I'm piggybacking here on Asad's post "I wonder how they got on with it..." as well as Mizz's comments in response to that post.
[Irrelevant aside: my general absence from this blog for a while can be explained by the fact that I've had craploads to do; the frequent posting since yesterday has to do with the fact that I'm sick and in bed, can't quite work but my brain is still racing so anticipate on seeing me around these environs quite a bit over the next few days as I work on recuperating.]
What I'm going to talk about is specific to my experiences growing up in Pakistan as well as continuing to experience life as [partly] Pakistani (nationally/culturally speaking) even after moving to the US in 1994. Why the explanation? Because the "we" I'm speaking of here is a "Pakistani we" as in that's where I'm coming from. This is not to diminish the fact that a "non-Pakistani we" might have gone through the same experience but just to ground what I'm about to say in a specific empirical context.
I know that "Sati" and "Savitri" are figures in Hindu mythology. Without getting lost in the details (since they aren't quite what this post is about and I'd have to do a whole lot more research to talk about that which would mean taking time away from the dissertation that I can't afford), I do recall that these were women of great courage and strength in that they stood up for their rights - what others might describe as "fighting The Patriarchy" but I won't (if you ask me I'll put up a separate post one of these days explaining why :-)!) - and fought for what they thought was just or simply what they wanted. I do remember something about their displays of courage being connected with men whom they wanted to be with or save somehow but don't quote me on that. Either way, the picture of these two women are individuals who wanted to live life (and the after-life) on their own terms is a far cry from the concocted archetype they've inspired. Extremely bizarre, yes? Why do I say that?
Because the archetype paints a picture of a submissive woman who lets life happen to her. She has no desires per se, especially sexual ones. She's expected to want to have sex or display physical affection only when a man expresses this need for it. There's nothing about this woman that isn't "Pure" or "Holy". She'd probably put "Miss Goody Two Shoes" to shame. She's emotionally restrained yet oddly enough the fact that she doesn't want to have sex to satisfy her own needs somehow means that her love for you is purer, truer, more intense. (Even more strange considering that it's probably kind of natural to be affectionate towards the person you love however you display that affection). You get the picture....
How does this figure into my life or generally in a Pakistani or "Desi" woman's life? First, you spend your teenage years receiving (generally unsolicited) advice not so much by folks older than you but your peers of roughly the same age and sex making the case - either explicitly or implicitly but always reminding you nonetheless - never to do anything "physical". Btw, that sounds like a really strange phrase to me logically speaking - if you're in the same room as someone else aren't you physical-ly in the same space as them? Yes, yes I know that's not what "physical" means in that context. What's the rationale? It would still make sense to me if it was a roundabout way of trying to keep teenage pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases at bay.(Yes I've heard of contraception but I honestly don't think know any 14 year olds who would have been or are) But the concern was generally of the "guys don't marry bad girls" (read: guys don't marry girls who engage in physical displays of affection) variant.
In your 20s you're supposed to either get married or be in relationships leading to marriage sooner rather than later. What's the story then? You're still going to have to put up a "Sati Savitri" act because you "won't be able to hook him". That continues into your 30s although people stop talking about it as much. Or rather the conversation shifts so that most of the married women (because of course we should have achieved marriage-hood before stepping beyond 25!) go into convulsions if you talk about "it" aka your sex life and whether or not you enjoy "it", initiate "it" and the romantic getaway you have planned etc? The advice then is to "play hard to get" because you don't want your husband to think you're a "slut" and because he should have to work to earn your love (huh?). Umm if I have someone in my life whom I love, then why do I need to play it cool - emotionally, physically, etc - to have "it" or to let him have "it"? More basically even, what is "it" that I'm supposed to be getting and why should I have to play hard to get "it"? Shouldn't the showing of love go hand-in-hand with nurturing any relationship? Nopes, apparently playing Sati Savitri does if I believe the herd.
I'm also amused by the emphasis on showing restraint when it comes to "physical acts of affection". This is further complicated by the fact that you aren't ever supposed to go up to a guy and ask him out or if you're already in a relationship be the first one to tell him you love him or that you want to marry him lest you undermine your purity - if you're too forward he'll never marry you.
My $0.01 - if there's never any display of love or affection on my part why the hell would any guy want to be with me? What would be the point even? Also, isn't marriage an arrangement in which emotional security and commitment are numero uno...IMHO at least?
Why am I rambling about this? 4 things that irk me:
1) Are we, as women, expected to orient everything we do in life towards getting and staying married* (asap)?
[*Just to clarify, by using the phrase "staying married" I don't mean to imply that people should be walking out their marriages left, right, and center....for me getting married implies staying married but if you're stuck in a relationship that's destructive you have every right to- and should - leave....hence the differentiation because I don't think getting married = staying married irrespective.]
2) Presuming that marriage is about companionship, developing emotional bonds further, and also starting a family I don't quite see how you would accomplish that if you were busy playing The Frigid Bitch?
3) From the general consensus, it seems like the Sati-Savitri doesn't make the first move romantically either. That's just plain tedious.
4) For the most part, I've always heard this advice from women. This is not to say that there aren't men who don't think like that but I'm not quite sure what's going on the other side of the fence. I wonder if women are making this up - after all my species has a tendency to fault men excessively using the Mars/Venus stereotypes unabashedly and often unthinkingly. Yup it's good for a laugh but it's strange that we would actually try to make sense of our relationships from the kind of check-list you find in these books. For example, I saw this segment on The Today Show (NBC) a few weeks ago. The details are fuzzy but there was a male author and a female psychiatrist who had a practice of her own counseling couples and had also written some kind of odd advice book for women on how to land men or some such thing. Both of them were asked to talk about what men wanted from women. I felt that the psychiatrist submitted to all the stereotypes eventually suggesting that guys only like meek, mindless women who never make the first move. The author sounded a bit more realistic in that what he sounded said more like the relationships I've been in or observed. Perhaps I found his words more credible because they resonated. Also his book was based on in-depth interviews with men whereas the psychiatrist just seemed to be ranting. But I digress. What I wonder is if men *actually* want to be with Sati Savitris or is this something women have made up in the name of preserving a particular kind of identity? Just on a practical level, wouldn't men want to try less to guage the other person's emotions? Wouldn't it be easier for them if they didn't have to keep guessing all the time. Yup there's something to be said for "keeping the mystery alive" but the Cold Fish that is the Sati Savitri takes it to an extreme IMHO.
So here are a couple of questions (this is the "sort-of-poll" bit...let's call it an "ur-poll") that I'd like to throw out there:
Q1: Is the Sati-Savitri someone you find appealing or a bit of a drag or somewhere else in between?
Q2: Like Asad mentioned, if a woman makes the first move does that make her "too aggressive", "a pervert", etc in your books?
Blog-readers: your answers and/or thoughts about anything else that occurred to you while reading this? I'd love to hear from both the "hazraat" (men) and the "khawateen" (women)....but if you're the one who loves to preach sati-savitriing as a way of life then it'd be okay if you held yourselves back...discriminatory perhaps but who said we were interested in being politically correct, right Asad?
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Thanks muchly Asad for the compliment. Some thoughts that I'll number not in order of preference but because I can't seem to both remember what I'm saying and weave it together...in other words, more percolation needed but there are some thoughts bubbling to the surface:
1. I like that you draw a distinction between politics vs. political...makes me think of my own dissertation so it was just nice to see someone using it to talk about stuff outside of an academic-analysis. Maybe a post on the guy who wrote about the other guy with the pendulum might be forthcoming from your end?
2. Agreed on the chastity belt thing. Just find it strange that if its supposedly about relating to the opposite sex why is the same sex handing out unsolicited advice.
3. The other problem, connected to #2 is that there is a larger tendency to generalize human relationships. Even at the scale where I generalize "you" in a convo with someone else might not work because the configuration that is you and me isn't necessarily always you and person X. Does that make some sense?
4. I know you weren't trying to present a battle of the sexes but just sharing your experiences, your perspective as a man.
5. A thought that fell into my head while reading your comments: a relationship, IMHO, should be about spontaneously-being-who-you-are-both-separately-and-together. It's when we start having conversations with ourselves that build up into a crescendo of frenzy so that by the time we talk to others we've already gone down another road without letting them really know we expect them to catch up. That's an unhealthy communication pattern but what it's also a sign of is that someone's needs aren't being met. So back to the "spontaneity" bit - instead of thinking about "Mars" vs. "Venus" or the "unsolicited advice" wouldn't it make sense to "just be" and react to the situation at hand as it unfolds? I'm not saying that we can't think or shouldn't....just that emotions are messy enough that they need to be handled with care. Personally, I know that my relationships have worked best when I shut everything else out and just react....exactly like a tango....you make some moves, your partner makes some moves, but the key is that you're constantly responding to each other rather than The Rules per se but rough contours of what a healthy and loving relationship means for you.
6. LOL on the software and hooked analogy :-). I know lots of women who think like that so I don't pity the menfolk for exhibiting behaviors that these women describe as "commitment-phobic". What I don't understand is when men actually say it? Do they really want to be trapped? Doesn't sound very appealing to me...like you said, you want the software you thought you were getting. I for one would prefer not to 'hook' a man - "phansao" in local Pakistani terminology - but rather just 'be together' and if it happens that we both think that being together should be "and they lived happily ever after" then I'm going to ecstatically share the moment with my loved ones, gussy up, and dance the night away to celebrate the beginning of a new journey.
7. Re: the flip side you described....it's funny (as in bizarre) that both women and men get cast in the role of culprits for similar reasons. There's this weird undertone of purity and impurity and the assumption that you must feel guilty if you fall in the latter camp in all of this. Not sure why this is the case. It's kind of like we think we're living in Eden, right? You must be absolutely pure and then you get married and procreate. Anything less then it's like being kicked out of The Garden - the "shame" factor seems to hang over our heads constantly and it's what shapes our social interactions as well. It's probably where "rules" come from - I have nothing against that coz I like the idea of having an organized, relatively unchaotic way of becoming a society. What bothers me is that if someone doesn't fit within your moral register they're automatically "impure". Realistically, if X isn't something I quite consider a sin in my books then technically in doing X I haven't metamorphosed into an immoral whore. When I say "s/he does X and that's bad, tsk tsk tsk" what it actually means is that I don't approve or I wouldn't do it. And that's the key- I wouldn't do it so the disconnect is that we're working with different values....this is problematic when we assume our values to be universal. Just because someone looks like me, thinks like me, belongs to the same culture or society or religion it doesn't mean s/he does things exactly the way I do. We have to come to terms with that I think - and not just in romantic relationships but in all our relationships IMHO. That is, our "shoulds" are particular and not universal. If you meet someone whose "shoulds" you have a problem with it's not his/her fault or shortcoming but it's just that there's a disconnect between you two - that's all. So walk away if you can't deal with it but for the love of God don't make him/her feel like they've fallen out of grace with all things good and Godly and what have you!
A bunch of other stuff to say (shock!) but so many things could be blog-posts so I'll save them for now...onwards!
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