You Can’t Sell Objectification on Instagram and Blame Cinema Later
There is no denying that directors and producers who keep recycling the same outdated templates for female characters deserve criticism. women in mainstream cinema have often been reduced to glamour props, eye candy, or plot devices rather than being written as layered, believable individuals. That conversation is important, and the industry absolutely needs to evolve.
But there is another side of this debate that rarely gets discussed honestly.
What becomes difficult to understand is why many actors, influencers, and public personalities willingly participate in highly sexualized self-branding on social media, profit from it, build audiences around it, and then later position themselves as victims of the very culture they helped normalize. If you scroll through the feeds of personalities such as Raiza Wilson, Abhirami, Yashika, Subhashree Sahu, and countless others, much of the content is clearly designed to attract attention through appearance, desirability, and engagement-driven marketing.
To be clear, they have every right to do that. It is their platform, their content, and their choice.
But if personal agency and consent are the central arguments used to defend that content online, then the same discussion cannot suddenly become one-sided when similar audience expectations carry over into films. At that point, blaming only directors, producers, or the system starts to feel selective.
The reality is that both sides play a role. The industry monetizes what sells. Influencers and actors monetize what attracts attention.
Audiences consume both. Removing accountability from one side while placing all the blame on the other creates an incomplete picture.
If objectification is genuinely the issue, then the conversation must be consistent across social media, cinema, advertising, and celebrity culture. Otherwise, it begins to look less like a fight against objectification and more like a fight against objectification only when it becomes inconvenient.
That is where many people see the contradiction. Either everyone involved shares responsibility, or nobody gets to claim complete innocence. Anything else feels like hypocrisy dressed up as activism.