Malala trolled for sporting jeans as male gaze ignores a woman's message, again
Malala Yousafzai is the youngest recipient of the Nobel prize. [Photo courtesy: Reuters]
Malala Yousafzai is being criticised again, this time over an unverified picture in which she is seen wearing jeans and boots. Before we get smug and go "Oh look Pakistan so backward", let us remember Mithali Raj was trolled just a month ago for wearing a spaghetti top.
Before we say "It's just some tweets, why can't they be ignored", let us remember that tweets are in effect statements hurled at you in a huge room full of people, with the potential to influence opinion about you.
More than that, tweets are proof that some people think they have the right to not just have a derogatory opinion about you, but to publicly state it to shame you. That the targets for the shaming are usually women says a lot about the way society continues to view them.
For a certain section of society, a woman can never be more than the clothes she wears. Also, the easiest way to discredit a woman and everything she stands for is to attack her for immodesty. An immodest woman is unworthy of respect, and nothing she says carries any weight any longer.
That was the reason the bullet directly targeted her head long time ago.#MalalaYousafzai #UK pic.twitter.com/M1DGEhLwho
— Muhammad Waqas Awan (@Waqas6671) October 15, 2017
want a nobel prize and getting admission into Oxford University? Step 1: get shot :P #MalalaYousafzai. so much for women rights advocacy lol
— Mr Nobody (@byhramkhan) October 10, 2017
Malala was shot in the head for wanting to study. Today, she is being hounded and shamed for supposedly wearing the clothes of her choice. The attackers have compared her to a porn star, lamented that she is unaccompanied by her father, and pronounced her defection to the other side complete - first, she embraced the West's education, now their clothes.
Malala stands for women's right to study, to determine the course of their own lives. For patriarchy, that is apocalyptic. What better way to dirty her message than to connect it to dishonor?
Women who defy men's diktats become "shameless". They "betray their religion". They "parade their bodies". They are "sluts". Let any woman who wanted to emulate Malala keep that in mind.
Also, the length of a woman's skirt can unite fundamentalists on the wildest ends of the religion spectrum. In Banaras Hindu University, after women protested against the molestation of a fellow student, the RSS-approved V-C first claimed the protesters were women who "stay out of the hostel till 8 pm", and then told the girls that complaining about sexual harassment is "like taking their dignity to the market".
A woman in public is never an individual in public. She is the honour of her family, her community. Essentially, she is the property of men, and hence they have the right to police her clothes and her conduct.
Even those who seek to distance themselves from unabashed, in-full-glory patriarchy often fail to see women as students,sportspersons, working professionals - she is always a woman first.
Before Malala and Mithali, Irfan Pathan's wife was targeted for an "indecent" picture. Priyanka Chopra was attacked for showing her legs when she met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Germany.
All these women were attacked viciously for their clothes when the clothes were just incidental to what they were doing - meeting the Prime Minister in Chopra's case, just going about their lives in the other cases. Type any important woman's name + wardrobe - Angela Merkel, Theresa May, Margaret Thatcher, Christine Lagarde - and you will be rewarded with a wealth of intellectual literature. Success rate for men leaders is nowhere close.
This is why "power dressing" is never empowering. It says that whether a woman is running a country or a bank, she is, first and foremost, the subject of the male gaze. The focus on clothes means that a woman is not an individual, but what she appears in the eyes of the men looking at her - frumpy, boring, sexy, slutty - and that is the most important part of her identity.
One "woman empowerment" image shared widely in India was of a group of ISRO scientists who worked on the launch of the Mangalyaan. The focus was not that these women had sent a craft to the moon, but that they were wearing Indian clothes.
#Feminists who find saree clad women working at ISRO regressive, fight for "women rights" like wearing short clothes, smoking in public..
— Ruchir Modi ???????? (@Ruchir78) April 22, 2016
Chanel's Karl Lagerfeld once said Angela Merkel wore clothes of "bad proportions like the cut, the clothes like for a guy".
Women taking their lives - or a company, or a nation - in their hands threatens the power structure patriarchy has nourished and nurtured over millennia. Malala had once said that the extremists are "are afraid of women, the power of the voice of women frightens them". That is true not just for the Taliban, but patriarchy the world over.