THE STEREOTYPES: homemaker, femme fatale, bold and beautiful, supermom, sex bomb. The creators: television, cinema, advertisements, magazines. All depict women who can be beautiful only if they are white-skinned, reed-thin and look like Barbie dolls. Take mainstream Indian cinema. What is common across most of it is the depiction of women, who can never look disheveled, untidy or even a wee bit like their real life counterparts. When there is the portrayal of a woman, who cannot pass off as stereotypically beautiful by media standards, her transformation into the ‘normative beautiful’ becomes necessary.
