In today’s politics, when opponents can’t win on substance, they fall back on an old, ugly strategy: weaponizing the women connected to their targets. This dynamic rests on a premise as old as patriarchy itself: a woman is not an autonomous figure in public life, but a point of vulnerability to be deployed against a man.
By turning female public figures into proxy targets, political operatives score cheap rhetorical points while stripping women of their agency, dignity and hard-earned professional individuality.
It is a quiet slide from open gender discrimination into a subtler kind of misogyny, one where a woman’s visibility is tolerated only so long as it can be turned into political ammunition against her male peers.
Consider recent events in Tamil Nadu’s political arena after film actor Vijay’s formal entry into politics and the launch of his party. Rather than engage with his political platform or vision, detractors turned quickly to personal insinuation and character assessment, with targeted mentions of actor Trisha Krishnan.
Across debates, social media and public rallies, rival commentators invoked her name repeatedly to trivialize Vijay’s political seriousness. In this toxic equation, Krishnan, with her two-decade acting career, was effectively reduced from a self-made, successful professional into a narrative weapon, her presence twisted into a tool signalling unreliability or moral compromise on the part of a male rival.
The message sent to voters was clear and deeply regressive: a man’s fitness for leadership gets measured by how his association with women can be scrutinized and sensationalized, while the woman herself is stripped of her own accomplishments and treated as mere political baggage to be used at will.
This pattern is not confined to regional politics; it stretches to international diplomacy. Look at the online discourse around Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
What should have been read strictly as a strategic bilateral engagement and diplomatic alignment between two sovereign nations was picked up on social media and turned by opposition groups into the viral ‘Melodi’ meme ecosystem.
Dismissed by some as harmless internet banter or light-hearted public fascination, this pattern tells a different story once you look closer.
Opposition figures and online political networks repeatedly used diplomatic photographs and bilateral interactions to caricature statecraft. As Italy’s first female PM, Meloni must navigate complex EU politics and global geopolitics, but her diplomacy was often flattened by critics into internet tropes and shallow commentary with no mention of her policy record or stance on foreign relations.
What links the online treatment of Trisha Krishnan and Giorgia Meloni is the same underlying mechanism of women’s names being used to undermine men. In both cases, the real political target was a male leader, yet the one who bore the rhetorical cost was the woman whose public image got objectified.
This exposes a stark and persistent double standard in political combat. Male leaders get judged on power, rhetoric, economic policy and governance, but when rivals want to demoralize or discredit them, they reach instead for gendered morality and personal association.
This dynamic sharpens further when the woman in question is conventionally attractive.
Krishnan and Meloni are not incidental examples; their visibility as attractive women is precisely what makes them useful as narrative baits. A woman whose appearance draws public attention becomes doubly convenient for this kind of politics: her looks generate the clicks and headlines that carry the insinuation further, while also making it easier for critics to place spectacle above substance.
The cruelty compounds here. The very trait that signals her success in an optics-oriented public sphere, whether cinema or international diplomacy, is repurposed against her, recast as evidence of frivolity, vanity or moral failure.
Less conventionally attractive women in equally public roles seem less likely to be dragged into these narratives, which reveals the mechanism for what it is: a punishment for visibility itself. The more a woman’s presence commands attention on her own merit, the more useful she becomes as a weapon against some male target.
This habit inflicts severe damage on public life, and it runs in more than one direction. First, it degrades political discourse by replacing substantive ideological debate with sensationalized personal insinuation. Second, it creates a dangerous chilling effect, warning women away from entering, engaging in,or staying in high-visibility public professions.
When women become collateral damage in male rivalries, every ambitious woman learns that her hard-won professional standing can be attacked to serve someone else’s political narrative.
And if society tolerates turning women into political collateral, it reinforces a culture that treats female figures’ respect and agency as conditional, granted only at the whim of patriarchal preferences. Political parties, media outlets and digital platforms need to call out this pattern for what it actually is: a cowardly attempt to take down rivals by objectifying women.
Until public discourse insists that leaders fight their battles on policy rather than through personal proxies, women will keep paying the price for men’s political ambitions and turning into collateral damage in others’ battles.
These are the author’s personal views.
The author is professor, economics, and executive director, Centre for Family Business & Entrepreneurship at Bhavan’s SPJIMR.