Somewhere between a late-night scroll through Instagram reels and an impromptu deep dive into a YouTube rabbit hole, I stumbled upon Pyaar Ka Professor. The snippet that intrigued me was deceptively simple: a man, a politician no less, gifting his wife a necklace because, during an intimate moment, she had placed his hand on her neck. What he saw as a hint for jewelry was, in reality, a suppressed articulation of desire. That was all it took—I had to watch the series. And the moment I finished, I sat down to write this.
Pyaar Ka Professor, a web series that ostensibly markets itself as a satire on love, relationships, and the ethics of seduction, is laced with problematic tropes. From Vaibhav’s overt misogyny to the insidious idea of “womanipulating”, much of the show warrants a separate critique. But what intrigued me wasn’t the tired rhetoric of gender warfare or the dubious ethics of dating schools—it was the unspoken, under-explored, and often uncomfortable conversation about women’s sexual desires, particularly within marriage.
The Silent Space of Women’s Desire
Mallika, the show’s protagonist, is neither oppressed nor silenced in the conventional sense. She is modern, confident, and in many ways, liberated. Married to Pankaj, an ambitious politician who—unlike the archetypal controlling husband—supports her personal growth, she is far from trapped. And yet, the language of desire remains elusive, her sexual needs lost in translation, misread, or outright dismissed.
Take, for instance, one of the most revealing moments in the show—Mallika tells Pankaj that she enjoys being choked. His response? A baffled laugh: “Aur choke toh main baahar karta hoon logon ko, unko toh bada maza nahi aata.” (I choke people outside all the time, they don’t seem to enjoy it much.)
It’s a scene loaded with tragicomic irony. Here is a woman, communicating her desires as clearly as possible, only to be met with a fundamental lack of comprehension. Pankaj’s response is not just humorous; it is emblematic of a larger issue—the limited vocabulary that men (and by extension, society) possess when it comes to understanding women’s sexual needs beyond the performative scripts of romance and duty.
Why Do Women Struggle to Voice Desire?
The repression of female desire in marriage is neither new nor exclusive to Pyaar Ka Professor’s fictional universe. Historically, female sexuality has been framed in terms of receptivity rather than agency. Even in ostensibly progressive partnerships, where women are given space to thrive professionally and personally, their sexual agency remains a murky territory—recognized in theory, misunderstood in practice.
One way to understand this is through Lisa Duggan’s theory of heteronormative domesticity, which argues that marriage, even in its modern, supposedly liberal iterations, continues to operate within structures that prioritize stability over pleasure, duty over exploration. Women, especially those in long-term heterosexual relationships, often internalize a model of desire that is shaped by emotional labor and caretaking rather than personal erotic fulfillment.
Even when they do articulate their desires, as Mallika does, they are met with bemusement, if not outright invalidation. This is not merely about men failing to understand what their partners want—it is about the absence of a cultural framework that allows women’s desires to exist without being pathologized as deviant or trivialized as indulgent.
Also read: Pleasure Is Political: Women, Desire, And Patriarchy
The Tragedy of Misreading Desire
Mallika’s predicament in Pyaar Ka Professor is not that she lacks the confidence to speak, but that her words do not register the way they should. The misinterpretation of her sexual cues is one of the recurring motifs in the show. When she places Pankaj’s hand on her neck in an intimate moment, she is expressing a desire. When Pankaj later gifts her a necklace, believing that’s what she wanted, the disconnect is almost absurd in its simplicity.
The humor in these moments is unsettling precisely because it is so relatable. How often do women hint at their needs only for them to be misunderstood? How many times have we heard of women faking orgasms, not out of deception, but out of sheer exhaustion from the work it takes to explain what they want?
Critical theorists like Teresa de Lauretis argue that desire itself is shaped by the discursive conditions of gendered subjectivity—meaning that even when women desire, they must do so within the confines of what is socially permissible or legible. Mallika is not a woman trapped in an oppressive marriage; she is a woman trapped in a world that does not yet have the tools to fully accommodate female sexual agency.
Desire, Not Desperation
The show, whether intentionally or not, makes a compelling case for the urgent need to reframe the way we talk about female sexuality. Women are not desperate; they are desiring. There is a crucial distinction. To be desperate is to be lacking, to be in need. To desire is to be full, to know, to want. The conversation about female desire needs to shift from one of scarcity to one of abundance.
Pyaar Ka Professor may not be a perfect show, but it inadvertently opens a door that remains frustratingly closed in mainstream discourse. We need more stories where women’s sexual needs are not plot devices or sources of humor, but legitimate narratives in their own right. We need men who are not just open to listening but are equipped with the language to understand.
Perhaps the greatest takeaway from Pyaar Ka Professor is that we must move past the old dichotomy of sexual liberation versus repression. The truth is, most women exist in a liminal space—neither fully free nor completely silenced, constantly navigating the thin line between articulation and misinterpretation. And it’s about time that the world caught up.
