Miranda Husain

Nothing is as fragile as the male ego and no one more bitter than a man scorned; such cads become genuinely and surprisingly affronted when a woman tries to steer the banter back to the path of most resistance

A chance encounter with a
former colleague has led me to ponder. About men and how even those who have perfected the art of projecting an outward image of sophisticated intellect still, when it comes to women, nurture the soul and ego of the adolescent schoolboy. Nudge nudge, wink wink.

Take my former colleague, for example. The gentleman in question is of the strategic thinking kind. All defence capabilities and nukes. Yet he wants women to know that there is more to him than just forward positioning. There is also the matter of whisky and cigarettes. And he genuinely believes it is the combination of the two that renders him a serious contender for the role of the Thinking Woman’s Crumpet. Yes, really.

How else to explain the sadly inevitable turn that our conversation took. After the initial superficial exchange of pleasantries, he asked what kind of book I was working on and if it would be a rollicking good read, full of romp and circumstance. Had I, perhaps, carved out for myself the niche of wordy erotica?

Fortunately, neither of us took this to be a question of actual significance. Nor even the reflection of wishful thinking from one so evidently in the grip of a mid-life crisis. Rather, it was understood that the allusion to sex simply provided the strategist with a rather too-good-to-miss opportunity of demonstrating that he still has what it takes. That he refuses to be shackled by the constraints of a so-called sexually repressive and repressed society.

But of course it would be unfair to name and shame the stereotypical homegrown desi man as the sole offender in such matters of thought manipulation. For even worse, it must be said, are those men of Pakistani origin who return from the West, or elsewhere, to this apparent hotbed of frustration.

These are the men who take it upon themselves to wilfully ignore the below the surface and, at times, upfront interaction between the sexes that takes place at every level of Pakistani society. Instead, they endeavour to perpetuate the myth of black and white gender segregation. All the better to outwardly reject it and cast themselves as men of enlightened liberal sentiment. Men who refuse to kowtow to artificial norms that seek to objectify women.

And herein lies the rub. Pun intended.

Because nothing is as fragile as the male ego and no one more bitter than a man scorned; such cads become genuinely and surprisingly affronted when a woman tries to steer the banter back to the path of most resistance. Choosing to ignore the fact that a joke can perhaps only be described as amusing if the recipient finds it so, the focus switches. Suddenly it is no longer the man’s possible inappropriateness that is under the spotlight. Rather, it is his suggestion that that the woman is so extraordinarily uptight that she has lost her sense of humour. That she is so supremely repressed that she cannot entertain even a passing reference to sex without invoking purdah of the figurative kind. The man’s unarticulated hope, of course, is that the woman will seek to reject such aspersions on her temperament by redefining her response to prove to the bounder that she is, after all, a good sport.

And it must be conceded that women do, at times, fall into this trap.

In Britain, for example, the 1990s saw the rise of what was, at the time, dubbed ‘ladette’ culture — a reference to the increasing number of economically independent women seeking to unapologetically ape the behaviour of their male peers. A deliberate rejection of traditional stereotypes foisted upon women, if you will. This phenomenon is said to have died a premature death as this generation of women grew up and realised that the mere mimicking of established male norms simply allowed men to continue dictating the rules of the game.

Yet we see that such conduct still — particularly in certain quarters — takes place in this part of the world. Women will resort to talking explicitly about sex and sexual expression in a bid to showcase their non-conformist face. Indeed, many female authors from the Muslim and Arab worlds are applauded for narratives in which female protagonists embark upon a round of sexual adventure. As if this is sufficient to demonstrate a groundbreaking radicalism of thought and deed. There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with this. But it can, perhaps, lead to a clouding of the issue at hand. Especially when a Bangladeshi author, for example, promotes herself as a pioneer of women’s rights yet delivers a novel with no little substance beyond that of well-received soft porn. Or when a Lebanese author employs the narrative voice to highlight the plight of an Arab woman taking an English lover and her subsequent fear that he is not letting himself go because he views his conquest as being untouchable due to her very Arab-ness. Never mind that she is having sex with a virtual stranger on the second date.

The issue is not one of prudish propriety. Rather it is a recognition that conversations centring exclusively on sex ought to be taken at simple face value. They should not be confused with falsely constructed demarcations that equate the topic of sex with a certain and unquestionable liberation.

For as a well respected male columnist admitted to me recently, sex is the easiest thing to talk about. And when we find ourselves in conversations that fail to move beyond this, we revert back to our school day selves, where we cannot see beyond smutty innuendos. And the fallout of failing to see the bigger picture is that we will continue having so-called strategic thinkers mistaking the proffering of sexual opportunism for intellectual exchanges. Not really a stimulating thought.

The writer is a Lahore-based freelance journalist and is currently working on her first novel. She can be reached at humeiwei@hotmail.com