Lust Stories 3 and the female gaze: What changes when women tell the story?

What happens when a woman's desires and lust are kept at the forefront? Lust Stories 3 shifts the lens from male wants to female agency without reducing its characters to sexuality.

In Short

• Lust Stories 3 shifts focus to women’s desires as central narratives
• Four directors explore complex female sexuality and relationships
• Women are portrayed with contradictions, not just stereotypes

For years, men and their desires have dominated Indian screens. The camera has lingered on women’s bodies, while female sexuality has often been filtered through what a male character or the audience finds attractive. However, the ballgame changed with Lust Stories 3. The question shifted from “What does he want from her?” to “What does she want?”

The third instalment of Netflix’s anthology brings together filmmakers Vikramaditya Motwane, Kiran Rao, Shakun Batra and Vishal Bhardwaj for four stories about love, lust, relationships and desire. While the directors bring very different sensibilities to the anthology, there is a striking common thread: women’s desire is no longer something that exists merely to move a man’s story forward. It is the story.

One can never forget the curious case of Kiara Advani and the vibrator from the first season, a moment that kept us invested and interested in what would come next. In the second season, however, it was harder to recall that one moment that would linger in our minds. The new edition, though, has its own share of memorable moments.

The third instalment came up with the biggest change this year. It allowed women to see lust not as an isolated physical act. The anthology asks what desire does once it enters an already complicated life.

The first segment, directed by Vikramaditya Motwane, features Konkona Sen Sharma and Radhika Apte as partners-in-crime who are so dissatisfied with physical intimacy with their respective husbands, Abhishek Banerjee and Vijay Varma, that they begin contemplating the idea of swapping partners. Bored by their monotonous married life, the two decide to take charge of their physical needs.

And what’s all this for? Just to be seen and heard as partners and not merely taken as wives and mothers to their children. A plot opened for judgment? Yes. But also a fresh story where a woman's desire takes the centre stage and everything else is in the backseat.

Female desires on screen have come with conditions. A woman who wants too much is often judged, while one who openly embraces her sexuality is reduced to it. The popular series attempts to break away from that idea, allowing its women to have desires, fantasies and choices without making those desires the only thing that defines them.

The characters in the anthology are not presented as a definition of what a sexually liberated woman should look like. Some are married, some are navigating complicated relationships, some are dealing with fantasy, and others are just trying to follow their dreams while fulfilling their desires.

Filmmaker Shakun Batra has described his interest in what happens when desire enters a life that already has its own rules and arrangements. His segment, featuring Ali Fazal and Radhika Madan, also questions the familiar cinematic equation in which desire automatically has to lead to betrayal, guilt, or heartbreak.

Sailee and Varun reunite for what they believe will be a smooth divorce proceeding. But the benefits of having once been a couple who had their most passionate moments are disrupted by their mental well-being. Fazal and Madan convincingly portray a pair caught between two extremes: they can barely speak to each other without biting each other’s heads off, yet they cannot seem to keep their hands off each other.

That makes the season's women more than characters who are either faithful wives or rebellious women breaking social rules. They have contradictions. They can love someone and still want something they aren't getting. They can be curious without having all the answers. They can make questionable choices without those choices becoming a moral judgement of their sexuality.

Lust Stories 3 has changed the lens altogether. It is now about changing the emotional and narrative ownership of desire.

Vishal Bhardwaj's story, starring Aditi Rao Hydari and Siddharth, makes that shift particularly visible. Set in the 1980s, it follows a woman whose imagination and writing become a private space through which she can express desires that she may not be able to voice openly. Bhardwaj has spoken about the importance of creating stories where women can speak about their desires, enjoy their sexuality and make choices without being judged.

One of the series' strongest takeaways is its refusal to reduce female sexual agency to a superficial symbol of empowerment. It makes a clear point: sexual activity alone does not automatically equate to liberation, nor does acknowledging a woman's desires imply promiscuity. Instead, it portrays female agency as something far more complex and nuanced.

This has become a talking point because mainstream storytelling has often given male characters the luxury of contradiction. A man can be ambitious and insecure, lustful and romantic, selfish and vulnerable. His sexuality can coexist with the rest of his personality.

Women have not always received the same freedom. Lust Stories 3 pushes toward that freedom by letting desire coexist with everything else that makes its characters human.

Interestingly, Lust Stories 3 is not an anthology that is made entirely by women. Yet the four filmmakers have kept the same approach: Desire through female perspectives. That makes the conversation around the “female gaze” more nuanced.

What happens when a woman’s lust, fantasies and desires are treated as important enough to be the centre of the story? In Lust Stories 3, the answer isn't necessarily that women desire differently from men. It is that they finally get the narrative space to desire without having to justify why they do.

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