A man spends Rs 370 on biryani for a woman. Later, when she asks him to drop her home, he thinks, ‘But I didn’t get back the money I spent on you.’ The audience bursts into laughter. Comedian, Pranit More, This is called ‘Peak Gurgaon Content’.

But what are people really laughing at? Because the man was clearly not asking to split the biryani bill in half or to pay for his petrol. He was not saying ‘I will recover my Rs 370’ and was thinking ‘UPI refund’.

The implicit joke here is: He spent money on her, so now he expects sexual access in return. Because that amount – Rs 370 – may have been spent on biryani, but in her mind, it was money to buy her consent. Women have been warned against this mentality for generations: the idea that a man will buy you dinner, take you on a date, buy you drinks or gifts to make you feel special, and expect you to come to his bed. All of this takes us back to the core problem, which has been discussed many times and is found in every form of patriarchy: male entitlement.

You see, it has become normal. You take a woman on a date, and you feel entitled to kisses and more. You think you’re worth at least that much. Because you walked her around, took care of her food, spent time in conversation with her, complimented her on her looks and, while she may have considered it an opportunity to get to know you – to you, it’s a simple transaction: you’ve invested your time and your money, and now want a return. And in most cases, that reward is only of one kind: sexual.

This is actually the ‘joke’, ‘peak Gurgaon material’ and the central problem of the story of Morey’s stand-up show which starts with ‘i want a big girl (I want to have sex with an older girl)’. It’s the same logic that fuels countless conversations around consent — the belief that spending money creates an obligation, that a woman has a right to a man’s access to her body because he’s invested in it.

What makes it worse is that people are laughing at it, glorifying the ‘joke’ and, in fact, blowing it out of proportion. The outrage should not just be about the joke or the fact that no one in the audience or on stage resisted laughing, but about the mentality that the ‘joke’ represents. This is the same mentality that promotes rape culture, which is encouraged every time:

1. Treat sexual harassment as a joke or a source of humor.
2. Suggest that the victims are responsible for what happened to them because of what they wore or how they behaved.
3. Assume that men are entitled to sex after spending money or doing favors on women.
4. Dismiss the incident with a casual response of ‘men will be men’.

No, joking about biryani is not rape. But the thinking beneath it all belongs to the same ecosystem that continually blurs the line between consent and compensation. All the more, who is now a popular stand-up artist, especially after his participation in bigg boss 19What had to be done was to shut that person down, to ask him to go away, to drive out the sick mentality that led him to think the woman he wanted to have sex with was just a body. But in the end he accepted the man’s story – feeling awkward taking a woman straight to his place and hence deciding to take her out for a meal first – as the content of his show. Ward, having simply taken the woman to his place and hence, thinking of taking her out for a meal first, as the source of his show’s content.

The idea behind not shutting it down was also how cool it would be to have something like a locker room conversation on the show. You enjoy, laugh, joke, pull each other’s legs and move forward. There is nothing harmful in it? After all, we have bigger problems to deal with: the economic crisis, the US-Iran conflict, what the BJP is doing in West Bengal and how the only actor is now the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu. Where does this idea of ​​rape culture fit in the priority list?

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You know what? It’s not like that. But it matters in your home where your wife is busy finding the best balance between your family and her work, inside the classes your daughters and sisters are attending, and in the park where a young girl is trying to convince a group of young boys to play cricket with her. Male authority permeates your everyday life and shapes the future of the women around you.

Patriarchy is not normalized through criminal acts alone. This happens through repetition, jokes, and thousands of little moments where society collectively agrees that a certain way of thinking is ridiculous and not dangerous.

Projecting a deeply entitled, perpetrator-centric mentality into bizarre urban dating behavior is a reflection of something ugly. What are we celebrating here? What makes a man think Rs 370 buys sex for him? A culture that is instantly mocked because the underlying belief is so normalized? Or an audience so comfortable with transactional views of women and consent that it hardly thinks it’s problematic.

That’s how the most dangerous ideas come: wrapped in laughter and with a pretty bow of ‘peak Gurgaon stuff’ tied around them. By the time you stop laughing, they have already returned to normal and become celebratory in no time.