What are the many ways according to Kollywood that a woman can ‘hurt’ the hero? The oldest shtick: consent, she could say no. The hero would proceed to stalk her or might already be stalking her. Sometimes she would object and be treated to a lecture on how women don’t appreciate ‘good’ men (who violate section 354D of the Indian Penal Code). Or the woman could wear clothes that don’t cover her from head to toe (Sivakasi, 2005) or refuse to be submissive (Padayappa, 1999). Or they could simply think of the hero as a friend, nothing more (Kaadhal Kondein, 2003). These are all decades-old tropes yet to be retired, so perhaps when Tamil movie makers were casting about for something new and on the cutting edge of misogyny, they hit upon their latest strawman — the boy bestie.
A boy bestie is what the male friend of a woman is called. While this could have been opened up to tell stories of platonic love and camaraderie between a woman and a man, this is predominantly not the case.
The term may seem elusively simple, but what fuels it is not. Fundamentally, it implies that a woman in a platonic friendship with a man, is by default, unfaithful to her romantic partner. Her fidelity is called into question every time she agrees with something this friend says, instead of what the hero (her romantic interest) does. While the boy bestie is overwhelmingly vilified, the undercurrent here is that man-woman friendships are a threat to romantic love. The only acceptable way for women to have a relationship with a man is through cis-heteronormative romance, the idea screams. Women whose best friends are men are immediately subject to scrutiny.
In Tamil, the trope has been around since films like the Jeeva-starrer Siva Manasula Sakthi (2008), but has recently seen an uptick thanks to actors like Sivakarthikeyan who have made the boy bestie sothanaigal (woes) a running joke in their movies, even in 2022 releases like Don and Prince. The Adik Ravichandran-Prabhu Deva double torment Bagheera (2023), aside from its violent storyline about the hero murdering women who break up with their boyfriends, also dabbles in boy bestie jokes. And who can forget ‘Mamakuttyyy’ Revi in Pradeep Ranganathan’s Love Today from last year? In all the cases, the male friend is seen as the aberration in a perfectly good relationship.
If one thinks that the boy bestie trope is a reflection of the silliness of cinema with no real-world impact, I urge you to Google ‘boy bestie sothanaigal’. From memes and Instagram Reels to YouTube videos, there is a litany of sexist rants that blame a woman’s friendship with a man for a romance failing. This is also built on the premise that every cis-het romance must lead to a marriage and wishes woe to the woman if she’s the one who calls it off.
The character of the boy bestie varies from the maleficent home-wrecker to suggesting that he’s not masculine enough (unlike the hero). Take the third meme above, for example. A photoshopped replica of a Google Translate result for boy bestie is allegedly kalla kaadhalan—a man whom someone is cheating on with. Or consider this meme:
While the images are from Vijay’s Theri in which his character is married to Samantha’s, the meme doesn’t directly reference anything in the film. In the meme, the hero magnanimously asks, “What is your dream?” The heroine replies that it isn’t something he’d be able to make happen. When he persists, she asks, “A small room in our house for my boy bestie?” The meme is framed to suggest that men are threatened by the boy besties even after marriage.
Take your pick among the search results on YouTube. Here’s one by @tamilxpress9416. The creator lists five types of boy besties with a Tamil cinema example of each. No, it is not done with irony or critique in mind, sadly.
The first example is one I’ve already mentioned, Siva Manasula Sakthi — this category of boy bestie’s “main aim is to make our girls laugh in front of us and annoy us.” There you go, since 2008, it has apparently been unwomanly to laugh at the jokes of a man who is not your boyfriend.
The second type: “He will take more liberties than a lover. He pretends to be a good person, but is waiting for the girl and her lover to break up.” The example given is Atharvaa’s Imaikkaa Nodigal (2018) — a worthy continuation of the film’s own misogynistic take.
But it’s number four on this video that crudely says, “He may look child-like, but apart from giving her a baby, he will do every other business.” The example given is of a man who doesn’t fit the cinematic ideas of a male physique, implying that he’s somehow a ‘lesser’ man.
The spectre of boy besties haunting cis-het men has made its way into Tamil television too, with comedian-show hosts like KPY Bala commenting, “Are they besties or veshties, they’re always wrapped around [women] so tightly,” on Vijay TV’s reality show Single Ponnunga. The channel has been repeatedly called out for its problematic content across various serials and shows, chief of which is Bigg Boss Tamil. Recently, Neeya Naana, an extremely popular debate show on Vijay TV, ran an episode on the boy bestie phenomenon, titled ‘Overprotective boys versus girls’.
In the show, seated on one side are men who profess to be boy besties. Each of them goes on to outdo the other as they list out the ways in which they ‘protect’ their woman friends. They reel off statements like “I don’t permit her to sit alone in bus stands” or “I don’t let her eat curd rice when she’s sick”. And here’s the worst of a bad lot: “I follow her to see if she’s reached a place safely even if she tells me not to.” Remember our earlier discussion on stalking?
This episode seems to unintentionally open up the boy bestie discourse to a new angle — that men, no matter whether best friends or boyfriends, are unwilling to enter a relationship with a woman without infantilising her. While many of the women contestants of the episode counter the idiocy and sexism on display, the premise itself is skewed. In the larger context of Tamil language entertainment vilifying man-woman friendships, all this serves to do is add ammunition, without acknowledging women’s agency. The show puts on display examples of overbearing behaviour and a narrative that friendships between men and women are doomed to fail.
All of this is not to say that the trope is not seen in entertainment industries in other languages, though it would appear that Tamil cinema has played a large role in spreading it. Memes and reels are fairly common in Malayalam and Telugu too.
What this phenomenon erases is firstly that healthy relationships are founded on respectful boundaries, compassion, and dignity, apart from love. This is something that Tamil cinema refuses to acknowledge, in neither the way romance nor friendship is portrayed. While often loyal friendships between men are depicted as natural and aspirational, the same courtesy is hardly ever extended to friendships between a cis-het woman and man. Underpinning this representation is the expectation of women to limit their interactions with men within the capacities of father, brother, or husband.