Anticipating authority: Early lessons of obedience for Pakistani girls

A girl can be taught the boundaries of her freedom long before she understands that she has any.

“bhai ko ase kapre pasand nai”

“baba gussa karenge”

“mamoo ne ghr se bhr jaane se mana kiya hai”

“log kaya khn ge”

Why are these remarks so normalized in our society?

These are first lessons of obedience for young Pakistani women, delivered to them not through fathers, brothers, but women closest to them their mother, sisters, aunts and grandmothers.

For women in Pakistan, these are not just merely warnings. These are some of the earliest lessons they receive about the limits of their freedom. Before they learn to question authority, they are taught to anticipate it. They learn what their fathers may object to, or what might anger their brothers or uncles, or what their relatives or even neighbors might think and what their husbands eventually permit. All before they even learn to ask themselves of what they want.

And sometimes the person enforcing these limitations is not a man at all.

It’s the mother. The sister. The aunt. The grandmother.

Women often become the ones who pass these rules to the next generation, becoming the most effective guardians of these rules that once constrained them too. Having internalized a system that taught them to associate obedience with virtue, they can become the custodians of that definition, further extending it towards the next generation of impressionable younger girls.

At the heart of it, this is the quiet paradox: the mothers who protect the patriarchy and the sons it protects.

Meanwhile the son learns a completely different lesson. A man’s discomfort becomes the rule for the women around them. His preferences become something they are expected to anticipate, accommodate and obey.

These sons watch from the other side of the households, learning a completely different lesson. His comfort is always prioritized. His anger becomes something to avoid rather than something to examine. His preferences become a collective concern for women around him. That’s the difference a girl is trained to shrink herself, while the boy is taught to grow and that the world will rearrange itself around his comfort. Even though they might be living under the same roof, both inherit different realities of space, voice and autonomy.

For many women it begins as a set of small everyday corrections a small warning before leaving the house, a comment about clothes and makeup and the most prominent “what will people say” may seem as small corrections but with time it accumulates and manifest into deep internalization of limitations. And by the time young women realize and begin to question this system the damage is already done, the lessons of anticipation are already second nature. Individually, these actions seem harmless and insignificant, even seen a protective, and can be concealed as ordinary advice for safety. These exact statement of concerns when repeated long enough accumulate into something much deeper, an internalized understanding of a women’s limitations.

When freedom finally arrives as a thought or an idea, these women have to fight against years of conditioning and training, that has taught them that their restrictions comes before their choices.

The consequences of this training do not just stay confined to women but also to the men. When a young boy raised in a more conservative environment where they learn women are inherently submissive, rather than having distinct personalities, and their own opinions, they often feel entitled to have a sort of an opinion regarding women’s lives and choices, to these men a women’s choice starts to look arbitrary, as it lacks validation from their patriarchal mindset.

To understand this argument from a more psychologically profound lens. We need to look into the concept of threatened masculinity, this is where the idea shifts from simple entitlement to a more defensive mechanism for men.

In a patriarchal society, rather than men seeing women as equal autonomous counter parts with independent minds, lives and choices. These men seen a women’s autonomy as a direct threat to their masculinity. When these men approach women with independence regarding her choice in life in any aspects, they see that independence as a direct threat that destabilizes their learned perception regarding traditional hierarchy where men are dominant. For these men who sit at an apex position, a woman following a non-traditional path triggers a defensive mechanism that urges them to reclaim a false fragile sense of authority.

Perhaps the most difficult part of navigating womanhood in Pakistan is that authority rarely exists in one place.

It can exist in a father, uncle, bother or even mother-in-laws. In families it exists but, it also exists in the community, the classrooms, the workplace and around the neighborhood. A woman can become answerable to the whole society and for other women as well because her behavior seems to reflect something greater than herself.

Her reputation ends up becoming a communal property.

Respectability for women is presented as something a woman should preserve. But the consequences of losing respect for women and men is rarely seen as equal. A man’s mistake is mostly interpreted as something that is individual failure, where as a woman’s mistake is treated as the reflection of her upbringing, morality and family.

And because these norms are social rather than personal challenging them can carry a cost beyond basic disagreement. This is also why change is so complex. Simply changing or challenging the rule is much simpler when there is one-person dictating the rule. Changing and challenging a social expectation that has been distributed across the environment is much more complex. It makes you question not only who has the right to impose a boundary, and also why such boundaries are understood as a set norm in the society.

Perhaps the more important question is therefore not whether Pakistani women are allowed to make certain choices.

It is why those choices are treated as something society has the right to approve or reject at all.