Anticipating authority: Early lessons of obedience...

Summary

• 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.
• In a patriarchal society, rather than men seeing women as equal autonomous counter parts with independent minds, lives and choices.

AI Generated Summary

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.