Why Pop Culture Still Romanticises Women As Feminist Fixers

I recently watched the movie ‘Aap Jaisa Koi’ on Netflix- a dreamy rom-com with lavish sets, beautifully presented actors, and a love story wrapped in soft focus. It had all the markers of a feel-good Bollywood film- luxury aesthetics, a conflicted modern progressive woman, and a man-child in desperate need of emotional growth. Nothing new, and yet it left me unsettled.

Because here is the thing, like so many love stories before it, this one also quietly assumes that the emotional labour of love belongs to the woman. That she has to be the one who must teach him how to love, push him to grow, forgive his regressions, and anchor the relationship while he slowly learns the basics. She has not only worked her way out of patriarchal shambles but is also actively working to dismantle it.

The Tiring Script of Feminist Fixers

The film, like many before it (Rocky aur Rani ki Prem Kahani, Mrs.) revolves around a modern liberal woman falling for a man raised with deep patriarchal values. She is smart, emotionally articulate, and brave enough to know her desires and want more from life and love. But she still ends up doing the heavy lifting. She explains, forgives, and fixes. And the man inevitably learns, grows, and sometimes even thanks her.

The narrative arc of the woman as the emotional mentor and the man as the project is not new. But what’s troubling is how deeply it continues to resonate both in cinema and real life.

As a cis-het woman in her twenties, I have seen this play out not just on screen but in my own life. I have been in relationships where my politics, feminism, and emotional clarity were always at odds with the emotional immaturity of the men I dated. These men were not bad people, but they came pre-loaded with patriarchy, absorbed through family, schooling, pop culture, and peer groups.

And the unspoken expectation? That I would do the work. That I would hold space, explain, be patient, and essentially rehabilitate them into better partners. This is not a rare experience; it is a rite of passage for women who date cishet men. And pop culture reflects this back to us as something romantic even aspirational.

This labour is now being reframed into online culture too particularly in India’s digital spaces. The rise of the ‘trad wife’ aesthetic across Instagram and YouTube; young women documenting their family routines of cooking for their husbands, caring for in-laws, dressing in hyper-feminine or culturally traditional ways, and calling it self-love or soft living.

The idea is not that women should do emotional and domestic labour, it also that doing it well is part of their desirability. It is a curated performance of care that still quietly centers the emotional needs of men. These are not just lifestyle choices they reflect and reinforce the same structures that made the idea of ‘teaching men how to love’ seem like a beautiful part of being a woman.

And the harder question that I am still grappling with: when I choose not to do that work, to not explain, teach or carry someone’s inherited patriarchy on my back- does that make me any less feminist? Does walking away instead of ‘fixing’ get read as a lack of care? A lack of solidarity? Or just selfishness?

Maybe the harder question is one we don’t have easy answers to yet: when a woman chooses not to teach, when she walks away instead of staying to explain, to nurture, to guide is that abandonment, or is it self-preservation? Does choosing rest over repair contradict feminist solidarity, or is it a form of it? I’m still sitting with these questions. Maybe love isn’t meant to be a classroom. Maybe refusing to be someone’s lesson is also a kind of care. Just one that starts with yourself. 

Views expressed by the author are their own.