Posts Tagged misogyny

Media misogyny

26 October 2009
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My piece for The Friday Times

Pakistan’s electronic media is not accountable to anyone except to the barons and the market. And let us not forget that the barons, the mafia and the market are great bedfellows

Stereotype sells and its reinforcement is a popular cause. Perhaps this is why the electronic media has taken the inherent sexism of mainstream Urdu media to new heights. A new culture of real-time degradation of women is in vogue – all in the name of entertainment and the vague estimation of ratings that guarantee commercial earnings.

In the recent weeks, we were shamelessly entertained by a reality-TV-esque squabble between two parliamentarians who called each other names. Dr Firdous Ashiq Awan, a sitting federal minister of the ruling party, and Kashmala Tariq, a doyenne of the Musharraf regime entered into an argument over switching of political loyalties. Kashmala had a fair point: Dr Awan switched her party before the 2008 election and joined the PPP. Once confronted with this uncomfortable truth, she became abusive to the extent of questioning Kashamla’s ‘character’, a generally male-defined view of women’s sexuality in Pakistan. (more…)

This is a long war

18 June 2009
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Published in The NEWS
By Raza Rumi

This is a critical moment in our history perhaps unmatched for its severity and its brutal reality. The experiential nightmare that our country is passing through is perhaps unparalleled for the enemy is neither foreign nor fully identifiable. At the same time, never has there been a clear backing of a military campaign against domestic agents of subversion and anarchy. Forget the doctored samples of opinion polls, often conducted by foreign agencies. That by itself should make us ashamed for our proclivity to accept what others have to analyse and determine for us. Even ignore the fringe voices of dissent led by those who neither have credibility or sagacity to comprehend the existential crisis faced by Pakistan. The army has shown vision and displayed courage in tackling a menace that alas is a home-grown cancer due to our short-sighted strategies in pursuit of phantom depths. The battle to be won is now the country itself.

The political consensus of sorts that has accompanied the military action against the Taliban is also remarkable. Notwithstanding the spin doctors posing as analyst-anchors on the idiot box, the political class has recognised that its survival is embedded in the battle against extremism that predicates itself on elimination of sane, moderate and secular politics itself. This was the Swat model – blow the polity to bits and create a vacuum for a takeover. An age-old recipe employed by the hordes from Central Asia that invaded Muslim Delhi again and again during Sultanate and Mughal periods of our common histories which refuse to be partitioned. (more…)

Through a screen, darkly

18 September 2008
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Pakistani cable operators, following the cyclical escalation of imagined hatreds, discontinued the transmission of Indian satellite channels in 2002. The absence of Indian TV soaps, fodder for an entertainment hungry populace, was widely mourned. Once, not long ago, the axiomatic edge of Pakistan’s TV serials was widely acknowledged both in Pakistan and in India. No longer. This is the age of the market, of selling dreams and drama, of converting the stereotype into a saleable commodity and citing it on the cultural stock exchange.

The popularity of Hindi language soaps is not limited to Pakistan. I have seen squatters in Dhaka’s decrepit Bihari camp, Bangladesh’s largest no man’s land, glued to their colour TV sets. Here, Biharis lack citizenship; they are technically Pakistani, having opted for the Land of the Pure at the cessation of Bangladesh in 1971. But Pakistan doesn’t want them and so they continue to live in limbo. Yet, Star Plus is still beamed 24/7 into their tiny, cramped, leaking shacks. Indian soaps have made inroads even into Afghanistan, that newly liberated project of global corporate interests. They were wildly popular until the Afghan government banned them as inimical to Afghani values.

The soaring audience of Star Plus and Zee TV serials, with their in-your-face parivar mantras, is known all too well. The hype is also a constructed story of success and market acquisition. On the face of it, the commodification of entertainment is a global phenomenon. So what’s the problem, one might ask, given that most of us post-colonial wannabes in South Asia want to integrate into the global economy and its uniform cultural variants? Junk food, designer brands, pop music and the corporate media ethos are all “signs of progress.” (more…)