There’s a double standard about women cricket we’re not ready to admit

The World Cup victory last Sunday marked a turning point for women’s cricket in India. Pay parity, professional contracts, and the Women’s Premier League were milestones. But this win delivered something else entirely: mass attention. And with visibility comes a question we haven’t adequately addressed: what does it mean for women cricketers to become public figures in a culture still learning how to see them?

Indian men’s cricket has long inhabited the space where sport blurs into spectacle. It lives across advertisements, dominates social media, generates both adulation and controversy. Women’s cricket now enters this terrain, carrying the weight of expectations as well as the complexities of public attention – praise and scrutiny, celebration and judgment, professional interest and personal intrusion. 

Two challenges emerge as particularly urgent: the struggle for ordinariness, and the negotiation of public desire without either denial or defensiveness.

Who will be blamed for performance?

Athletic performance, by its nature, fluctuates. Even celebrated male cricketers experience failure more frequently than triumph. The criticism they face can be withering, the analysis unsparing. Yet it typically remains within professional bounds, focused on technique, strategy, form.

For women athletes, this boundary has historically been more porous. When performances falter, as they inevitably will, there remains genuine uncertainty about whether commentary will stay focused on the game itself. The question is whether failures will be read primarily as athletic shortcomings or as somehow reflective of gender.

The right to mediocrity is fundamentally about normalisation. It means women athletes can perform inconsistently, struggle through rough patches, and experience ordinary failure without their womanhood becoming the interpretive lens through which everything else is viewed. 

We readily celebrate the exceptional moments from players like Shefali Verma or Smriti Mandhana. (Mandhana had earlier pointed to the limits of the celebrityhood of Indian women’s cricket, saying the revenue came from men’s cricket.)

But the test lies elsewhere: when they struggle, can they be seen simply as athletes facing challenges rather than as women failing to meet some additional burden of representation? The spouses of some leading male cricketers have been unfairly berated for the failure of their husbands, and so what’s in store for the spouses of women stars? Will their husbands bear the brunt? Or will traditional patterns of blame prove more resilient than we’d like to believe?

The deeper challenge concerns visibility itself. Celebrity in contemporary culture is fundamentally about being looked at. Once women cricketers occupy the public stage, attention will extend beyond their athletic achievements to encompass their entire public presentation, how they move, how they speak, how they appear.

This raises an uncomfortable but necessary question: can we accept women cricketers being regarded as desirable in the way male cricketers have been, without moral panic or protective impulses that ultimately limit their agency?

Men have long been subjects of desire

Male cricketers have long been subjects of desire. Tiger Pataudi was celebrated for his aristocratic bearing. Farokh Engineer became the face of Brylcreem in the 1970s. Imran Khan generated as much attention for his appearance as for his bowling. Rahul Dravid’s thoughtful reserve, Dhoni’s ruggedness, Kohli’s aggression, they became different forms of marketable masculinity, success being one of the features. It never provoked moral alarm. 

When women athletes attract similar attention, the response often shifts. Concerns about “objectification’ surface in opinion pages. Activists worry aloud about “commodification”. Journalists frame it as a distraction from serious athletic work. The underlying assumption seems to be that women cannot simultaneously be respected athletes and figures of public interest that extends beyond their sport.

This misunderstands how public life operates. Celebrity arrives with multiple dimensions, not all of them chosen or controllable. Visual appeal, personal style, public persona – these have always been elements of sporting fame. The commercial world operates on its own logic. Endorsements will materialise. Media opportunities will present themselves. Individual athletes will respond according to their own preferences and comfort levels.

Different perspectives will clash over whether new prominence represents empowerment or exploitation, whether attention signals respect for achievement or reduction to appearance. These tensions are real, but the instinct to shield women athletes from this complexity can itself become limiting. It risks suggesting that women cannot navigate these waters without protection, that desire and respect are mutually exclusive rather than coexisting realities of public life.

A few will prove otherwise. Some will shape their own image, use the gaze to their advantage, turn attention into capital, though also bringing some ennui with too much visibility. Others will reject that route and rely on cricket alone. Both choices are rooted in individual personality as much as opportunity – some rejecting fame as leverage for non-cricketing ends, some grabbing it. 

Global precedent

Global sport has travelled this path. Maria Sharapova and Anna Kournikova became icons not just of tennis but of global pop culture. Their beauty grabbed eyeballs, perhaps drawing more attention than their backhand strokes. They were sexualised, mocked, and adored. But in their time, that also became a route to agency, wealth, and influence. The two truths of on court prowess and off-court appeal could live with each other. Not many can forego the gifts of luck.

In some ways, the appeal of Sania Mirza, the country’s first global tennis celebrity, unwittingly found its way too into desirability, voiced in hinterland music. Bhojpuri pop wove it into bawdy admiration, with lines like“Saniya Mirza Cut Nathuniya”, and other songs that sang of her jewellery, her style, her body. The lyrics were often crude but they marked her arrival in mass imagination.

By any stretch of imagination, such songs were not feminist literature. Though they were a record of social transition. They show when a woman athlete ceases to be invisible and becomes a presence powerful enough to provoke, envy, imitate and even desire. That is how mass culture often, and not always in clean ways, registers new arrivals

Almost two decades ago, Bollywood played with the male version of the same theme. 

Hattrick (2007), a film about cricket and obsession, built its plot around a woman’s fantasy of M S Dhoni. The female gaze was no less sexual. Yet it was received as harmless fun. The only crude thing with which it was attached was the timing of its release – the 2007 World Cup in the Caribbean. However, no one wrote weighty essays about the commodification of the male body.

As women’s cricket grows, the media will change its tone. Even if these are early days, and the fleeting nature of overnight fame can’t be discounted in modern sports, some icons will endure. That’s how performances and luck play out in sporting stardom. 

Some will become household names, their posters sold on the streets, their interviews discussed in magazines that once ignored the women’s game. The gaze will linger on their style, their walk to the crease, their celebrations. At that point, two reactions will compete. One response would see it as women reaching the same noisy stage where men already stand. The other would see the danger creeping in: the women players hogging limelight for non-cricketing reasons. But can gender-tinted glasses see both these responses not as mutually exclusive?

If you liked this piece, let our reporters tell you why you should subscribe to Newslaundry.