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Twinkle Khanna recently addressed the issue of "missus blaming" in a column for The Times of India, shedding light on how women, particularly wives, are often unfairly blamed for situations or problems that men encounter. She pointed to examples like Anushka Sharma being blamed when her husband, Virat Kohli, gets out during a cricket match. Similarly, Twinkle highlighted how baseless rumours about Kareena Kapoor Khan circulated after her husband Saif Ali Khan was attacked in their home.
In her piece, Twinkle emphasised the rising sense of vulnerability within households, especially after the stabbing incident involving Saif. "I double-check the window locks before going to bed," she shared, noting how such concerns have become a common reality for many. She then condemned the unfounded rumours about Kareena, stating, "While Saif was in hospital, ridiculous rumours swirled that his wife hadn’t been at home or had been too intoxicated to help him during the assault. The absence of any sort of evidence did nothing to stop these dumb theories. People just enjoyed shifting the blame onto the wife, an all-too-familiar pattern." Check out her post here.
This is why upsetting the wife is dangerous
— yajnadevam (@yajnadevam) January 23, 2025
You’re Right, Twinkle! These Wife-Blaming Jokes Make Me Burst A Blood Vessel Too
This phenomenon, as Khanna points out, is part of a broader cultural issue, particularly in a country like India, where WhatsApp, the world's largest market for the messaging platform, is filled with sexist jokes, good morning messages, and tweets that contribute to the cycle of manufactured misinformation. Of the long list of the many things that irk me, coming up for podium finish would definitely be the slew of forwarding jokes that belittle a ‘wife’. What irks me even more is that these jokes are often blithely forwarded by women themselves, completely tone-deaf to how misogynist and sexist these jokes actually are.
Do I cringe as I read these jokes? Yes. Do I call the senders of these jokes out, yes I do, and have been removed from a few Whatsapp groups for my ‘lack of sense of humour’. I’m not complaining. I get all bristly in porcupine manner, and call it out. And more so when it is a woman forwarding one of these. Perhaps I lack a sense of humour because I completely fail to see the humour in these. At the best, they’re reductive. At worse, they’re vicious. They reduce women to mistrustful, sexless, avaricious harridans. And also, we’re in 2018, and these marriage jokes often not very flattering to the wife, are based on the stereotype of a heterosexual marriage.
What do these jokes promote? The Utopian ideal that a man would have a much better life without a wife around to constantly nag him and spend ‘his’ money, in a hedonistic display of consumerism. The man is presumed to be the sole provider in these Whatsapp forwards, that many women earn an independent income these days is conveniently neglected
The hapless husband seems compelled to stay on in a marriage much against his will, and seems to seek any opportunity to escape from his terrifying wife. I look around me and wonder, are these husbands who populate the territory of these Whatsapp forwards for real? I don’t see any of them around me. The husband of the Whatsapp forward is very different from the husband of everyday life. Most urban families are dual-income. Wives, even if they’re not working in standard 9-to-5jobs are earning additional incomes to contribute to the household income through entrepreneurship, through flexi work, and more. So why is this financially and emotionally ‘victimised’ husband trope so popular in the Whatsapp world?
In contrast, popular culture has emancipated women quite ruling the roost, whether in the movies, in stand-up or in fiction. In our advertising too, the wife is slowly emerging from being the sole in charge of all domestic arrangements and morphing into a professional woman with an independent income all her own to spend as she chooses. The Whatsapp joke wife though continues to be stuck in a time warp as far as professional achievements and financial independence are concerned.
Pointer of social mindset
Whatsapp jokes are telling of a social mindset, of what is acceptable enough for a people to find humour in it, and not be offended. A joke is always more than a joke, they are tacit acknowledgements of a shared perception, agreed to by a limited cohort, in this case a Whatsapp cohort. Jokes acknowledge inherent biases and expectations, laughter is evoked by underlining these, and more often than not the jokes on wives and marriage shared on Whatsapp are deeply sexist and misogynist. What is worse is that we propagate them without a second thought, perpetuating this casual sexism, normalising it. Jokes on women and wives will continue to be shared and laughed at, as long as women themselves see nothing wrong with it, and don’t call it out.
Repeated silences when such jokes are forwarded legitimises the sexism they propagate. And sadly, by our silence as women, or our complicity in sharing these, we endorse and legitimise sexism against our own gender.
Personal views expressed by the author are their own.