We’ve Lost the (Marriage) Plot
Plus: A predecessor to the Indian women's cricket team, and a new risqué aesthetic taking over the culture.
The End of the Marriage Plot
In Bollywood the fate of the marriage plot is preordained. When the marriage is unhappy, there is a virtuous wife, an ungenerous husband, and fiendish in-laws. When the marriage is happy, there is a virtuous wife, a reformed husband, and indulgent in-laws. The marriage plot may be Bollywood’s favourite storyline, but its imagination of marriage itself remains paltry. It is portrayed as either a snare to escape or a prize to attain and redefine. This overgeneralization of partnership cauterizes our storytelling and, in turn, our imagination of other possibilities.
Whether happy or unhappy, the marriage plot is faithful only to the family, never to the couple. In the unhappy marriage plot, marriage asphyxiates within a framework that assumes the individual will submit to the meddlesome collective of the family. In the happy one, it is reverence for the abstract, larger-than-life family outside you and your partner’s caprices that mends the union. In choosing to marry, these plots insist, you are already among the sheep. Any attempt to break free from the herd is in vain.
When the Bollywood marriage plot considers an alternative to itself, that possibility seems to take form only outside the scaffolding of marriage. In Laapataa Ladies, a newly wedded bride accidentally left behind cannot remember where her groom lives to return to her marital home. To make do, she works at a tea stall run by a grouchy woman, still in her bridal attire, living a life without a man to take care of her. Once her husband finds her, she emerges a wilful girl, courtesy of their fortuitous separation. The wife only self-actualises outside of marriage; within it, it is, again, rendered impossible.
In his writing on marriage, though, Ambedkar argued that marriage could serve as a form of liberation from endogamous caste‑class and religious codes. The narrative vacuum of such a possibility – when it does not end in tragedy, à la Sairat or Dhadak 2 – leaves us without a model for a relationship of equals, unbound by inherited baggage or intractable institutional problems.
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Cricketer Diana Edulji’s Walked So We Could Run
Diana Edulji, the first woman to be appointed to the BCCI selection panel, entered the game when women’s cricket was only beginning to find its footing — in India and in the world. But she made history by becoming the player with the third highest number of wickets taken in women’s Test cricket. Still, in 1986, as the captain of the Indian team, Edulji was refused entry to the Lord’s Pavilion in England — an incident that prompted her to criticize the MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club) as more befitting of the abbreviation MCP, for “male chauvinist pigs.”
Before Jemimah Rodrigues led India to a historic Women’s World Cup final victory against South Africa this week, she faced much of the same prejudices that her predecessors did — with memes depicting women in the kitchen. Decades apart, the two women stand testament to the spirit of sportsmanship in a hostile culture. But good sportspeople have always had a way of letting their game do the talking.
On ‘Porno Chic,’ or How Helmut Newton’s Ghost Haunts Us
Look at your own risk, for risqué is in full swing. The 2020s runway drips with eroticism: designers sheath every curve in slick vinyl, cinch corsets that bite and seduce, drape sheer lingerie over molten leather, and parade models like irresistible, forbidden fruit. At Paris Fashion Week Spring-Summer 2023, Laruicci sent down a model in a nipple clamp on a bare body, topped with a red leather and glossy vinyl corset, leather pants, and towering platform boots, merging seductive glamour with a provocative porn-chic edge. At Paris Fashion Week Spring-Summer 2025, Spanish designer Luis de Javier fused Y2K porn-chic audacity with Spanish flair, featuring pointed shoulders, torero-inspired jackets, and visible lingerie, with lace amplifying bold, elegant seduction.
Outside the rarefied world of fashion, porno chic has also gone mainstream in popular culture. Mia Khalifa has become a high-fashion “It girl,” fronting Marc Jacobs’ Heaven collection. Kendall Jenner was photographed clutching a Jacquemus purse while suspended mid-air in stockings. Julia Fox wears denim cutoffs, leather harnesses, and latex as everyday glam. It seems we can’t resist flirting with porn-chic iconography. Its power to provoke – read: ragebait – is the ultimate attention engine. Diesel’s 2023 “XXXMAS” campaign draped porn stars in a carnal holiday spectacle. Designer Rebecca Minkoff launched an OnlyFans to showcase her collections. Sabrina Carpenter pushes the same provocative edge as many pop divas before her.
It’s the obvious heir to Helmut Newton, the German-Australian photographer who, as his wife June joked, “loved all those things they called him – ‘Porno Chic,’‘King of Kink!’” Such was the reputation of an unsubtle artist. In White Women (1976), barely clothed models lounged amid pools, jewels, and champagne. The notorious “Hermès Saddle” (1976) showed a model kneeling on a bed with an Hermès saddle atop her, as if she were the animal, causing outrage when published. A cavalier Newton quipped, “You see so many images of women riding men.”
In Newton’s world, women could be fetishized objects and high-fashion props. Critics called the work “cold, voyeuristic,” and feminists dubbed Newton the “antichrist” of women’s liberation. For Newton, to think of voyeurism as exploitation was limiting. Far more fun was treating it as a playground, so his women “stride, tease, and reach for what they want.” For all its supposed empowerment, porn chic has always been suspect. You don’t have to wonder what Laura Mulvey, the feminist film theorist who coined the term ‘male gaze,’ would think of it.
In our hyper-sexual world, porno chic might feel passé. But there was a time it both thrilled and scandalized. At its centre was one man with a camera and a taste for provocation: Helmut Newton. The story of porno chic is incomplete without the story of his obsessions.