For those who missed the latest episode in our national circus of misogyny dressed up as banter, a clip from comedian Pranit More’s stand-up show recently went viral. During a crowd-work segment, an audience member, Himanshu Jangra, began talking about a date. He had taken a woman out, paid Rs 370 for her biryani, and when she later wanted to go home, suggested that this was somehow unacceptable because he had spent money on her. He used the word vasooli — recovery, extraction, getting back what is owed — and here, it was being used for sex.
The comment was obscene. But the more uncomfortable thing was the ease with which it landed. The audience laughed, the host egged him on, and a line about sexual entitlement became comedy. Before the outrage, before the apology, before Jangra’s eventual firing by his employer, the room rewarded him.
It is tempting to treat this as a story about one vulgar man. It is more useful to see it as a story about masculinity: what men learn from other men, what we laugh at in WhatsApp groups where misogyny passes as humour, what we let pass unchallenged, and what women are left to explain afterwards.
This is where the podcast bros bring in the ‘men in crisis’ narrative. Male loneliness is real, and I am not dismissing it. Gallup’s 2025 analysis found that one in four American men aged 15 to 34 reported feeling lonely a lot the previous day. In India, the data is thin, and research on social isolation remains focused largely on the elderly. Perhaps that absence is revealing too. In a culture where men are still expected to provide and endure, loneliness may not always be named as loneliness. It may appear instead as anger, withdrawal, overwork, resentment, or silence.
But the diagnosis being sold to men is wrong. Increasingly, the loudest voices tell them that women have become too free, men too soft, feminism too powerful, and that the solution lies in restoring an older order where men provide, and women adjust. It surfaces at family events and in WhatsApp forwards, in jokes about women who earn too much or refuse to ‘adjust’, and in the idea that every failed relationship is another data point in evidence of civilisational decline.
It is patriarchy with a podcast mic.
Helen Lewis, writing recently in The Atlantic, calls this broader ideological project ‘masculinism’: not just influencers like Andrew Tate selling resentment, but a worldview that treats feminism as the source of social decline. In India too, this nostalgia has its own vocabulary: declining “family values”, rising divorce rates, women becoming too independent, and men too weak. Some of these anxieties attach themselves to real changes. Families are changing, and modern dating is confusing. But the manosphere takes a real anxiety and attaches a false cause.
Women did not create male loneliness by becoming freer, and they are not responsible for curing it by becoming smaller.
Much of this talk of traditional masculinity is also oddly thin. Which tradition are we talking about? The village elder? The king? The monk? The ascetic? The poet? The man who renounces the world or the man who rules over it? They are not the same person. And yet, in the online imagination, they get flattened into one figure: dominant, heterosexual, physically strong, emotionally contained, sexually successful, obeyed by women, admired by men, and always certain of his place.
Sociologist R W Connell coined the term ‘hegemonic masculinity’ to describe the culturally dominant ideal of manhood against which other men are measured.
Most men are not exceptionally wealthy, powerful, stoic, dominant or sexually successful. Yet the manosphere sells an exaggerated version of this ideal while pretending it is natural and universal. What makes this stranger still is that our own religious and mythological traditions, so often invoked by the defenders of tradition, rarely imagine masculinity so narrowly.
Shiva is terrifying as Bhairava, but also Nataraja, the cosmic dancer. He is the destroyer, but also the ascetic and husband, a yogi and a householder. In Ardhanarishvara, the form where Shiva and Parvati share a single body, masculinity is not made impure by the presence of the feminine. It is made whole instead.
Even the Mahabharata begins its most famous philosophical moment with a man falling apart. Arjuna stands on the battlefield and cannot go through with the war. His body trembles, his mouth dries, his bow slips from his hand. He is not weak because he hesitates. If anything, there would be no Gita without a man publicly acknowledging an emotional breakdown over a moral dilemma.
The old epics were often more complicated than the new podcasts. But the men who talk most loudly about tradition often seem to know the least about it. They want the father, the warrior, the patriarch, and the king. They do not know what to do with the dancer, the mourner, the friend, or the devotee. They do not know how to hold space for the man who listens, the man who loves, or the man who doubts.
When the biryani clip went viral, women did most of the explaining. They explained the entitlement beneath the joke. They said, again and again, that paying for dinner does not create a debt. Many men agreed quietly, perhaps, but silent agreement is not enough.
The room should have gone quiet when a man said he would recover a Rs 370 investment via a woman’s body. It didn’t. So, the question is not only what kind of man says something like that. It is what kind of men laugh when he does.
And until men are willing to have these conversations with each other — about loneliness, rejection, consent, and responsibility — the manosphere will keep having them for us.
