Women, more than men, are familiar with the gut-wrenching unease we’ve all experienced with ogling eyes piercing through us, as if the distance between one set of eyes with the other suddenly diminishes, and the protective sheath becomes almost too thin to cover anything. Such is the male gaze, a phenomenon, an experience that we grow accustomed to later in life.
This internalised misogyny is what is presented to us as a reality, as our reality and there is no room to ever question it. We grow up thinking about being an ideal woman who is modest, reserved, and not quiet because she openly agrees with the patriarchal norms that she absolutely has to uphold. She shies away from all kinds of male gaze, being surrounded by good men who do not gaze, or if they do, this perfect woman doesn’t report it. For years, we are told that if a man stares at you, it is because of what you were wearing or doing, and that it is your own fault because you stared at them staring at you.
We do not know who created this perfect woman that we all aspired to be at one time in our lives, or why do men in fact gaze. Funnily enough, most stories we’ve read, films we’ve seen, and art we’ve appreciated, have been produced by men based on women’s experiences. In English literature, we’ve been bemused by celebrated women whose greatest trials followed through a lover’s heart. Growing up, I could not relate to any of these characters. Then came Little Women which talked about the intimacy of a woman’s coming of age experiences, which in its subtlety captured the complexities of women beyond the traditional roles of them being lady-like. It comes as no surprise that the complex depths of these varied characters could only be written by a woman herself. This isn’t to say that men shouldn’t write about female characters, but that their gaze boxes these characters at most to two-dimensional, when in reality they are significantly more than that.
As fiction doesn’t happen in isolation, such narratives bring to light how authors view society, and the support for their views grows as readers are influenced by these words. Therefore, for decades, societies have been described owing to their idiosyncrasies, but everywhere women have had a long struggle for the realisation of their rights. While actual rights have been given much later. This is primarily because women have always been described in a particular way; their social mobility and role predetermined; they first had to gather support for their own radical beliefs and then go through a collective struggle in realisation of these.
So, women march, amongst other things, against the male gaze that seems to penetrate through social dictums embodied by a woman; it is their perception, their leverage in being allowed this gaze, that is the real issue here. The idea of a male breadwinner and a female caregiver has come at the centre of a discussion challenging gender stereotypes for some decades now. Nobody knows how these gender roles came to be defined, but their utility in modern times has waned. This can be attributed in part to economic opportunism, which is at the epicentre of the balance of relationships in a post-capitalist society. When women are no longer dependent on men for their livelihoods and are equally competitive for the same jobs, their role in society and what has been traditionally expected of them has significantly changed. While this is what Marxist Feminists have been arguing for over a century, the modern interpretation is much wider in scope.
A modern-day feminist or anyone in opposition to these archaic values goes beyond the economic proposition. It’s about freedom; of expression, of belief, of being, of existence. At the helm of it is an opposition to anything and everything that boxes this ‘fragile’ gender.
However, despite the many global movements and their local interpretations, women continue to face gender-based violence. While freedom of expression and speech is to be guaranteed to everyone, the fact that men get to use it more to their advantage, further widens the gap.
Recently, the very fabric of our female existence was rocked by the brutal murder of Noor Mukaddam at the hands of a barbaric Zahir Jaffer. I will not add the daughter of or the son of because that divulges the attention away from the subject; a woman was lured in to visit her friend, she was held against her will, she went through extreme torture, she was killed and she was beheaded at the hands of the said friend. The mindset of the man who killed Noor those who want to go into the details of why she was there might not be too different.
This is similar to the male-driven narrative that started circulating after a mother in her 30’s was raped in front of her kids while travelling on the Motorway from Lahore to Gujranwala. The men were the first to come forward and question why she was travelling at night alone when she should be scared of men. In each of these cases, there has been an exploiter and enablers. In the motorway incident, CCPO Lahore was the enabler, in Khadija’s case it was the boy’s family and friends, in Noor’s case it was Jaffer’s family and friends, and the list goes on.
This idea that women should be scared of men allows men to carry out heinous crimes. Women who defy are violated, those who don’t are still violated. As a generation we have been raised to accept men as more worthy of respect than women, as is perhaps written in the doctrine of culture. And for the longest time we did believe that the men at our homes were better and worthy of this respect. However, recent stories of sexual harassment of women at the hands of their fathers, uncles, brothers, cousins and other relatives goes to show that in all of this, men pose the biggest danger to female security and rights, no matter who they are.
Statistics show that Pakistan has emerged as the 6th worst country for women in the world. Moreover, it has been labelled 151st out of 153 countries on the worst countries in global rankings for women. It is from here that it begins to make a lot of sense for why the Domestic Violence Bill fails to become a law; as certain men believe that with punishments being announced, their favourite part time activity in Pakistan—harassing women—will be penalised. A husband will not be able to beat his wife because he can’t take the anger out on his boss during the day, an egoistic man whose proposal is rejected will no longer have the right to stab another woman, relatives will no longer be able to exploit others’ children on family dinners, teachers will be fired when harassing female students etc.
Men’s action or inaction has for decades enabled sexual predators. At the helm of this is victim blaming, which has been echoed in all corridors of power, on morning shows and by ultra-modern turned superficial Islamic anti-liberals on digital fora. This blindness to looking at the world from a man’s perspective is perhaps what’s wrong with our society.
It is high time we accept our own fallacies and pass the bill to protect our women and children. We need to stop questioning women, and hold men accountable. No society can prosper if it’s mere socio-economic fabric is built on insecurity, anxiety, and with no free spaces. Women need to be protected. Children need to be protected. Sexual predators should be punished. We can not create an unsafe space, we have to look at the world from a woman’s perspective now and create a space where women are protected and catered to.