EurekAlert! Science News: Babies whose births were depicted in Bollywood films from the 1950s and 60s were more often than not boys; in today's films, boy and girl newborns are about evenly split. In the 50s and 60s, dowries were socially acceptable; today, not so much. And Bollywood's conception of beauty has remained consistent through the years: beautiful women have fair skin.
2 comments:
I definitely just clicked on this article because I saw Bollywood and was like "oh I know what that is, I grew up with that. Bollywood was one of the first media forms where I personally felt seen on the big screen and in entertainment especially because it took me til very recently to see any brown person in western entertainment that wasn't the butt of tons of jokes. When I was younger I had this mindset that I would not be accepted in Western entertainment and there is legit no point in going into it as a career field, whether I am backstage or onstage. To me, being in Bollywood was the only option and sometimes the brown community around me also assumes I want to go to india and do tech in Bollywood when they hear my career choice. I have definitely noticed the social trends that were outlined in the AI when it came to Bollywood and after a while choosing between western entertainment and eastern entertainment became which poison do I wanna drink. But both industries are improving tremendously with western entertainment becoming diverse and no longer using south asian characters as this awkward, unattractive, nerd stereotype and allowing them to have more diverse roles. I also think Bollywood is changing as the social climate in india changes as well, all though it's very hard in india to decide who pioneered the change first as the movie business dictates a lot of social norms, however the biggest thing that Bollywood still needs to change is the idea of fair= beautiful.
It is so great that studies are being conducted on things like this. I feel like in a lot of discourse I see surrounding biases or trends in popular pieces of media it's easy for people to shut down an argument by just cherry picking a few examples. I, personally, have never documented and categorized decades worth of movies to be able to identify long standing biases, so it's hard for me, or most people, to convince anyone. But thankfully studies like this are actually quantifying and recording these trends. Not only is the science behind this truly impressive, (2000 movies in a matter of days?!) but it is examining a really important topic that doesn't often get covered. So I applaud the computer science researchers at CMU for thinking this up and putting it into action. It is great to have concrete evidence of the existence of these trends so hopefully now we can all collectively acknowledge the past and move towards a more progressive future.
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