A social media user named Kabir Menon has accused Hindi movies of making Indian men weak. He refers to the average Bollywood movie where the male lead hypes up and inflates the ego of the female protagonist as if she is the most beautiful in the world.
"He puts in all the effort (even if the actress doesn’t), and keeps running after her like a dog (even if she gives him just breadcrumbs). The movies show the actor obeying every stupid thing she says. He will enable every woke feminist narrative like drinking, smoking, clubbing, etc. The actor begs her as if getting her is the only highlight of his life. It’s as if he has no other thing to do in life. He is so low on self-respect that he finds even violence or torture done by her cute," Menon writes. The critique is a direct reference to Hai Jawani To Ishq Hona Hai, the recent Bollywood movie co-starring Varun Dhawan, Mrunal Thakur, and Pooja Hegde.
This line of argument is not limited to India. In the West, Hollywood movies have faced similar criticism. "Cultural critics, men’s self-improvement subcultures, and even mainstream film theorists have long argued that Western romantic comedies and dramas have conditioned men to adopt a weak, self-sacrificing, and overly submissive posture in dating," a Hollywood critic once argued.
