Rants and Roasts – Does consent come with a gender bias? | Tamil Movie News

Let’s look at what happened on October 9 at a theatre in Chennai. It was the 50th-day celebration of Modha Rathri, and actor Rishikanth walked into an absolute madhouse. The crowd swarmed him, with female fans seemingly throwing personal boundaries out the window. They grabbed his hands, refused to let go, and some even hugged him without his consent. And the public reaction? A few tweets here and there, but nothing close to the outrage such a scene would normally provoke if it were a female celebrity.Now, compare this with December 2025, when actress Nidhhi Agerwal was mobbed by male fans at a mall in Hyderabad, where she had appeared to promote her film. The crowd surged around her as she tried to make her way to her car, and the incident raised serious questions about security and crowd management. The Cyberabad Police registered a suo motu case against the mall management and event organisers, citing the lack of prior permission for the event. Social media, rightly, erupted with criticism.Of course, the two incidents took place in different circumstances, and the response to each cannot be measured by outrage alone. But they raise an uncomfortable question: why does consent seem to matter less when the person being mobbed is a man?When a woman is mobbed, it’s rightly viewed through the lens of threat, vulnerability and safety. Nidhhi herself later described the incident as unfortunate and said she wanted to speak about it at the right time. But when a man like Rishikanth is subjected to unwanted touching, why is it simply dismissed as harmless enthusiasm or extreme star worship? Sure, Rishikanth hasn’t publicly said he felt uncomfortable. But since when does someone’s silence mean a boundary hasn’t been crossed? Why should a man have to explicitly say, “I was violated!” for people to recognise that grabbing and hugging a stranger without permission is fundamentally wrong? It infuriates me that we still see men as these physically dominant, invulnerable blocks who should feel “flattered” when women put their hands on them. Let’s call a spade a spade: physical boundary violations are not a compliment, and they aren’t simply passionate fan behaviour. They are an infringement on bodily autonomy, plain and simple.And what about the female fans who crossed those boundaries? We live in an era when women rightly demand respect, personal space and consent from men. So why should those principles suddenly become optional when a male celebrity walks by? You cannot demand bodily autonomy for yourself and then disregard someone else’s. The entitlement is glaring, and the double standard deserves to be called out.

At the end of the day, if we are going to preach about consent, it needs to be a universal rule, not a selective one. Crowd safety and basic human dignity shouldn’t depend on whether the person in the middle of the mob is a man or a woman.– This rant comes from Praveen Kumar S, who is exhausted by blatant hypocrisy in matters involving men and women