Maa ke paas bhi desire hain: Why do we strip women of their sexuality when they become mothers?

Indian Express

11-05-2025

Mother's Day 2025: There is a lot that women lose when they become mothers — our hairlines, waistlines, a full night's sleep, and the ability to put ourselves first. But what I miss most is the permission to be wrong, mediocre, selfish, unhappy and imperfect in the way everyone else, fathers included, are allowed to be. The moment you become a mother; people start looking at you differently. You become a human unicorn; magical, special, and a beacon of all that is good and hopeful. Perhaps this forced reverence also impacts how women are presented in cinema and OTT content.
As I thought more about how mothers are portrayed on screen, I realised that women who are mothers, especially older women who are mothers, are never shown as individuals with sexual desire, or as sexually desirable. More alarmingly, they are seldom shown getting physically intimate with their partners on screen. Women characters who are vocal about feeling amorous are either laughed at in comedies or bad TV shows (remember the erotically charged dadi in Kapil Sharma's show), portrayed as scary cougars, unfaithful wives who are cheating on their husbands, or are divorced and looking to move on.
Kirti Kulhari's character Anjana in Four More Shots Please is one of the few examples of a mother getting intimate with multiple partners on screen. It helps that Anjana is in her early thirties, attractive, and single. But when Neena Gupta's character Priyamvada in Badhai Ho gets pregnant in her late forties or early fifties, their intimacy is merely hinted at with thunder, rain and physical proximity. Even in the short film Khujli, where Jackie Shroff and Neena Gupta's characters decide to add an element of kink to their sex life, the film ends with him clipping the handcuffs back on to her hands, leaving the rest for us to assume and imagine. Dimple Kapadia played an older woman who gets physically involved with a younger man in the film Leela. However, the scene where they make love is shot using the shadows of a man and a woman.
So, why don't the words mother and sexy or mothers and sex coexist more often in the movies and content we watch? There are perhaps several reasons for this. One maybe that female and/or male actors over a certain age are uncomfortable or reluctant to perform physically intimate scenes while playing parents. Second, we don't think of older female bodies or bodies that aren't skinny after childbirth as sexy or desirable. Thirdly, it is very difficult for us to imagine our mothers, and by extension, mothers in general, having or enjoying sex like young women. We put our parents, especially our mothers, on a pedestal where they are isolated from the vices and weaknesses of regular folk, and sexual desire is definitely on that list. Some may argue that not everything needs to be explicitly shown on screen, and this is fair. But to separate mothers from their sexuality or portray mothers, especially older women who are mothers, as comical or abnormal if they express sexual desire, is doing a huge disservice to them.
Another factor in the representation of a woman's sexuality in cinema and OTT content is that we largely see it from a male perspective. Given the limited number of women filmmakers even today, the decision about what kind of women and from which age group or stage of life can be considered sexy or interested in sex is still largely determined by men. Additionally, women seen from a male gaze are not perceived as beings with sexual agency. They are simply a means for the man to find sexual fulfilment or titillation. For decades, mothers wept over sewing machines and passed on a legacy of revenge or abandonment issues. Alternatively, they were class-conscious and narrow-minded, determined to control every aspect of their child's life. Then there were the sauteli ma's (step mothers), uniformly uncaring and self-centered, who furthered the evil stepmother stereotype from western fairytales. Long story short, a mother was only ever seen in the context of her children and how well she had done as a caregiver.
Younger filmmakers, influencers and digital creators have taken a more empathetic perspective on parenting and given us realistic and varied portrayals of mothers on-screen and social media platforms. However, if you do a quick search of films that had mothers as protagonists, the stories are of moms being multitasking superheroes, mom next door turned vigilantes, or mothers who reclaim their identity after years of sacrifice and servitude. Even in a seemingly progressive film like Paa, where Vidya Balan played a proud single mom, she was never shown expressing a need for physical intimacy, which would be quite normal for a young woman in her thirties. She was a great mom, but the film had to unite her with the father of her child after twelve years apart to make it acceptable to us.
There are a few exceptions that come to mind. Lust Stories 2, where Amruta Subhash's character Seema is seen having sex with her husband in her employer's home because the couple has kids and a small home with little privacy. Kalyug, directed by Shyam Benegal, showed Reema Lagoo and Kulbhushan Kharbanda's characters enjoy an active sex life even after becoming parents. Other examples are The Sky is Pink, where Priyanka Chopra and Farhan Akhtar's characters enjoy intimacy as parents of teenage kids, or the OTT series Married Woman, where Riddhi Dogra plays a married woman with kids who falls in love with a younger woman played by Monica Dogra.
Motherhood is perhaps the most life-altering decision for any woman. It's deeply fulfilling, extremely exhausting and not for the faint-hearted. Perhaps the physical and emotional sacrifices it demands have led to mothers being venerated in stories and cinema. For years, women have been labelled Devki, Yashoda, Durga, Lakshmi, or Kali to deify their every dimension or emotional expression. But strangely, fathers have no divine or mythological points of comparison. They are allowed to remain regular, fallible human beings who get congratulated for doing the bare minimum. Perhaps it's time we replace reverence with realism and acknowledge that women don't stop being regular people with physical, emotional and sexual needs once they have children. We just forget to look at them that way.