Nobody minds SRK's abs, but outrage over Janhvi's scenes is justified. Here's why

Let's start with a question. When was the last time you watched a Hindi film where a woman's body was treated as entirely her own — not a spectacle, not a symbol, not something the camera lingered on for the benefit of someone else's enjoyment?

Take your time. It's a longer list than you'd think, but not as long as it should be.

Bollywood has had a complicated, occasionally shameless relationship with the female body since its earliest days.

Raj Kapoor built an entire aesthetic around it - the rain-soaked white saree became almost his signature and nobody asked too many questions because the films were beautiful, and the music was gorgeous and that's just how things were done.

Zeenat Aman in Satyam Shivam Sundaram and Mandakini under the waterfall in Ram Teri Ganga Maili are iconic images in Indian cinema, but the discussion about what they actually represented was largely ignored.

Fast forward to 2026, and people are finally talking about it. Peddi drew criticism for its portrayal of Janhvi Kapoor's Achiyyamma, with many arguing that the film focussed more on sexualising her than developing her character. The hyper-sexualisation had very little to do with the story. For many viewers, it felt like another example of the male gaze that has existed in Indian cinema for decades. The backlash was understandable and arguably overdue.

And the men?

Here's where it gets interesting. Men in Hindi films have not been entirely spared this treatment, but the way it lands is so different that it barely registers as the same conversation.

Shah Rukh Khan's shirtless sequences in Om Shanti Om were designed as much for the female audience as anything else, and they worked. There was something almost self-aware about it. SRK, having spent years being the romantic hero women swooned over, finally giving them something more literal to swoon over. The film leaned into it, the audience leaned into it, and everyone went home happy.

John Abraham in Dostana was essentially a walking fantasy for a large part of the audience, and the film knew it. His entry scene, coming out of the water in yellow swim trunks, dripping, is still remembered nearly two decades later. The film used his physique on purpose and audiences enjoyed it because it was so openly done.

More recently, Vicky Kaushal in Tauba Tauba from Bad Newz gave audiences exactly what they came for, and social media had a good time raving about it. The song became a viral hit and people watched it on loop, dissected it, celebrated it. Vicky, to his credit, committed completely and the results were, by most accounts, very well received. Girls went swooning over the actor.

A shirtless Salman Khan and his Oh oh Jaane Jaana moves are legendary. Nobody was particularly outraged by any of this. Nobody wrote serious opinion pieces about the male body being exploited or the damage it might do to how society perceives men. The general response was somewhere between appreciation and amusement — good for them, they clearly put the work in, now let's talk about something else.

Because the difference isn't just in how audiences react. It's in how the films themselves treat these moments. For men, it is a moment often played for a laugh or a cheer. The film acknowledges it and moves on. The male actor remains the subject of his own story. For women, the camera rarely grants that same courtesy.

The comedy defence

When men are sexualised in Hindi films, it almost always comes with a safety net - comedy. The moment is played for laughs, or it exists within a song sequence that gives everyone permission to enjoy it without taking it seriously. It is an isolated incident within the larger film, a wink at the audience, a moment of deliberate fan service that the film then steps away from.

For women, it is rarely limited to a single moment or a song. It is woven into the entire character — how she is shown on screen, how the camera looks at her, how others treat her and how her body is used to signal desire, danger or morality. It is not just one scene; it is a recurring pattern.

That's the difference. And it is not a small one.

The conversation around the female gaze in Hindi cinema is still relatively new. More films are beginning to recognise that women in the audience also want to see men portrayed as desirable, without it being treated as a joke or something unusual.

Why it matters

None of this is to suggest that sexualising men in films is a good thing, or that the solution to one kind of objectification is more objectification in a different direction. The point is simpler than that.

When the way women's bodies are portrayed in films becomes so normalised that it takes a film like Peddi to start a debate, it shows how deeply rooted the problem is. Men being sexualised is often seen as harmless fun, while women being sexualised is far more common and widespread. That difference reveals whose comfort Indian cinema has traditionally prioritised and whose it has not.

Indian cinema is changing. Not fast enough, not consistently enough, but changing. The backlash against Peddi is part of that change. So is the growing demand from female audiences for films that actually see them — not as the people being looked at, but as the people doing the looking.

That's not an unreasonable expectation. It's actually quite simple.