Boys will be boys?
Public misogyny is common in every sphere of life, from homes to workplaces, from shrines to markets, and from schools to shopping malls, women are an unwanted centre of attention
The word empathy–stepping into someone’s shoes–does not work well when it comes to the internalisation of experiences that one-half of the country faces in dingy and vast spaces, posh areas, cul de sacs and bustling market places every day.
This half does not want sympathy, but to be left alone–freedom.
The favourite hobby of an average Pakistani male, does not matter what part of life he is in, is to sit outdoors and wait for some activity. This has nothing to do with watching the sunrise or looking at the hues of spring (if there are any anymore), or finding a shade in hot summers, but to wait for some flavouring in their lonely-sad lives. The aim is leering at women. The extraordinary ability to reduce women to a mere plaything. Mama’s boys are out of mothers’ laps and now they are on streets to prove their manliness–I don’t know to whom, perhaps to themselves and their counterparts.
Public misogyny is common in every sphere of life, from homes to workplaces, from shrines to markets, and from schools to shopping malls, women are an unwanted centre of attention. Pakistani women, too, are being singled out and policed throughout their existence.
It is ironic, but being told that woman’s crucial responsibility is to protect her honour; but from whom: the ones who are a threat to them?
Everyday, M walks from her not-so-good living place to work. Rickshaw walas, vendors and the shopkeepers’ gazes accompany her till she reaches less crowded streets. Now she is glad that she is not in the teeming streets of the bazaar anymore, but a peaceful thoroughfare. Okay, staring strangers are not there to make her uncomfortable; no one is jeering at her; then enter the hot-blooded youths in the picture. And streets brimming with them; riding their motorbikes recklessly, for which they aren’t even old enough yet; they harass her while she makes her way through the unpaved working class streets of the area. Slut-shaming, cat-calls and unwanted attention, and she wades through all that pile, untouched, confident. And she will have to go through this ordeal again, for the rest of her life: as far as one can look into the future.
Sexuality–post-Victorians have explored it. Women don’t need corsets and gloves anymore to look and act like a lady. Sex, and sexuality, remains a taboo, but still some media outlet, out of a concern for rating, takes up this issue to the audience; later, to be forgotten in the piles of dusty memories.
B is a college graduate and lives with her boyfriend. Her liveliness is not to be matched. You will see her lighting up a cigarette in short sleeves shirt and skinny jeans in streets littered with men. She doesn’t care–but everyone else does–from the milkman to a boy who has not even reached puberty yet. Her walks from home to her workplace are not pleasant experiences. But, defiant, she always said, “reclaiming the streets is a way to go”.
A heavy bag on her shoulder, scorching heat–in Camus’The Stranger, the sun is the enemy, but in her life, sun keeps the frustrated men away–as she makes her way through the traffic.
An elderly uncle, on a motorbike, stares at her body; drooling, his neck is turned at a 180-degree angle, with no regard for traffic until he satiates.
Cars drive by her, stopping, offering rides followed by a smirk: accept or not to accept the offer, she remained perplexed thinking the motives behind it.
Sex remains a taboo in the society: everyone accepts that, but women have been turned into sexual objects. They are measured in terms of sexual intensity.
Rickshaw drivers make half of the public life of Lahore. The interactions cannot be avoided if you are out in the public without a transport of your own. My friend and I use rickshaws quite often, and it’s not the same when you are alone. You can not ask but wonder, being with a woman brings you respect or public service for the sake of weaker sex. The respect you get from rickshaw walaswhen you are accompanied by a female: patronising and misguided.
Once a rickshaw driver enlightened me about how girls of a well-known university wear provocative dresses, which is not good for them, their parents and society on the whole. They do stuff in the college which is prohibited in a ‘decent Islamic society’; but of course, men are an exception. I am sure he had never been inside the college, but it was a word on a wing from his lustful comrades, who wait in front of the college, to charge more fares, and speculate about the sexual lives of women inside.
It is three at night; the streets of Gulberg are deserted. You can see some small groups of men, sitting, smoking on the stairs of closed shops. The sun takes the most people with it when it sets. A couple, friends, walk through these streets. Perhaps enjoying a nightly stroll to wear the day’s heat off. A whistle; a jeer from across the road, and fixed gazes which penetrate even the thickest shields. A majority of them would be potential rapists if they were given a chance. One always feels lucky to reach home safely. Days are not far, or they don’t seem far, when verbal assaults can be turned into physical assaults more often.
Public discrimination against women is not some unusual phenomenon. We, the men, are feeding on it: no different than Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man. The alternatives do not exist. Parents live in fear their daughter would lose their heads if they go outside; men prone to liberalism keep their liberal tendencies out of their homes; mothers, conditioned for decades, accept the inevitability of the social crisis. Why is it?
The emotion of guilt sometimes helps us to do the right thing or refrain from others. In case of women, our self-righteousness kills it; we are so sure of our authority to direct them that we even refuse to acknowledge that it might be misguided. But, no, men are men, always like that, a lullaby since childhood, now a conviction. While women have to compromise; assaulted by men, having to pretend to be saved by men.
