Forever girls
THEY descend upon Pakistani television screens almost as soon as the men and the working women have left, bound for grim offices via car-clogged roads. Many of the women hosts of Pakistan’s morning television shows are unrelenting in their insistence that the new day is going to be a glorious one. One can, of course, pause at the absurdity of this claim, dissect its inapplicability to every single new day in Pakistan; but there are others that annoy more, and grate on the intellect as they do on the senses.
This kind of deluded optimism is not the only crime of the morning show. Even more annoying than the relentless and artificial excitement is the ‘girlishness’ with which it is conducted. There is something crucial to be noted here: few of the many hosts of the many channels are actually ‘girls’ or anywhere around the neighbourhood of just-passed adolescence. Their mode and manner, however, seems never to have recovered from that bygone age bracket; as they seek to project that the grown woman is really just a girl. In turn, a girl, naïve and innocent, forever cheerful and untainted by the seriousness of the world, is the epitome of Pakistani womanhood.
The morning show is just one instance, albeit a grating one, of this curse of infantile thinking that is inflicted on millions of Pakistani women who must never grow up. In this, its most visible iteration, it says to women that maintaining the persona of a girl — the just-grown anorexic body, the impish impudence and the naiveté with which all things serious or pressing are somehow out of bounds — equals attractiveness.
A society that is obsessive in its idealisation of ‘girls’ is one that can never really be committed to ending practices like child marriage.
Seriousness of purpose, engagement with issues beyond wedding outfits, crafts and cooking are generally questionable, suggesting an un-femininity that is, if not outright noxious, definitely not attractive. Advertisements and television dramas further substantiate the stereotypes; the girls who grow up into women, are more often than not the villains, scheming, plotting and arranging the demise of the girlish innocents, who cannot see through their evil machinations.
Excavating the curse of being the forever girl from Pakistani society requires a bit of acuity in cultural products — mornings shows, television dramas and advertisements — that are otherwise uncritically consumed by too many. It also requires recognising what such an image does to the larger situation of women in the country.
A society that is obsessive in its idealisation of ‘girls’ is one that can never really be committed to ending practices like child marriage. If it is the ‘girl’ that is the epitome of attractiveness, then it follows that younger and younger girls are sexualised and made available for marriage. In turn, the girls who escape this practice, who become women, are caught in the vice-like grip of cultural expectation that requires them to pretend at being younger than they are, embarrassed, even rejected, for being women.
It is not just they who are being discarded; the degrees, the professional skills or educational achievements that they may have gathered on their way to becoming women are all also devalued. A society that wants women to stay forever girls is disrespecting all women by saying that women are or should be, in some perpetual way, always children. Children, we all know, must be told what to do, protected, never permitted to do as they wish. So it is the condition of women as well.
If we assess this wreckage produced by cultural norms that find women attractive only when they model the childishness of girlhood, then the realm of the morning show is recast as yet another scene of battle. Grown women, guests and hosts and those who call in are constricted by the shackles of a permanent adolescence, one they must embrace to be considered attractive, even acceptable.
Further iterations are available throughout the wedding season, where the unwed, aged anywhere beyond 18 or 19, must maintain the mien of that glorious age if they are to preserve any prospect of being betrothed. This latter goal, everyone in Pakistan knows, is the defining dream of every unwed Pakistani woman — I mean girl.
The task of changing norms can only belong to those who are currently defined by them. If Pakistani women do not recognise the degradation and perversion of an idealisation of girlhood as the feminine ideal, then all of them, married or unmarried, old or young, will remain shackled by its boundaries, pushed for years to come into the pretence of being childlike.
Youth and its preservation is undoubtedly a universal quest, the paints and potions sold to women around the world all evidence of its ubiquity and timelessness.
There is, however, a difference between the worldwide quest of staying young and the social insistence that only the female and the young are pretty, marriageable or beautiful. The former points to the human fear of death and aging, applicable to men and women, in Pakistan and elsewhere. The latter, the curse of the forever girl, points to something particularly Pakistani: a clever equation of the female with the child, something that indirectly justifies the subjugation of women, their relegation to lesser beings.
There are many tools in the arsenal of those who wish to deny women equality, and other women are one of them. The mavens of morning shows, fighting the fervent rating wars, are perhaps too preoccupied with the task of widening their appeal and emphasising their girlish inability to question the structures within which they operate. If they were to take up their task, they could begin by putting their flippancy aside and consider with some seriousness the fact that Pakistani women, including themselves, deserve much better than to be sentenced to being forever girls.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
Published in Dawn, December 23rd, 2015