Pranit More controversy: There are all kinds of violence in this world. Some just involve MEN TALKING

There’s this scene in the 90s TV show Ally McBeal. It was a show about law, lawyers, lovers, and the American judicial system. There’s this particular scene where the lead character Ally McBeal, played brilliantly by Calista Flockhart, and her ex-lover and colleague, Billy, played by Gil Bellows, are having a screaming match.

I forget the specifics, but it was something about dating. Anyway, by the end of this fight, Billy, a good man and a great colleague, finally loses it and says, “B***h.” Ally responds, “Man!”It’s been 30 years since I watched this particular scene. But despite no rewatch, it’s kind of hard to forget. It was one of those rare instances, even in fiction, when a woman, tired of living in a man’s world, turns a verbally violent word thrown at her, flips it, and wins the argument.

One word. Man. For the first time, casual verbal violence, thrown at women every day in the world, was flipped and thrown at a man. The noun became the adjective/expletive here.As the Pranit More controversy broke out last week, among the many thoughts that came to mind, somehow, this scene from Ally McBeal was one of them. The distance between the courtroom corridors of Ally McBeal and a stand-up comedy stage in contemporary India may seem vast.

Yet both reveal the same uncomfortable truth: power often speaks before it acts. Violence is not always a fist. Sometimes it is a narrative. Sometimes it is an expectation. Sometimes it is a joke that transforms consent into debt, affection into obligation, and another human being into an object whose autonomy can be negotiated away. The injury is not inflicted on the body here, but in the social reality that words create and perpetuate.The controversy has reignited a conversation about a form of violence that societies often struggle to identify: verbal and psychological coercion. At the center of the debate was the notion of “vasool”: the idea that money spent on a date must somehow be recovered through physical intimacy. The idea of consent did not even come up.

The outrage that followed was as much about a joke as it was about the worldview the joke reflected and reinforced.

It revealed how language can transform human relationships into transactions and how entitlement can masquerade as humour. This issue extends far beyond one comedian or one performance. It points to a deeper reality about patriarchal societies: power is not maintained only through physical force. It is also maintained through narratives, assumptions, and words that shape how people understand their rights over others.French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu had a phrase for this. He called it symbolic violence, the subtle process by which structures of power settle into language and habit until they no longer look like power at all — they are just the way things are. The most effective forms of this violence are rarely the loudest. They are the ones that have become routine. The casual certainty that women are gold-diggers. The notion that pursuing someone who has already said “no” is romantic rather than menacing.

The arithmetic that turns a spent rupee into an emotional debt. These ideas do not announce themselves. They travel, picking up legitimacy through sheer repetition, through clips and captions and group chats and the easy laughter of a comedy show.What makes this kind of violence so slipperyWhat makes this kind of violence so slippery is its built-in escape route. Physical harm is hard to deny. Words are easy.“It was only a joke.”“You are being too sensitive.”“I did not mean it like that.”Words play a crucial role in this process. They establish hierarchies. They determine who gets to define reality. They shape expectations about gender, class, caste, race, and power. Repeated often enough, language can normalize behaviours that would otherwise be recognized as harmful.

The language of entitlement

The logic underlying the “vasool” argument is not new. It is rooted in a centuries-old belief that women are recipients of male provision and therefore owe men something in return.

Historically, marriage itself was often framed in transactional terms. Dowries, bride prices, and economic dependence reinforced the idea that women were objects of exchange rather than autonomous individuals.Modern dating was supposed to move beyond such frameworks. At its best, a date is a voluntary interaction between equals. Yet remnants of older patriarchal thinking continue to survive beneath the surface.

When a man says that paying for dinner entitles him to intimacy, he is expressing a belief that consent can be purchased.For women, hearing such ideas repeatedly can create an environment where refusal feels socially costly. If a culture constantly suggests that accepting a meal, a gift, or attention creates an obligation, then autonomy becomes harder to exercise. The coercion is psychological, but its effects are real and devastating.Humour as a vehicle of dominanceComedy has always pushed boundaries. It has challenged power, exposed hypocrisy, and confronted uncomfortable truths. Yet humour can also function in the opposite direction. It can normalize prejudice and reinforce existing hierarchies, as we are increasingly seeing in India. A joke allows an idea to enter public discourse with a built-in shield. If people object, they are accused of lacking a sense of humour.

If they laugh, the idea gains legitimacy through collective approval.This does not mean all offensive jokes are inherently harmful. Context matters. The crucial question is whether the joke punches up at power or punches down at those with less power. Throughout history, patriarchal cultures have frequently used humour to trivialize women’s experiences. Harassment becomes flirtation. Coercion becomes romance.

Humiliation becomes banter. The laughter does not erase the underlying message; it often helps it spread.What appears on a comedy stage is rarely created in isolation. It reflects attitudes already circulating in society. The stage has just amplified them.

From gentlemen’s clubs to digital platformsThe phenomenon is hardly confined to stand-up comedy. Historically, elite male spaces — from gentlemen’s clubs to corporate boardrooms — have often functioned through coded language that excludes, belittles, or objectifies women.

Stories, jokes, nicknames, and innuendos become mechanisms through which group identity is reinforced.The point has never been amusement though — it’s power. A sexist joke in such settings signals who belongs and who does not. It reminds participants of the hierarchy governing the space. Those who object risk social exclusion. Those who remain silent tacitly validate the norm.The digital age has dramatically expanded the reach of such dynamics.

Social media platforms reward provocation and outrage. Podcasts, reels, livestreams, and viral clips allow millions of people to consume messages that might once have remained confined to private conversations. As a result, verbal violence no longer requires proximity. A single remark can shape attitudes across an entire culture.Every hierarchy begins as a story somebody tells. Every prejudice begins as a conversation somebody has.

Every act of domination is rehearsed in language before it is committed in fact. The joke is not the harmless thing that precedes the harm. Very often, it is the first instalment of it.Which is the long way back to that small scene and the reason it refuses to fade. Ally’s word, Man, has stayed with a whole generation because they were accurate. She saw what was actually happening. She saw that the insult was not a man’s private failure of temper but a system speaking through him, and she answered the system rather than the man.

It’s also possibly the reason when friends met after that particular episode was aired, all we could discuss was how this scene had captured everything that our teenage minds felt but could not vocabularize.

Ally McBeal aired sometime in the late 90s.It’s 2026. Some things don’t change. Public conversation and the outrage about the joke shared by Himanshu Jangra at Pranit More’s show are beginning to reckon with what that scene grasped in an instant — that language is never only language. Words often belittle and objectify women. And it’s not even considered an insult, or even wrong, unless there’s a backlash. But can backlashes really change deep-seated notions of “vasool”?