set and another one by Padma Lakshmi who spoke about being raped as a minor. 

In an interview to Zoom, Tanushree said, “Everyone knows about Nana Patekar that he has always been disrespectful towards women. People in the industry know about his background... that he has beaten actresses, he has molested them, his behaviour with women has always been crude but no publication has printed anything about it.”

“The entire industry saw what happened but there was not one word of condemnation from anybody. Every single person in this country remembers my incident and this was something on national TV for three days but even today there’s a stoic silence on that. So, my question is, ‘Who is going to believe these hypocrites?’ These are the people who stand up and raise their voice against women empowerment,” she added.

In the New York Times op-ed, Padma Lakshmi said she had been dating a 23-year-old man when she was 16 for a few months until he raped her on New Year’s Eve. The two had gone to a couple of parties before returning to the man’s apartment. She added that she was not intoxicated at the time and was wearing a long-sleeved black maxi dress that only showed her shoulders.

Lakshmi, who was a virgin at the time, eventually fell asleep, but woke up to what she described as “a very sharp stabbing pain like a knife blade between her legs.”

“He was on top of me. I asked, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘It will only hurt for a while.’ ‘Please don’t do this,’ I screamed,” the 48-year-old mother-of-one wrote. “The pain was excruciating, and as he continued, my tears felt like fear.”

“Afterward, he said, ‘I thought it would hurt less if you were asleep.’ Then he drove me home,” she recalled.

She added that at the time she began feeling like it was her fault the rape occurred. Which kept her from reporting it to the police.

“We had no language in the 1980s for date rape. I imagined that adults would say: ‘What the hell were you doing in his apartment? Why were you dating someone so much older?’” she wrote.

I don’t think I classified it as rape — or even sex — in my head. I’d always thought that when I lost my virginity, it would be a big deal — or at least a conscious decision. The loss of control was disorienting. In my mind, when I one day had intercourse, it would be to express love, to share pleasure or to have a baby. This was clearly none of those things.

Later, when I had other boyfriends my senior year of high school and in my first year of college, I lied to them — I said I was still a virgin. Emotionally, I still was.

When I think about it now, I realise that by the time of this rape, I had already absorbed certain lessons. When I was 7 years old, my stepfather’s relative touched me between my legs and put my hand on his erect penis. Shortly after I told my mother and stepfather, they sent me to India for a year to live with my grandparents. The lesson was: If you speak up, you will be cast out.

These experiences have affected me and my ability to trust. It took me decades to talk about this with intimate partners and a therapist.

Some say a man shouldn’t pay a price for an act he committed as a teenager. But the woman pays the price for the rest of her life, and so do the people who love her.

I think if I had at the time named what happened to me as rape — and told others — I might have suffered less. Looking back, I now think I let my rapist off the hook and I let my 16-year-old self down.

 

As strong as this movement is, we're all sure that there are several million stories that haven't been heard yet...the monsters behind those stories haven't been punished yet, and to top it all off, fresh instances from current times keep surfacing more than a hundred times a day.

But, make no mistake...men aren't fully immune to this either, here we put together a list of men of Bollywood who have spoken about facing casting couch in the industry:

Ranveer Singh:

Ayushmann Khurana:

 

 

 

 

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Shikaayat hai mujhe aaine se ki naql karta hai woh meri. Or may be it’s the other way round, kahin ek din aaina palat ke boley- stop copying me bro! But i feel I’m better than my mirror image. That guy on the other side is an illusion. Tabhi peeth kar ke khada hoon. He doesn’t deserve my attention. ——————————- (Styled by @ishabhansali)

A post shared by Ayushmann Khurrana (@ayushmannk) on Sep 16, 2018 at 11:36pm PDT

Talking about his struggle in Bollywood and a weird film audition, Ayushmann said, There was this gay casting director, who asked me, 'I want to see your c*ck. Can I just feel you?' I started laughing. I was like, 'Are you serious?' I said no, it's not happening like that. Give me lines, I can give you the audition, this is weird.'

Sidharth Malhotra:

Hope these celeb stories help anyone who's trying to come out with a story, stand up for themselves and to just move on with their lives.