Making suppression seductive
I still remember the woman without a face. It was in Dubai International Airport where a painfully regular crowd of darkly shrouded Muslim women had huddled near the check-in counter waiting for their male chaperones who went about the business of taking care of the women’s business in the patriarchal world of their own myopic delusions. I am no stranger to the staggeringly high numbers of women who enclose themselves in swathes of unappealing, hot, isolationist fabric and the many arguments that tell how women choose to wear these testaments of their theology. Coming back to the woman without a face, I am left with a masectomised sensibility. Complete with the burqa and over the niqab she wore what can only be described as a muzzle. Made of steel and crisscrossed over the face to leave just her eyes visible and mouth gagged, she reminded one of a pup, a very domesticated one.
Imagine my shock then when I ran into this same abstraction here in Pakistan on M M Alam Road – a hub of shopping, eating and trend setting. A very well-to-do jewellery brand has taken glamour up a notch by shooting any sort of female emancipation down a few thousand rungs of the gender equality ladder. Displaying a large billboard outside their store, a woman with kohl crusted eyes and head hooded by a black cloth peeks at passersby from behind a diamond-gilded mask exactly like the one described above, sans the mouth piece. The shot beggars belief as to why anyone would stoop so low as to increase sales through their marketing theatrics.
Pakistan is a country where women are still fighting tooth and nail for some basic recognition. Rights and feminist mumbo jumbo are still pipedreams for a vast majority for whom identity is snuffed out at birth when fathers leave newborn daughters in garbage heaps, education is splintered by bombs and provincial mentality, speaking out and taking a stand is a challenge and not a choice. Women have a long way to go, far too many taboos to slice through and manifestos of male monomania to tear up to have to cater to the whims of those who turn to demeaning methods of marketing to cheapen the very women they serve. To glamourise turning a flesh and blood human being into a subjugated creature is contemptible. There are too many people in Pakistan who run solely on imagery. We are a country that lives and dies for a book that is not even taught to us in our own language. We associate our religion with images and visual stimulation that give us an inkling as to what is being demanded from our dogma. We are a very impressionable lot. What we see is what we believe. Those who cater to the fetishes of this country’s elites would have us believe that muzzling a woman in traditional tribal fashion is the greatest thing since the Afghan Taliban made blue shuttlecocks all the rage.
Similar to sadomasochistic leather and rubber masks used for the darker side of stimulation, such tribal masks seen on women in Arab states are meant to subjugate and provide a legit means to dominate. Women are socialised to accept that they belong in a role that is sexually smothered and vocally veiled behind a smokescreen of culture, tradition and faith. What better way to compound this idea of the submissive female than to strip her of her dignity, gag her, silence her and then parade her as someone who needs to be told what to do because she cannot say it for herself? I’d like to thank those parked on the publicity platform for this particular jewel brand – you’ve just sexualised oppression for us once again.
Civilised societies have moved to a greater level of gender equality and understanding. However, in countries like ours the word ‘equality’ is a terrifying one for the Muslim man for with ‘equality’ comes the word ‘competition’. Only when men and women are in the same playing field can they compete in the race for happiness, love, finances, resources and independence. Only then will honour become a ham-fisted fabrication of darker days. Masking these facts behind dazzling displays of what is essentially restraint and a sullied obedience might help sell a few rocks but it does nothing for the women who wear them.
The writer is an editor by profession and a participant of the Salzburg Trilogue. She can be reached at [email protected]
And I thought I was the only one who found this ghastly contraption comparable to Hannibal Lecter's anti-cannibal muzzle! To market and sell a highly visible symbol of oppression as bling (or maybe a chastity belt for the face?) – way to go Damas. Not.
What an absolute load of rubbish “journalism”. Its taken the author 5 paragraphs of waffle to explain what could be summed very easily in a few sentences.
If you think western countries have a”civilized” perception of women you have clearly never spent time here. A woman is rape takes place in the UK once every 30 seconds,
lol! I dont think this poor women as any other way of getting attention to herself.
How would you know that wearing a burqa is sign of oppression? Not all women that wear these burqas think that, so stop generalizing. Instead of looking from the outside in and thinking how bad their lives must be, focus on your own! Your fake empathy and your crap journalism that has no evidence to back the crap you spew is just as hateful as what you seem to think is right.
I thought author was some right-wing French.
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