Their wedding day.

We call it “Decemberistan” as though the season belongs to the ritual. Denoting the wedding season with its own name and devoting a season to it is deliberate. It reflects our collective priorities. It is our way of declaring that the institution of marriage takes precedence above all else and that the festivities associated with it deserve the same standard.

Before we go further, a disclaimer1 for the reader regarding what this essay is:

This is an essay about a specific slice of Pakistani womanhood. Decemberistan, as I have described it, belongs to cosmopolitan hubs. To the neighbourhoods with backyards that represent generations of wealth hoarded and passed down. It belongs to the upper class that has a particular stake in the upholding of marriage. It is one of the primary mechanisms through which wealth is consolidated and kept within families and the current hierarchy is maintained. For women without access to this privilege the decision to opt into or out of marriage is not a choice in the way this essay describes.

It is also necessary to say this: marriage does not only happen through elaborate celebration and seduction. It happens by force. In situations where the festivities of a wedding are only a way to conceal the bride’s resistance to being placed into a life she did not choose. It happens when women marry to escape abuse at home, hoping that a husband will be less violent than a controlling father or a claustrophobic extended family. For these women the wedding industrial complex is not a seduction. It is a ceremony performed over their objection. This essay does not encompass their experience because that requires its own dedicated space.

Pakistan’s wedding industry is worth2 roughly what the state spends educating its entire population.3 Where a society spends its money tells you what it values and the collective decision Pakistani society seems to have made is clear.

This decision that is ultimately made for women (even when they think they are the ones making it) has consequences that go beyond devoting a season to a ritual. It has tangible consequences on what we owe young girls and what we prioritise in relation to their future.

Adrienne Rich identified the withholding of education from women as one of the central mechanisms by which compulsory heterosexuality is maintained, and these numbers make this mechanism visible. According to Save the Children “A total of 38% of school age children are out of school, with more girls than boys not attending classes. In Balochistan in southwest Pakistan, 75% of girls are missing out on education.” The population being most underserved by education spending is the same population being most aggressively targeted by the wedding industry.

But these figures wane when you reject reality and embrace what you witness through your social media feeds as the only truth that matters. These past few months every time I have opened Instagram, someone I know is either getting married, attending someone else’s wedding, or managing to do both simultaneously. Watching stories and liking posts on Instagram lets you forget the price tag for a while. Decemberistan calls on you to suspend disbelief and forget financial woes.

It makes the extravagance feel accessible and affordable, even if that means a hefty loan from the bank to finance a dream you have always dreamt.

Wrapped in this extravagance is a fantasy and a feeling that most women are raised to desire and chase. The feeling of being, for once, completely and uncontestedly at the center of the world (our world in particular). The allure of the festivities distracts from the extraordinary cost, both material and immaterial. Pakistani families take up loans of up to 3 million rupees to finance a single wedding. But when a woman goes into debt for her wedding, she can calculate what she owes and make a plan to repay it. The cost she cannot calculate or repay?

Herself.

Shaadi is so essential to the indoctrination curriculum for younger girls and unmarried women that it is the main plot-line for popular culture in the country (television shows like Nida Yasir’s morning show or popular drama serials such as Humsafar and Zindagi Gulzar Hai). I remember watching some of these shows while I was growing up and questioning why, even when there was an attempt at critiquing the institution of marriage by showing that abuse and violence were common issues married women face, the solution was somehow still marriage. As if the problem is not the institution but a few bad apples and finding the right one is all it takes to address this structural oppression.

Popular culture now conditions us more rigorously through social media and Decemberistan offers us the salvation we witnessed the women in these dramas experience. The happily ever after that our mothers never got to have but maybe we could.

Decemberistan, we are told, is for the bride. It is sold to us under the guise of something we have always wanted. A celebration. A day which promises to unequivocally prioritise us and our desires. But not in a way that improves our lives even after the bridal wear sheds. Maybe this is why our weddings span over days and sometimes weeks. It is almost as if it is the only way to delay the transition from a bride to a wife. And everyone who profits from this delay—the designers, the vendors, the banquet hall owners, the patriarchs, the institution of marriage—all of them let you perform emancipation, because they all know it ends as soon as the shehnai stops.

The Conflation

A marriage is a contract. In many (if not most) cases one that signals finality and completion for a woman. It is a sense of “completion” that women are taught to crave from girlhood. They are taught that no matter what they achieve in life, it will fall short if it comes at the expense of marriage. In this way, a marriage signals to society that a woman is finally good enough now that she has been chosen once and for all. A wedding is a celebration of this achievement. In essence a wedding is a party for a milestone and the marriage is the milestone.

So if a wedding is simply a party why does it receive preferential treatment in the hierarchy of celebrations? Why does it get to be any different than a birthday or a graduation party or a school farewell—all of which mark important milestones in our lives. What makes weddings so special that most women have dreamt (elaborately) of becoming a bride and walking down the aisle?

When I started writing this essay I was partially unconvinced that wedding celebrations needed to be uniquely and exclusively grand. Now that I am finally putting down every thought I have had since the inception of this idea, I am completely unconvinced that weddings are special enough to justify the debt we accrue (for them). They are only made special because of marriage. Simone de Beauvoir observed that marriage is not one choice among many but the only destination a woman’s life is understood to be moving toward. It offers a finality that achieving academic and professional milestones such as a degree or a dream job cannot. Not because these accomplishments are not fulfilling, but because we are taught to view ourselves as incomplete and unsuccessful until our efforts land us a man who decides to give us his name.

Without it we are not good enough.

We are taught to compete with other women for the prize of life-long male companionship. In a society where our worth is governed by our association to a man at any given moment (father, brother, husband, son), this companionship is social currency. We spend our whole life shrinking ourselves and becoming who we are supposed to become. A good woman. A marriageable woman. The wedding is the shiny medal that signifies that we were successful in this quest. That we do not have to compete anymore. That we are finally spoken for and chosen unequivocally.

That we won. What we have won is revealed only once the bride becomes a wife.

Marriage, we are asked to believe without questioning, is a gateway to a life well-lived. It is a social passport that unlocks the social validation we grow up craving. Trips to the gynaecologist no longer feel as tense when the question of sexual activity comes up and your husband is sitting right next to you. Sex is no longer deviant or unregulated female desire, but an essential ingredient to maintain a relationship. Conversations about “trying for a baby” are met with genuine curiosity instead of shame and sanction. If the police stop you and your partner for embracing each other or engaging in a public display of affection, your nikkahnama acts as a get out of jail free card that lets you look down on unmarried couples doing the same.

In Urdu, colloquially, the term used for weddings is the same as the term used for marriage. Shaadi. Though the wedding industry seems to have reframed it to shaadi ka din (day of the wedding/shaadi). Implicit in this conflation is an intent to associate one with the other. Adrienne Rich argued that the glamorization of so-called sexual liberation of women is one of the central mechanisms by which marriage as an institution is maintained. The spectacle of the wedding, the influencer bride dancing to her heart’s decree, the Decemberistan aesthetic all function precisely this way. They look like freedom.

They are not.

You cannot have one without the other. Silvia Federici argued that the domestic role assigned to women was not natural but constructed, engineered to ensure that the unpaid labour a wife provides would remain invisible and uncompensated. The wedding is the ceremony that initiates this arrangement. The debt families accrue to fund it is, in this light, an entry fee into a system designed to extract far more than it ever returns.

Women do not have to opt into the institution of marriage to go on dates, have sex, or mark every milestone with the same enthusiasm reserved for a wedding. They do not have to spend their entire lives earning this pleasure.

But if women in this country realised this, the institution of marriage and its closest benefactors capitalism and patriarchy, would be in disarray.

What a Wedding Actually Gives Women

When else is a Pakistani woman publicly and lavishly celebrated? When a suitable boy and his family choose her for marriage. When she gives birth, especially to a boy. When her children achieve a milestone she could never dream of. When she proves herself to be a good wife and allows her husband a second wife.

Every item on this list celebrates her in relation to someone else or marks her joyful submission to the roles ascribed to her. She is still not at the center. Her proximity to a man is.

The wedding day feels different though. The bride is the moment. The groom is merely a side character. It is the only culturally sanctioned moment in which a Pakistani woman is permitted to occupy the center. This day promises to be a celebration of her womanhood.

But there are two other ways a Pakistani woman finds herself at the center. The first is as a warning. To be at the center this way is humiliating. It requires you to justify your existence, to apologize for simply being. I know this because I have been this woman—shamed for being over-confident, for my sexuality, for refusing to shrink. The second is as a prize. When a woman is celebrated in mainstream Pakistan it is conditional. Women who march on Women’s Day are reprimanded. The celebration that is permitted is a celebration of surrender—of a woman accepting her fate, being rewarded for her docility. Her true self is nowhere in it.

The wedding is the only offer that claims to be neither.

From birth, a girl’s existence is met with mourning; parents are commiserated, prayers are offered for a son next time. She witnesses her male counterparts celebrated for the smallest wins while her own access to achievement narrows the older she gets. She does not know what it feels like to be celebrated simply for being. The wedding arrives and says: today, no justification required. No submission demanded. Just you, at the center, uncontested. This is the only day she comes close to experiencing a freedom she had only heard of in fairy tales.

Fatima Mernissi argued that the entire Muslim social structure can be seen as a defense against the disruptive power of female sexuality. Our whole lives we are told to put our lives on hold for this day. Shaadi ke baad jo marzi hai karlena. Shohar se ijazat le ke apni marzi karna (Do whatever you want once you are married. Ask your husband for permission and then do what your heart wills). Our society is organised around regulating and institutionally containing female desire.

Marriage grants women a permit to access and exercise these desires. Her wedding day is a celebration of this containment. The desire has been redirected and channelled into an institution that claims it as its own. What feels like liberation is, on closer inspection, a permit.

As I get older I often wonder how many people have gotten married just so they could date in peace.

The wedding industry goes beyond the designers and the vendors. There is big money in making the union possible in the first place. MuzzMatch (a muslim dating app) renders the traditional practice of rishta aunties acting as a hitch obsolete. It gives you the opportunity to browse bachelors on your own. And while it does make the process of finding yourself a husband less humiliating in comparison to being sold as a product to eligible men by some aunty, you cannot convince me that it is not simply a dating app in modest apparel.

This branding makes a socially sanctioned desire permissible by associating it with the goal of marriage. Kecia Ali has shown that Islamic jurisprudence has historically constructed marriage as the institution that makes female sexuality legally available within it and unsanctioned outside it—MuzzMatch gives this centuries-old architecture a user interface.

The main sell of the wedding day is the ability to occupy the center. But this is also the trap—opt into the institution of marriage and you may never occupy it again.

The Bride vs. The Wife

This year for my 26th birthday, I threw myself a fake wedding. There was a saree made specifically for the occasion, a dholki setup, and every person I love arranged around me. My friends—most of whom had never met each other—came together to ensure I was having the best time. The rituals of a dholki removed the awkwardness between them. They all knew their role as wedding guests and performed it naturally. And in that way the bonding between them came almost organically.

What made it different from every other celebration I had been a part of was the ease of it. I have always felt a queasy feeling when people sing happy birthday and all eyes turn to me. That feeling did not exist that day. I was at the center and it felt entirely natural—because the structure of the ritual said I was supposed to be.

The wedding is the peak moment before the descent into domestic obligation. The bride is allowed the experience of a subject (autonomous) once before she becomes a function (a role or tool). My fake wedding gave me the opportunity to enjoy this autonomy without the fear of losing it. By virtue of it not being real, the pressure of satisfying in-laws and adhering to social standards was removed. The wedding did not have to meet anyone’s criteria of respectability. It was mine to enjoy.

A bride and a wife are not the same performance. Being a bride feels incredibly special. Being a wife is an obligation, De Beauvoir would call it a function, the performance of a role rather than the living of a life. Therefore, the emotions each role produces are also entirely different even though the industry sells them as one continuous experience. On her wedding day a woman is centered, adorned, celebrated for herself. Once the wedding ends, the transition to a marriage is marked by the instant change in expectations. She becomes a representative of her husband and his family. Though she remains the main attraction (for a while) this time the spotlight serves a different purpose. It highlights how unfamiliar she is with the script despite having rehearsed it her whole life. As the wife, she must perform the role to the best of her abilities or stay yearning for material security in her new life. Kecia Ali has shown that Islamic jurisprudence historically constructed the marriage contract as an exchange of obligations—the wife’s obedience and availability in return for the husband’s financial maintenance. The wedding celebrates the beginning of this arrangement while decorating it beyond recognition.

The transition from bride to wife begins the moment the engagement is announced (but settles in more firmly post wedding). What follows happens in three stages:

1. Anticipatory conditioning: From girlhood women are told that compromise in marriage signals virtuosity. Federici argued that the domestic role assigned to women was constructed to ensure that the unpaid labour a wife provides remains invisible and uncompensated. The conditioning that makes compromise feel like virtue is the system preparing her for work she will never be paid for. Women (as wives) are rewarded for their obedience and availability through their husband’s financial maintenance and his (conditional) decision not to share himself with three other wives. The script of this scene is handed to women early in life and so when it actually happens, the sacrifice feels like evidence that they are doing marriage correctly.

2. Cognitive siege: The identity crisis, the new expectations, and the performance demanded of them is all-consuming and exhausting. Even when women consciously register what is happening to them, they do not have the bandwidth to act on that knowledge. As they lose themselves, they also lose sight of what they truly desire. Deconstructing an identity they were raised to believe as the ultimate destination takes energy. Standing up for what you want requires knowing yourself enough to understand your needs and wants. It also runs the risk of losing all that you have ever known, and with that the privilege that comes giving into the demands of hegemonic femininity. This exhaustion and cognitive dissonance through disconnection from self is what upholds the institution of marriage. I have watched this transition happen to many friends who I have lost to their marriages. Before their wedding our conversations were full. After the engagement it all became about marriage. It is the siege happening in real time and no way to stop it but the next stage.

3. Retrospective grief and cope: In retrospect the shape of what happened becomes visible. But by then life is already structured around the marriage itself. There is a lot of grief in this process. And it is almost never named publicly—because to name it would be to indict a choice that was supposed to be the pinnacle of a woman’s achievement. Women reconcile the loss by reminding themselves this is what they always wanted. Deniz Kandiyoti identified this as the logic of classic patriarchy. Women endure present hardship in exchange for future power. The wife who submits today is investing in the authority she will wield as a mother-in-law tomorrow. The role does not disappear. It is simply transferred to the next woman in line. This is how the system reproduces itself through the women who have already paid the price and need the next generation to pay it too.

But as traditional patriarchal bargains stop feeling as rewarding, women begin seeking new terms. The woman who throws herself a fake wedding is finding a new bargain, one that gives her the celebration without the contract.

The Feminist Fear Theory

The most recent granular national data on marriage patterns in Pakistan comes from the Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey of 2017-18, analyzed by Gallup Pakistan. It shows that the median age at first marriage rose by 1.8 years over three decades, from 18.6 in 1990 to 20.4 in 2017. In urban areas this increase was steeper—from 19 to 21 over the same period. The percentage of women married before 18 fell from 41% in 1990 to 29.3% in 2017. A reduction of 12% over thirty years. The data also shows that a woman with higher education and workforce experience married more than six years later than a woman with no education who had not worked before marriage. Education and employment delayed marriage. The trend was clear and it was moving in one direction.

Then something shifted.

There is no comprehensive post-pandemic national data on marriage rates yet. What we have instead is anecdotal evidence, and it points in the opposite direction from the pre-2018 trend. Most of my batchmates from high school are already married. The generation before them, my cousins, the millennials, married closer to their thirties. My generation is marrying younger, not letting education or jobs delay this milestone for them. This is despite being more educated and more financially independent than any that came before. I cannot prove this statistically. What I can do is ask why.

My theory is this. The delayed marriage trend among educated urban women was a threat. A woman who earns her own income, who has a degree and a social life, who can date and travel and build a career, has less practical need for the institution of marriage than her mother did. Silvia Federici argued that capitalism’s development depended on women’s unpaid reproductive labour—any threat to the supply of that labour is a threat to the system itself. The wedding industry is the recruitment mechanism for that system. When recruitment starts to falter the incentive has to become more extravagant.

The sell has had to change.

Fatima Mernissi argued that Islamic fundamentalism is in part a defense against recent changes in sex roles and perceptions of sexual identity. The wedding industry’s intensification follows the same logic. When female self-determination rises the institution responds through a rebrand. Deniz Kandiyoti identified this pattern as a patriarchal bargain entering crisis — when the old terms stop feeling rewarding women begin to seek new ones, and the system responds by making the original bargain look more appealing. The spectacle of Decemberistan is precisely that response.

For my mother’s generation marriage offered survival through financial security. For my generation it offers the relief of being permanently chosen. In a generation defined by situationships and the exhaustion from uncertainty, marriage promises stability by removing you from a dating pool that only seems to be getting worse. You no longer have to audition and perform perfection for someone to choose you.

You are spoken for once and for all.

And the industry knows exactly which demographics to target and what story to tell.4 Every shaadi season my social media fills with influencer weddings. Grand, lavish, multiple outfit changes, every moment documented. The photography page tagged as a collaborator, the designer outfits that are almost certainly gifted, the catering subsidised in return for a major endorsement. Much of these favours stay undisclosed or land up in footnotes the audience glosses over. Pakistan’s Competition Commission formally warned influencers in 2024 that undisclosed endorsements constitute deceptive marketing under the Competition Act 2010. This is not an anomaly specific to Pakistan. Research analysing over 100 million social media posts found that the vast majority of commercial content globally is not appropriately disclosed and that consumers cannot distinguish paid from organic content without disclosure labels. This is deliberate and by design to ensure that the cost (and how it was managed) is only a post-script to the main sell.

The women watching ache for the euphoria of this ceremony. The feeling of being at the center and having nothing else matter. The narrative being sold weaves in a fairytale romance so seamlessly that getting married seems like the only possible way to attain the certainty of forever. Once married, the content from these influencers centers their new life and their partner. Their happiness is emphasised through a constant bombardment of wedding photoshoots and romantic captions for months after the wedding is over. The influencer stays a bride for however long she wishes to be observed as one and through this performance she cloaks all the compromise a marriage demands of women.

The Provocation

In 2023 the students at LUMS threw a fake wedding. A bride and groom were selected from among the cohort and the campus transformed into a banquet hall as their batchmates joined the celebration of this union. This wedding spanned over multiple days to give each traditional ritual the service it called for. It was organized communally to make sure that no one person would have to incur huge costs. With no vows and no debt, this wedding became the subject of mass scrutiny as it was labelled a bastardization of the institution of marriage. The girl who played the role of bride had to face an angry set of parents while the boy playing groom did not.5

The asymmetry of that backlash tells us what we need to know about the limits of celebration placed onto women. A woman who discovers she can have the celebration without the contract is a danger and must be confined. Marriage is the container for this deviance.

I am not arguing that women should not marry or that weddings should not exist. I do not think that doing away with elaborate celebrations would cause women to stop opting into marriage because a (grand) wedding is only one of the ways in which women are inducted into the institution. What I am arguing is that celebration should not be exclusive to marriage. That the elaborateness and the spectacle and the ritual of being publicly centered should not require a contract. That the industry has made these things appear inseparable because it needs them to appear inseparable. And that if women were given more space to be celebrated as themselves—at graduations, at career milestones, at the simple fact of surviving another year—the lure of marriage as the only door to that feeling would be less total.

What I call for is a suspension of disbelief. The woman who dreams of the wedding knowing and not knowing what comes after. The woman who has been so starved of being celebrated that she will sign any contract that promises her one day of it. The woman who wants the party and is handed the institution. I call for women to recognize that surrendering our being in service of the day is not a necessity, no matter how many times we are told otherwise.

When I threw myself the fake wedding I understood, somewhere in the middle of it, that I did not need a marriage to access the feeling of being loved and worthy of celebration. The feeling was always available to me. I never had to earn it (I was only taught I needed to). It just required safety, and community, and people who loved me without conditions. None of which required a contract.

The celebration was never about the marriage.

endnotes6

I was intense and unruly and desirability was not high on my list of priorities.

I spent my pre-teen years busy winning elocutions, indulging my hyperlexia and being the overly passionate child who wanted to do everything all at once (I received my ADHD diagnosis at 22).

My hair was unruly and I never thought of how my body looked and no one in my life pointed it out to me as something I needed to worry about. Looking back, I can literally trace my steps back to when that changed.

I was in fifth grade when a few of my classmates counselled me on the importance of getting my arms waxed. I was ten, maybe eleven years old at that time—and so were they. They sat there discussing all of the different salons their mothers took them to in order to help them maintain themselves. Waxing, threading, hair treatments like relaxing, re-bonding, facials and so many things I had never heard of. I do not remember much from when I was that age but I do remember feeling like an imposter in my body anytime the topic of performing femininity came up. All this work was a part of the greater project to be pretty and girly—and for the years that led up to fifth grade I had never thought of myself as either. It was not for a lack of security in my physical features, for me it just never felt like something a ten-year-old should be occupied with. This is a sentiment I still agree with. Encouraging vanity among children that age is never in good faith. It is dangerous that at an age when nutrition is of the utmost importance, we instil a fear of bigger bodies into children that is so intense that it dictates their relationship with food for years to come.

I would fight my parents after getting back from school for not making me vain. I would blame them often for my lack of friends. If I was raised with the expectation to be feminine and fragile and pretty, I would fit right in with the rest of them.

But instead, I was always on the outside. I have so much compassion for younger me but I wish I could tell her that being on a diet at age twelve is not normal. I will never know how my body would have matured because I was so focused on making sure that it would fit the desired standards. I wish I could go back and tell myself that these diets and the endless cycle of under-eating and bingeing would stunt my abilities to excel in things that have nothing to do with how I look. I have spent so much time moping over my lost potential and all the reasons for why I find myself so chronically burned out, but it is only recently that I have started connecting it to 1.5 decades of disordered eating.

My academic skills carried me through to my teen years when I gave in to the urge to perform femininity. I started straightening my hair every single day. My hair was always the primary culprit when it came to the allegations of being ugly—and so naturally when I straightened it out I became less noticeable. Every night I would wash my hair and dry it and straighten it before I went to bed. Come rain or shine, sickness or health. I was tied to this ritual.

I had resolved the issue of being seen as ugly because of my unruly hair. All I had to do was avoid shower heads, rain, sweat, water, and sacrifice hours of sleep time.

No big deal.

I had to give up dancing in the rain if people were around and I love both dancing and the rain.

But its fine, because I could see all of the ways in which my life had improved due to my decision to basically commit to permanently frying my hair.

Every salon I went into tried to convince me how much easier my life would be if I just paid them money I did not have for them to permanently straighten my hair. I would beg my parents to let me do it. I even tried saving money and paying for it myself but my father threatened to never speak to me if I did that to my hair. I look back at it and I wish I had the perspective to view his refusal as an act of love and not one rooted in control.

With hair sorted I now only had to make sure I never exceeded a certain dress size and that my skin was always clear and my voice was the perfect pitch to beat the tomboy allegations and my outfits were always in line with the latest trends and that I looked rich but not boujie, and that I spoke clean english but never so good that I would get picked on for being too anglicised—all while maintaining the perfect grades and doing at least two extracurriculars so that my father wouldn’t disown me for not living up to his standards of intelligence and accomplishment.

But given the choice between pleasing my father by making it in life and winning the approval of everyone rooting for me to look pretty, my malnourished body only held the capacity to accommodate the latter. I have spent three years making it up for failing to live up to my father’s academic standards and I really wish I had some food in my belly when I made the decision initially, because it may have been a better one.

I take issue with the narrative that everyone and everything is beautiful in its own right. Not because there is no truth in it but because beauty should not be a pre-requisite for worthiness. Even in a post “body-positive” culture, beauty is a necessary qualification for acceptance. People in fat bodies with conventionally attractive features are seen as more human than fat bodies that do not pass that threshold and so on…When worthiness is rooted in desirability, it will always require its subjects to perform for the intended audience.

When your morals have an aesthetic requirement, the work you end up doing is performative at best—because performance is all you can manage with an under-fed body.

My body has never known rest. Every intentional break from performing perfection is followed by a back-breaking routine in hopes of glowing up to escape my depressive spiral. It is a viscous cycle that I am yet to escape. A cycle I was born into. Birthed by a mother who, even in her fifties, struggles with disordered eating recklessly playing with her health and well-being. I find myself oscillating between a desire to break away from this cycle and living up to the standard of beauty expected of me.

This expectation for creation to be rooted in beauty doesn’t only drive a self-inflicted (though arguably it is structural) war on our bodies, but also seeps into everything we do. The clean girl aesthetic, minimalism, pretty shaped beautiful content that is not an eyesore to look at. But not all creation can be beautiful. Not everything fits neatly into one aesthetic. In fact, the expectation that it must—that everything we do must be an either/or teetering on the tail-ends of a spectrum and never interacting is unrealistic.

Art and creation is equal parts messy and composed. And its creators are allowed the same grace (or at least they should be)

I think vine, Tiktok and reels defy the narrative of only pretty content doing well because the raw unedited stuff usually tends to do extremely well on those sites, but even then the content only oscillates between serene and absurd with no room to rest in the middle. Daring to show the parts of us that stand out and don’t fit in also requires a performance. Calling stretch marks tiger stripes or making sure that every other element of our being is pristine is we are letting the world see us in the middle of an acne flare up—so that we are not denied the “you are still pretty beneath it all” chants of validation we are programmed to crave.

Such is the contradictory nature of choice feminism; The ten step night-time routines, the barbaric chin straps and long uncomfortable nights in bed trying to achieve the perfect bed-head curls upon waking, the painful hair removal for silky smooth skin, everything showers and burning every inch of ourselves in the quest to validate our worth through desirability—none of it is a choice.

Choice comes from agency and the ability to decline. If rejecting the invitation to perform beauty leads to exclusion, then the choice is merely illusion. True choice then would be to deny the expectation in the face of these consequences instead of fawning and bowing—because while resistance holds the potential to be aesthetically spectacular, it is often ugly, untoward and an eyesore.

On the third day I failed. Not because I was bad at managing my intake of food, or because I was not committed to my weightloss (the thought of which seems diabolical I WAS TWELVE YEARS OLD), but because these diets are designed to fail. The sight of hard boiled eggs and an apple still send shivers down my spine because of how traumatising this diet was—and yet, somehow, this it has amassed hundreds and millions of views.

Diet culture is a viscous soul-sucking cycle and unfortunately, we have all fallen knee deep into it at some point or another. What drives its prevalence is guilt and shame and the fear of being not enough and too much, all at the same time. Fitness coaches and famous dieticians stress that we make our meals as efficient as possible by cutting down on calories and maximising the macro-nutrients we consume. The obsession with consuming excessive amount of protein, is a more recent trend—one that has grown with the rising popularity of lifting weights and building muscle.

This is not to say that advice that promotes a balanced diet with a healthy amount of protein and other macro-nutrients and encourages movement is a bad thing, but to point out how over-bearing the advice that centers the need for protein to make a meal balanced—or in general the language that distinguishes and assigns a moral value to what we eat (carefully not using the word consume here)

It is very similar to how in this age of late-stage capitalism where every breath you take must be productive, and everything is about maximising efficiency—the food we eat must perform the same function. Any meal that does not maximise gains becomes a waste of calories and fuels the guilt of not-being-good.

Food low in protein feels off-limits—and as a Pakistani, that feels like a hate crime.

Thanks to algorithms being designed in a way that endlessly feeds our worst insecurities, a singular search for a healthy recipe leaves my entire feed in shambles. And now everything is laden with or drenched in cottage cheese, greek yogurt, protein powder—or worse, all three of these.

Clean-eating and the over-emphasis on eating to acquire a certain build, has ruined my relationship with food for years, but I am now also realising how much it has sabotaged my connection with my culture and its cuisine. All of the diet advice that I consumed growing up, alienated me from cultural foods. A roti apparently had too many carbs, everything was presumably overly fatty and generally unhealthy. For years, I deprived myself of the pleasure to enjoy foods my ancestors loved and passed onto my parents to maintain tradition and preserve their cultural heritage. I would get anxious anytime I went to my village because the food they consumed there was so different to how my extremely weight conscious mother would make.

My experience of food, for as long as I can remember, has been laced with the guilt of having ingested it. Instead of allowing myself to enjoy the flavour of the food, my brain has become hardwired to think of all the ways I must punish myself for attempting to savour it. Food laced with guilt tends to not taste as good when every bite threatens to upset the semblance of control you have maintained by obsessing over calories and macro-nutrients.

These days my food is laced with another type of guilt though. It is the feeling of complicity and betrayal that I cannot seem to shake no matter how hard I try. I find it hypocritical that the moral value of the food we consume is limited to a nutritional label and does not extend to the cruelty that lines our convenience culture on the daily. I have been boycotting KFC and McDonalds for almost two years now, and I can assure you I feel better for not consuming them not because I reduced my intake of fast food, but because I refuse to be complicit in the genocide of a people. It confuses me that the same people that stress the importance of purity in diets look the other way when they are confronted with the reality of where their other products come from. They will boycott processed goods and villainise starbucks for its sugar content, but will refuse to talk about the genocides happening in Gaza, Congo, Sudan and several places across the globe. I have come to realise that it is not that people do not know HOW to boycott or consume more mindfully, it is about what truly matters to them.

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The ideal physique now is a lean muscular body that looks just the right amount of deprived and nourished simultaneously. This physique, in today’s world is not only an aesthetic aspiration but a social symbol. A healthy muscular body—in a world where populations are being deliberately starved and the cost of living crisis is actively fuelling nutritional deficiencies—becomes a status symbol signifying both the ability to afford the luxury of healthy food and the availability of enough time to exercise and prioritise movement.

The over-emphasis on individual actions and the prescribed over-correction veils a public health crisis. Someone working multiple jobs and still making the bare minimum does not have access to the same resources.

When I think of the standard Pakistani diet I often think of how we arrived at the dietary patterns that we possess.

(Spoiler alert: its colonialism and forced starvation).

Between 1850 and 1899, (British colonised) India, suffered 24 major famines, a number higher than in any other recorded 50-year period, resulting in millions of deaths. And the trauma they inflicted runs deep. So deep in fact that our body composition and the way we store fat has been changed forever. South Asians must work twice as hard to avoid diabetes as their Caucasian counterparts. On top of that, carbohydrates prove as the most cost effective macronutrient, making them relatively more accessible to a population surviving on less than three dollars a day.

The fact that skinny is back and medication made for diabetics is being used to attain bodies that are nearly impossible to maintain without it also leaves a really bad taste in my mouth. It brings me back to the genocides across the world where food is being weaponised. To see starving bodies and my own country at the top of the list when it comes to prevalence of diabetes in the same scroll as the Ozempic body leaves me feeling sick.

I revolt by eating food. I am so grateful that I do not have to worry about where my next meal would come from or how the wrong amount of sugar could be lethal.

Food is political. It is used to starve and weaken. It is used to control and restrict. It is used to police and coerce. I now eat as a rebellion. Every time I feel guilty for consuming more carbs than protein on a certain day I tell myself how lucky I am to have the ability to complain. If I told 20 year old me that the way we fight our disordered eating habits now is very much aligned with everyone who told me to be grateful about having access to food that I could choose and refuse, she would freak out.

But I hold compassion for myself for falling for the propaganda that tells me that my worth rests on how much food I eat and the moral value of each meal. I find satisfaction in the fact that my sense of what matters goes beyond my desire to control my body.

The Wizard Liz recently (in May) revealed that she caught her (ex?) fiancé cheating on her. She has built an entire empire on giving other women advice on how to score the perfect divine masculine partner who is a provider and treats you like a princess. But the hetero-patriarchy is relentless. It spares no woman—even those adhering to essentialist roles rooted in their own subjugation with the promise of an ever-lasting love. It just goes to show that this girl-boss stoic dark femininity bullshit will not save a woman from being betrayed by their male partner—or being betrayed in general.

If anything, this recent revelation proves that the claims of Argov and the likes of her fall flat once the “chase” ends and an actual relationship starts. There is no blue-print or road-map or an all encompassing guide that will teach you how to foster healthy fulfilling relationships.

These guides might teach you how to create the illusion of such a thing, but that is as far as they go.

Most people pick up works like Argov’s Why Men Love Bitches or binge watch content from the likes of Wizard Liz because they are tired of their male partners disappointing them and causing them pain that leaves marks for a life-time. Most of us turn to these coaches because we wish to avoid this pain in the future—and so they sell us avoidance in the name of security.

What we can take away from the Wizard Liz scenario is that repackaging misogyny and selling it as empowerment will not save us. It will not bring us any closer to receiving the love we truly desire—whether it is from our male partners or other loved ones in our lives.

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Most of us have experienced love as a gut-wrenching emotion. Love (romantic love specifically) to me felt like I was giving up all control and handing over my reigns to another. It felt destructive and I have spent most of my life dreading the idea of falling in love with someone again. The fear and dread were still somehow never enough to stop me from wanting to love and be loved—and so I felt even more helpless. I did not want to take the risk or falling in love and getting hurt but I also do not want to be alone for the rest of my life. My relationships in the past always began with me being reluctant about accepting my feelings towards the other and ended with me feeling dismissed and abandoned.

And yet, despite having dealt with countless heartbreaks, I refuse to let the hopeful romantic in me die.

In my own journey of unlearning a compulsory monogamist culture and healing from a debilitatingly anxious attachment style, I have learned quite a few lessons.

I have learned that to love and to be loved you have to learn to trust—not just your partner, but your own self, your intuition and your own internal guidance.

The doom scroll of bad advice

Somewhere around the beginning of 2025, I decided that I no longer wanted to go on dates with people with the intention of finding a long-term partner. It took months to cleanse my social media feed in order to get rid of all of the conflicting dating advice that had found its way to me.

I could literally scroll for days, uninterrupted, and the content would not finish. I felt like I was insane for trusting anything. I was obsessed with seeking reassurance in sly ways to affirm to myself that my relationship was “healthy”. I was hyper aware of every single thing my partners were doing and the ramifications of them. I was not feeling these consequences though, I was intellectualising them. I felt extremely disconnected from the relationships I was actually in because I was constantly worried about whether or not they were toxic. A lot of it came from a fear of ending up in an abusive/unhealthy relationship again but it also largely stemmed from me not being able to trust my instincts. I would follow some of the advice and then I would be back at square one relying on another set of rules or guides.

It was a viscous cycle.

Unfortunately an unending access to a depository of advice claiming to fix all our love woes removes our connection with ourselves and fills us with doubt. Advice on social media does that. It removes you from the experience and forces you to learn through the lives and suggestions of another.

Everything is a red flag and everything is a sign that he is head over heals in love with you—and somehow both of these are flagged by similar actions.

The first thing I did to improve my relationship with how I approach dating and romance now was to stop listening to other people. I stopped seeking reassurance from my friends and family regarding my partners and started listening to how I feel and respond to their actions. I had to train myself to stop fearing how much it would hurt to lose someone I love.

I can’t say that dating no longer stresses me out at all, but I can confidently confirm that I know longer feel overwhelmed by it as much as I used to.

This is not meant to be advice by the way. These are just things I have done that have helped me. The whole point of this essay is that what has worked for me will probably not work for you.

Subverting dominance and power plays

Men are not taught how to love women, they are taught how to dominate and control us. And we are taught to desire it. We are taught that no matter how independent and self-sufficient we become there will always be a part of us that craves submission to a man. The ideal masculinity is described as a provider who can bring out the ‘natural’ submissive nature of a woman.

What the fuck does that even mean?

In the past year I have seen so many women—who are otherwise unabashedly loud and unapologetically feminist—fall into this trap. So many of them became obsessed with finding a partner that made them feel “safe enough” to be feminine and delicate. Looking at it from the outside in, I know that it is a reaction to the glamorisation of hyper-independence where we feel like we cannot rely on anyone but our own selves. I understand why women want the safety of a relationship where they don’t have to do that all of the time. I know that men make their partners do all the labour by weaponising their incompetence. Despite this awareness, watching women infantalise themselves and surrender their autonomy in the name of being more “feminine” makes me uneasy and uncomfortable.

Literally setting us back DECADES.

Similar to their male counterparts (incels) these women blame feminism. They claim that it is the reason women have become hyper masculine and take on the roles of men causing the men to never provide. The princess treatment these coaches speak of is essentialism that rewards the docility of women and reinforces the male right to “control” a dynamic through his financial abilities. It is glamorised trad-wife behaviour in a post feminist world. The first essay in this series has already talked about this but it has been months since I wrote it and I still feel like I need an entire lifetime to get over this bullshit.

It is this type of advice and guidance that demonises unconventional forms of love. It imposes on us a “superior ideal” we all must look towards when shaping our relationships and choosing how we love. Ridiculing alternative ways of loving, and singling out a dynamic that privileges the hetero patriarchy will always leave women dissatisfied even if they seem to be getting the “ultimate princess treatment”.

When we normalise the idea that one form of love and loving is better than the other and everyone else must adhere to it, we normalise other fascistic ideas that claim the same.

This is how we find ourselves back in the territory where it has once again become more acceptable to be queer phobic and misogynistic.

Again, I would like to reiterate that I do not blame women for wanting supportive male partners who pull their weight. After all, that is what a relationship should be. But for me it has become increasingly difficult to navigate my dating experience in the presence of conventions that have never really made much sense to me.

De-centering Men

I have always questioned my attraction to men as a by-product of the way we are socialised to crave male validation. I internalised at a very young age that boys/men finding me attractive was a form of social currency that I would always need to work for. I have realised over the course of this past year, that for me to be truly happy with who I am and how I love, I must make an active effort to de-center men and unlearn the need for male validation.

The desire for male validation is so strongly conditioned into us that it sneaks into the most mundane every day activities. We are literally raised to center men—their validation and comfort is taught to us as a priority. Male validation is so essential to maintaining the fabric of the hetero-patriarchy that the desire for it is not exclusive to women.

People across the gender spectrum crave attention and affection from men. Even men.

Especially men. (but that is a whole other essay that I am working on)

It has proven to be quite a difficult thing to do and I truly believe that it is a life-long process. But I am also learning that it is not impossible.

I have a friend who always flags when our conversations are failing the bechdel test. I have realised that so many of the conversations we have as women center men. We often bond over how much pain different men in our lives have caused us. Or we connect over how similar our male partners are. Or how debilitating it feels to have feelings for a man.

All this happens in the absence of men.

I think we as women do each other a disservice by situating our friendship around men.

At the start of this year I lost a friend who found this concept difficult to internalise. It was hard for us to connect after I asked her to shift the focus of our conversations from boyfriends to daily life. We drifted apart because she felt like I was a bad friend for not wanting to hear about how wonderful her boyfriend was (and how she shitty he was on days she had taken an issue with him).

Ever since my friend started enforcing this rule, I have certainly become more conscious about the way we talk and how we connect. It has also improved the quality of my conversations with my girl friends. The only downside has been a disconnection from friendships that were solely focused on bonding over men.

De-centering romance

I cannot de-center men without de-centering romance because for me both of these things go hand in hand. I have seen queer people replicate the same heteronormative dynamics in their relationships because that is how they perceive love to be. Everything I know about love comes from a male centric perspective. To unlearn how I have always loved, I must let go of everything I already know about it.

I refuse to be led into a loving relationship with false notions around how it must be.

The things I learned about love growing up made it seem like a scarce resource; something that runs out eventually; something you stop valuing when you have access to an abundance of it. And so all of the popular advice around romantic relationships is about holding back or being mysterious and stoic. Love became a reward I had to constantly try and earn.

Over the past two years I have realised that the abundance of love is the only thing I can truly rely on. I refuse to hide my feelings.

I refuse to perform nonchalance.

I think our generation is obsessed with maintaining a mystery about ourselves in order to seem more intelligent and to avoid being called cringe—but all it does is isolate us further.

As I de-center and de-platform romantic relationships in my life, I find myself appreciating the different forms of platonic love in my life. I think as women it is incredibly important for us to find peace and comfort in our platonic bonds. Our entire life is an audition to find the most compatible romantic male partner who will save us from the world. So many incredibly smart intelligent and strong women still find themselves dissatisfied with life because they feel incomplete without a romantic partner. So many women sit and wait for men to make the first move. So many of us constantly measure how much affection we give because we are worried about smothering them or devaluing ourselves in the eyes of our partners.

De-centering romantic love and the men at the center of it, allows us to find out for ourselves whether it is even something we desire to begin with.

I have learned to show up as a better person for my friends and family because I refuse to prioritise romantic validation anymore. I also feel less lonely because my mind no longer places a specific form of love on a pedestal anymore. I have learned that I truly deeply completely love my friends and if I was to never find a romantic partner again, I would be absolutely okay with that possibility.

Since I am no longer auditioning for romantic partnership I have more time for everyone—including myself. I am now learning to center myself (without being selfish of course) in a way that I no longer worry have to worry about how painful getting hurt in love would be. I am embracing the fact that love comes with the risk of loss and that does not have mean that I hold myself back

This essay is not a how-to guide for anything. I am not claiming that doing any of these things has completely changed my life. I think I am simply writing it as an appreciation for all the forms of love that have helped me pull myself out of sticky situation(ships). I no longer chase unavailable people—in fact they are extremely unattractive and off-putting to me now. I no longer worry about loving too intensely and people losing interest because I showed up authentically.

In these past few years I have learned that love is a choice. A very conscious and intentional one. A choice that we make over and over again. It is a choice I make for the ones I love and I make it every single day. I am lucky that I get to choose how I love and I am grateful that I no longer believe that it is tricky or complicated to find love. I truly love love.

I love all of my friends dearly and if there is one thing I am certain about, it is that they feel the same about me—and that is enough for me.

If you liked this essay and my other works, feel free to share it with the people you love <3

Itna dard tou sab ko hota hai periods main (all women experience this amount of pain when they get their period)

But what about the fifteen days of constant cramping, painful bloating, sleeplessness, nausea before the period?

Haan kuch logon ko wo bhi hoti hai, kuch ko nahi hoti. Sab normal hai. (Yes some women get that too. Some don’t. It is all normal)

I am sorry I don’t think this is normal. You are telling me that passing out on the bathroom floor every-time I get my period is normal? You are telling me that not being able to function like a normal human being for half a month is NORMAL?

I wish I had said all this to her instead of internalising her message and nodding my head in agreement.

After she callously scanned my uterus and ovaries, she prescribed me antibiotics, painkillers and…MARRIAGE.

Aap ko endometriosis hai. Aap ki uterus ke around growth hai tou uska operation karna parega. Aap unmarried hain is liye nahi karsakti main. ( You have endometriosis. There is growth around your uterus that will need to be operated. Since you are unmarried I cannot do it yet).

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME???

This is not the first time I have been told I am too young to get the necessary treatment for endometriosis. I am told that I will probably not be able to have children if they operate on me. Followed by a pitiful sigh for my future husband and his family. I am told that once I am married, I can ask for my husband’s approval for any surgery or procedure.

I need his permission to not be in agonising pain at all times. Until then, the pain I suffer is just a consequence for my decision to stay unmarried and childless.

What is endometriosis?

According to the World Health Organisation, endometriosis is a disease in which tissue similar to the lining of the uterus grows outside the uterus. It can cause severe pain in the pelvis and make it harder to get pregnant. Endometriosis can start at a person’s first menstrual period and last until menopause. With endometriosis, tissue similar to the lining of the uterus grows outside the uterus. This leads to inflammation and scar tissue forming in the pelvic region and (rarely) elsewhere in the body. The cause of endometriosis is unknown. There is no known way to prevent endometriosis. There is no cure, but its symptoms can be treated with medicines or, in some cases, surgery.

I hate everything about a trip to the gynaecologist. I hate going alone because all the other women there look at me like I am some teenager who got knocked up at school (I am literally twenty-five years old). I hate talking about my symptoms because I know exactly what I am going to hear in response. I hate getting on the weighing scale and fearing that if my bodyweight signifies health, then there is a heightened possibility that everything I say would fall on deaf ears.

I have been told my whole life by doctors that I look healthy and that all of my symptoms are in my head. When I was a teenager, my periods were bad because I was overweight. When I was anorexic, they were bad because I needed to eat a little more. Now that I am neither, I just need to eat healthier. Avoid gluten, dairy and anything that could cause inflammation. In every case, I am expected to be obsessive about my eating habits and the way my body looks. It tells me that my pain is a consequence of my actions and exercising ‘control’ and discipline is the fix.

When I had just newly started menstruating, my mother used to say that the pain of childbirth is far worse. My nano used to tell her the same thing. Every woman I have spoken to about this has echoed this sentiment. To be a woman is to know pain. Over the past few years though, as my mother has witnessed my cramps get more intense, her views have changed.

Your cramps sound as painful as labour I don’t think this is a normal amount of pain for a period.

She often sits and prays to God that I find a man who will take care of me when I am away from home and on my period. I always tell her I don’t need a man, it is a cure for my pain that I desire most.

I have tried birth control (that was awful, 0/10 would not recommend), yoga, pilates, low impact workouts, mobility stretches, Ayurvedic remedies. Not a single one of these things was able to provide sustainable relief. Researching the condition also helped me realise that I am not alone in my experience.

The medical professionals in this country are so useless when it comes to reproductive health (and women’s healthcare needs in general) that only divine intervention could save me now (the equivalent to which is a man in this society).

The problem though, is that being a woman in this country means that I am not to be saved but punished for deciding to exist.

Roughly 10% of the world’s reproductive population suffers from this condition. The treatment for endometriosis is very difficult to find in low-to-middle income countries (Pakistan being one such example). This number is an under-estimation because it does not account for the population of women and girls across the world, of this age, that do not have access to any resources or education regarding their reproductive health.

The curse begins

In my essay on the pervasive shame culture in Pakistan, I have already mentioned the ways in which shaming is used as a tool to control women and girls. This shaming extends to conversations regarding menstrual hygiene and reproductive health as well. We are actively taught not to disclose to our male family members any details that could “gross them out”. For several years of my life, my mother would physically cringe anytime I mentioned my period in front of my brother. There is absolutely no room for me to speak about it in front of any male outside the confines of my immediate family. Shame follows us every step of the way during that time of the month. We are forced to make yourself smaller and less visible even if we are literally incapable of functioning due to the intensity of pain and everything inside us wants to crash-out and burn down the patriarchy.

Most women I know are forced to work through the pain of their period. An acknowledgement of the pain only brings in the question of kyun kya hua? (why, what happened?). The answer to this question is meant to be avoided at all costs.

The first time I bought pads from a general store in Karachi, I could feel the judgemental stares of the men behind the counter looking at me as if I had committed a crime. One of them quickly leapt at a brown paper bag and stuffed the pack of pads into it to make sure no one else could see it. I walked out of the shop feeling like the only way to survive as a woman in this country, was to conceal parts of my identity I have absolutely no control over. I have tried to fight off this shame that is forcefully pushed onto me by refusing the brown bag every time. It is hard though, to tell myself that in the grand scheme of things, it has any impact on the general mindset of people on this subject.

My efforts still persist.

All of this context of how painful my period is, might make what I am about to say, sound out of place, but please hear me out.

Despite all of my woes with womanhood, and life as a woman in Pakistan, I consider myself extremely privileged. I can openly talk about my period. I have the luxury of consulting multiple doctors for a diagnosis (even if they refuse to do anything about it). I can buy as many menstrual hygiene products as I need. I can even afford to stock up on them for emergencies.

This is not what life looks like for every girl and woman in this country.

Girlhood denied

For most girls in Pakistan, life as they know it comes to an end when they start to bleed. They are seen as women. It does not matter that they are newly into their teenage. Once they start to menstruate, it is time for them to reproduce. They are forced to leave schooling and to abandon any dreams of life as independent women. Her fate is often joined with a man much older than her so that she can give him children for as long as she is alive and fertile.

Pakistan is home to nearly 19 million child brides (which is an underestimation). The question of consent does not even arise here. There is nothing consensual about an agreement that holds no regard for her well-being. Not only are these girls robbed of their right to live as they please, they are also at a greater risk of complications arising due to childbirth and domestic violence or IPV (intimate partner violence).

This shame around conversations about healthy reproductive cycles and the unending desire to control every aspect of a woman’s life, largely contributes to period poverty:

Period poverty refers to the inability to afford and access menstrual products, sanitation and hygiene facilities and education and awareness to manage menstrual health. It is a pressing issue affecting more than 30 million women in Pakistan, depriving them of access to the most basic menstrual hygiene products and resources.

Period poverty is also perpetuated by stigma and the lack of information and education – not only do many girls and young women lack awareness and are unprepared for their periods, but policymakers and adults with decision-making power in schools and workplaces also lack comprehensive menstrual education.

Period Poverty – why millions of girls and women cannot afford their periods

Forced marriages, underage childbirth, abusive paedophilic husbands and a culture that only sees your worth in your ability to reproduce. This is the fate that awaits millions of girls in this country as they start to “come of age”.

The sin of womanhood

I have lived between Lahore and Karachi my entire life, but both my mother and my father belong to a small village along the Chenab River. I used to visit my extended family there quite often as a child but, as I have grown up I have realised, that although I often crave a strong connection to my roots, maybe I don’t want to associate myself with them too closely.

My roots seem to have been watered by a steady cocktail of violent misogyny, downright femicide and female infanticide.

The fate of a mother in my village (and several like it. and not exclusively villages either) is determined by the sex of her baby when it is born. If a girl is born, the woman is abused, taunted, shamed until she is able to birth a son. If she is unable to after birthing several girl children, she is replaced with another woman whose uterus and vagina are used to produce the next heir. All the daughters born out of the desire for a son are collateral waste. They are lamented for being a burden on their fathers. Unwanted daughters are married off early so they can do the only thing they were born to do: Birth a son or create more unwanted daughters until a boy is delivered.

Some skip all the work of negligently raising these daughters and simply kill them upon birth to save themselves the trouble. The worthlessness of a woman’s life is evidenced by the fact that doctors will ask the father of a child if he wishes to save the mother or the unborn child in case there is a complication. Often husbands will choose the child. Especially if it is a boy.

When I was first told there was a possibility that I have endometriosis, the symptom that was highlighted the most was infertility. I am lucky that I was never raised to believe that my worth lies in my ability to give a man his offspring but that is an exception and not the norm.

Women who are unable to get pregnant or deliver healthy children are considered a waste of space. My own aunt was replaced with another woman by her husband because she gave birth to 4 still born babies. Her postpartum depression, the consequent health issues and eventual death meant nothing because the new bride gave her husband a daughter in the first year. It has been less than two years since my aunt passed, and her husband has a second baby on the way (and everyone is hoping for a boy, what a surprise!)

Pain as punishment

In Pakistan (and countries like it) a period is just a symptom, it is being a woman that is the incurable disease. The pain women face is viewed as a necessity for their condition. It is deliberately maintained to inhibit our power and to control us. The suffering that comes with a period, is considered essential to the experience of womanhood.

With all of this context it makes sense that my gynaecologist, a product of our misogynistic culture, told me that there is nothing abnormal about my extremely unhinged menstrual cycle.

Women experiencing pain and punishment is the norm in this country. It is a desirable consequence to inflict upon us to restrain us and hold us back from fighting for our liberation.

I know it feels crazy that I consider myself lucky to be in constant, intolerable pain for almost half the year. But it is also the painful truth. The life I am choosing to live is not one that is available to millions of women and girls in this country. And so maybe, it is survivor’s guilt or some trauma response that I try to be grateful even when my ability to function normally is completely hampered. Because at least I am alive. I can choose to not get married so I don’t have to worry about my future husband rejecting me if I can’t give him children. I have choice. I have agency. I have privilege and maybe the pain I bear is the price I must pay for all of that. Maybe pain is the punishment for being kept alive.

To be a woman or a girl is to know pain, and to be denied the right to a cure for it.

“Why would you tell him that?”

“Don’t you know you are supposed to conceal your feelings?”

“Now he knows your weakest spots”

I felt equal parts confused and humiliated . I told him how I felt because he used to flirt with me (and pretty much every girl in our grade) and I wanted him to stop if he did not have feelings for me. He told me he thought of me only as a friend and I told him I respected his honestly but no part of me expected to be blindsided by his attempt to ridicule me for a simple confession.

This trauma and the resulting lessons it has taught me have taken me nearly a decade to unlearn and shed — due to, and in spite of, the algorithm’s best efforts to keep me trapped.

My mother always used to tell me not “give away my body” too early into a relationship with a man. She reminded me not to tell him much I loved him. We would fight often as I tried to bargain with her in defence of my (now ex) boyfriends. My rejection of the notion that relationships with men could never be healthy and empowering was always met with a snarky response from her. Overtime these conversations and taunts led me to internalise ideas that I now found repeatedly emphasised in Argov’s Why Men Love Bitches.

To date men is to give up your power and agency and to accept his domination over you. At the core of Sherry Argov’s “ultimate guide” and the inspired (read: plagiarised) content is a lesson in everything but love. In the words of one of my favourite authors:

These books validate the old-fashioned sexist notions of sexual difference and encourage women to believe that no relationship between a man can be based on mutual respect, openness and caring. The message they give women is that relationships are always and only about power, manipulation and coercion, about getting someone else to do what you want them to, even if it is against their will. They teach females how to use feminine wiles to play the game of power but they do not offer guidelines for how to love and be loved.

bell hooks in All About Love

The vow of silence

Promising us empowerment in our relationships with men, these coaches tell us that our power lies in silence. They advise us not to let ourselves be perceived as a tiresome obligation because that causes men to withdraw. We are told that if we do not bitch and moan when these men refuse to meet our needs, they will reward us by doing the very things we desire them to.

The only way this could work is if both parties are on the same page about what they desire (which is also impossible to determine without a conversation). Women are advised not to ask for commitment because apparently, that is the only way a man will feel more compelled to give it to them. But what if the reason I am not asking for commitment is because I do not desire it? Or what if both of us desire commitment but the way we define it is completely different?

When there is no conversation about expectations and desires, whatever is ‘received’ by the participants in a relationship is decided by assumptions. The assumptions are in turn governed by stereotypes and gender norms taught to us as the ‘ultimate truth’ that we must accept about our existence. When the parties in the relationship assume these roles and act in line with them without communicating and checking in, it often results in disharmony and dissatisfaction —despite what the conservative pundits of the dating world will have you believe.

Unspoken expectations soon turn into unspoken resentment as we are robbed of our right to freely and openly express ourselves.

Those who take this vow of silence in hopes that it will soon turn their undefined and in-exclusive relationship into a committed one, often feel betrayed. Kelly Oxford, in her essay The Modern Proposal: A Study in Sanctioned Waiting points out how “we’ve normalized a system where women perfect the art of waiting while men perfect the art of keeping them waiting.” She points out the “profound power imbalance" that exists for women who eventually wish to be married because ultimately more often than not, the decision of “when” (alluding to the proposal) rests on the man.

Many women I know, myself included, have questioned our worth when we are forced to occupy a space within this ambiguous territory. Since we are conditioned to derive acceptance for our existence through male validation, we put our lives on hold until they choose us. We downplay all of our other achievements because feeling unloved feels like the price we pay for being successful. We often abandon our pursuit of independence and liberation in the hopes that pacifying ourselves to seem less threatening will be rewarded with commitment.

We lose ourselves and then, when we turn to women like Argov for advice, they tell us it is our fault. Men deny any accountability because they can claim they never knew we wanted commitment because we never told them. And these coaches deny accountability by telling us that we didn’t apply their method correctly. In the end, we are left blaming ourselves and accept being unsuccessful in love as fate.

I also think that such advise is directly responsible for the rise in ‘situation-ships’ and undefined relationship dynamics that thrive in the absence of honest and open communication.

THE IDGAF WAR AND THE DREAM GIRL NIGHTMARE

The richest man on the planet and overgrown child Elon Musk is quoted as saying that empathy is the fundamental weakness of society. This statement might have felt shocking to hear a few years ago but with the stark rise in modern stoicism and fascist ideology, his words only point to the new normal. The patriarchal values of ‘logic’ over emotion are the main focus of the content that repackages stoicism as an ultimate guide to success today. This content much like all other red pill content—mostly geared towards men desiring to become alphas— preaches self indulgence, avoidance and detachment. Feelings and emotions are vilified and, as should come as no surprise, deemed effeminate. Successful relationships are also framed through these ideals.

All of the famous dating influencers like the WizardLiz and Margarita Nazarenko preach that women must co-opt these stoic tendencies to regain their power in relationships with men. They tell you to not show your emotions when you are hurt. To not nag or crash out when you are wronged. To act like you truly do not care when your partner obliterates your boundaries. Argov says women should approach relationships like business negotiations by being succinct with our words and always having one foot out the door. According to these gurus, this detachment is what earns us leverage. Men only treat women right when they fear that she might walk away at any time.

The message is simple: We must control our emotions in order to control the men we are partnered with.

The idea behind such narratives is the same gender essentialism that bogs us down in stereotypes: Men respect other men because they value logic over emotion. And men don’t respect women (or give them what they need) because we are too emotional and that makes us hard to reason with. They suggest therefore, that we must also become like men (unfeeling and cold) to receive male respect —but we must also at the same time make sure that we don’t become one of the guys.

It is also an ideology rooted in fear. All of the control promised to women under this model comes from the men fearing that they will lose the woman if they don’t act right. The women also operate in fear that failing to follow these guidelines will result in either a lifetime of loneliness or a bitter unhappy relationship where her needs are never met.

But not all men become better when faced with the fear of a breakup and not all women experience a fairytale romance even when they become the ‘dream girl’. Despite the standard being impossible to meet, we work towards it under the delusion that it might bring us healthy sustainable love.

The problem is that it wont.

When I was a kid, crying would come naturally to me. I would cry at every little inconvenience. I was called sensitive and bullied for it all through my childhood and into my early teens. Every adult in my life told me that crying only gave more power to my bullies and so I made it my life’s mission to not care. I took a page out of Argov’s playbook and truly embodied the aura of an uncaring bitch and for a while it worked. I became so good at suppressing my emotions and performing perfection that I became unrecognisable to myself and those around me. Every guy who had previously bullied me, suddenly had a crush on me. I was hot and multiple people wanted to date me (something 15 year old me could not ever fathom)

I got into my first ‘proper’ relationship when I was 18 years old with a guy that dubbed me his ultimate dream girl. There is no one like you, he would tell me in the start. I was the smartest, prettiest and the most perfect person in his life…until I was too much of it.

It seems that men do love bitches. But what does that say about them?

As the relationship grew, my attempts to allow myself vulnerability felt suffocating to him. He told me I was too sensitive. Everything I felt was an over-reaction now. All the things he told me he loved about me in the start now began to threaten him. I was his dream girl as long as I performed nonchalance for him. As soon as I was unable to keep up the act, I was discarded.

You might be tempted to say that it is possible that this guy was just a narcissist. And you would be right. He was (or still is, I don’t know I haven’t talked to him in five years) but several men after him also withdrew affection at the first sign of me revealing my feelings to them. And I don’t think it is a coincidence. In fact I think it points to the flaw in the way modern relationships are structured because they do not allow any space for vulnerability and true intimacy.

As long as I adhered to Argov (et al)’s principles I only felt secure in relationships when I was concealing my true feelings. Vulnerability was terrifying because it came with the threat of ending the relationship I was in. I kept attracting people I never felt safe enough to be myself with. People who idolised me and then yanked me off the pedestal anytime I expressed a real emotion. In the past seven years, my inability to authentically express myself forced me to settle for an unfulfilling half-baked experience of love.

- a brief account of my bitter past with love

The nonchalance war is not a gendered one. Every single person on the gender spectrum relates to it, and it affects more than just our love life. It seeps into our everyday life and impacts how we interact with everyone. The idea that this nonchalance will resolve our love woes is based on the false premise that there is something wrong with expressing emotions and being vulnerable. Having been the bitch and also the dream girl, I can confirm that it is a hollow honour devoid of any real empowerment.

It is a way to punish us for daring to be a human being and not a machine. Most of us are not wired to be apathetic and are only putting on a show for the world to see. To the observer we may be perceived as detached and free but inside we are miserable and lonely. To not care when everything inside you craves a deeply emotional experience is incredibly draining and will have you resenting the idea of love itself (in all of its numerous forms).

These guides might help you find a partner and keep them happy for a few months, but such a relationship seldom stands the test of time. In my opinion, these guides are designed to make us experts in avoidance to pacify our resistance to the structures that constrain us. By betraying our internal cues and denying ourselves the authentic expression our emotions demand we lose the ability to healthily connect with others.

To build community and long-lasting healthy relationships we must allow ourselves the joy of being as chalant as we wish. I can attest to the fact that being loving towards the people in your life and wearing your heart on a sleeve helps you feel truly free and unbound. I have now realised that if my relationship with someone can only be sustained by holding back the hopeful romantic and emotionally sensitive person in me, then it is not something I wish to be a part of.

This essay is the second part of a three part series on navigating love and relationships under fascism. Read the first part here: Fascist Love .

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And second, that Argov falsely claims that our biological sex dominantly dictates our preferences in relationships. In the chapter titled, ‘Cracking the Code: What Every Girl Needs to Know’ she claims:

The cat-and-mouse game that women find maddening is actually very exciting to men. This is a very basic difference between the sexes. For a woman, the objective is often a committed relationship, also known as the destination. For a man, the road trip on the way to the destination is often the most fun.

The problem with such generalisations is that they are deeply rooted in gender essentialism, which is the belief that certain traits are inherently masculine (and apply only to biological men) or feminine and female (and apply only to biological women). This not only marginalises identities that do not conform to the gender binary but it also limits the scope for accountability and change. In fact, in my opinion, the synthesis of Argov’s guide is that boys will be boys and that women should know better.

This misplaced responsibility is not exclusive to this book or any guide on the subject of love and romance. The self-help genre in general enjoys its popularity due to its claim to ‘expose’ the true state of things to you and to help you change. But these how-to guides— and the corresponding social media content on these subjects— do not contextualise the issues they contend to offer solutions to.

The advice is hyper-individualistic and places an undue burden of responsibility on the readers without acknowledging that the system is heavily stacked against them.

For example, Sherry emphasises that men like difficult women who pose a challenge to them. Every single time this claim was made it sounded a bit like men hear “no” and take it upon themselves to eventually turn it into a yes.

This book has left a bitter taste in my mouth because it constantly felt like I was reading the point of view of a rape apologist. The quote above is only one of several from the book. It implies that a man’s attraction to a woman depends on how difficult it is for him to convince her to be with him. When women themselves push the narrative that unavailability is what attracts a man, men on the “incel end” of things are able to use these words to justify the high they get out of dominating a “difficult woman”. To me it feels like the whole book and its repackaged content we see now is telling us that men do not want to love us, they only want to capture us.

And there is nothing loving about control.

The narrative that this is just how men are wired, is extremely unproductive. It implies that human beings, especially men, are incapable of change — and so any effort to be different is futile. It allows men to justify their unwillingness to change and to get away with it.

Similar to the book, much of the content regarding modern day dating focuses on how men and women should act in relationships. Women are advised to not wear their hearts on their sleeves, to avoid nagging their male partners and to let the man be the man by learning the art of receiving. These discussions claim to offer an insight into ‘his’ mind and help you figure out what he really wants. This type of content often emphasises that men don’t tell you they feel about you through words but through actions, training women to become hyper-vigilant and constantly trying to read minds.

Non-verbal communication is a major theme in these videos and guides. Through accessing the inner workings of a man’s mind women are able to better navigate how to extract what they want without asking for it. Women are constantly reminded that men do not like being told what to do.

If you want commitment, don’t ask him for it. Just become the girl of his dreams and he will have no choice but to commit to you.

But the idea of being the dream girl feels like a death sentence.

If you identify as a woman, there is a high likelihood that your entire ForYou page has looked like this at some point — especially when you are in a relationship where most of your needs stay unmet. These content creators claim to be experts because their (male) partners treat them like princesses and give them everything a ‘woman’ could want in a relationship. There is footage of them receiving flowers, expensive presents, constant reassuring contact, commitment, regular dates and more. On the other side of the screen is you. A person who feels inadequate now because if love like this exists, then why is your access to it restricted? Why does your (often male) partner not do anything for you? Why are you stuck with having to smile at fortnightly dry texts?

These creators (often conventionally attractive, almost always white women) will tell you that it is because YOU are settling for less —without acknowledging the context for why we settle. After they show you the material evidence to certify their credentials, they tell you “you can have all this too….here is how to become his dream girl….here is how to have it all.”

The advice, as I have established, will be a paraphrased regurgitation of Argov’s attraction principles teaching you to navigate agency and come out on top (compared to other women) under the existing patriarchal model. In her essay titled Red Pill Women: Heterosexual Fantasies in Misogynistic Spaces, Pauline Hoebanx discussing the femininity premium states:

..these traits are not merely passive attributes but are strategically pursued to gain a femininity premium. In this context, RPW participants adopted these traits to secure privileged partners and financial security, leveraging the cultural ideals of femininity to achieve personal and economic advantages.

This makes a lot of sense considering that most of this content is focused on attracting a materially wealthy man who provides for you — one that is able to treat you like a princess and spoil you with gifts and unending affection. It is explicitly implied that to be a woman worthy of such treatment, you must perform femininity the way it is naturally ordained. It is important to understand that much of this desire for financial security comes from the economic state of affairs worldwide and part of it results from the chronic burnout associated with capitalism where women are not adequately compensated for their dual labour. Deniz Kandiyoti frames such movements as “an attempt to reinstate an older patriarchal bargain”, where their “submissiveness and propriety” is directly tied to the exhaustion resulting from the structure of gender and class pushing against them. This way, new age anti feminist movements veiled by an ‘innocent effort to get women the love they truly want’, encourage women to become parties to their own subjugation.

So if becoming the dream girl is so easy and being one solves all of our worries, then why are women more dissatisfied with the nature of their relationships with men than ever before? The answer is simple: Performing this identity is yet another way to get women to obsess over receiving male validation and changing everything about themselves to acquire it.

The dream girl is passive. She doesn’t ask for what she wants because she doesn’t have to. Dream girl is not easy to fuck but once conquered, sex with her promises to be otherworldly. She is independent and has a life of her own but her lifestyle never threatens the masculinity of her man. She need not compete with other women because she is already what every woman wishes she was —other women must compete with her. This woman makes it known that she does not need a man but also makes sure that he still gets to feel like her ultimate “protector”. Her clothing is never too revealing, like the whores she knows not to compare herself to. But she is also not a prude. She knows exactly how much skin to show to keep things tasteful and exciting for her man. She does not desperately crave male validation because it is all already available to her.

Her identity is riddled with contradictions as she is told to de-center men while her worthiness is still placed in how desirable she is to men now. Her love for herself is conditional upon how much she is rewarded for loving herself. She performs perfection and never utters a sigh of protest (because she knows that men hate emotional women). The message is obvious. Lose yourself to become what is desirable and let the patriarchal order reward you. She has other names too: Trophy, ultimate prize, divine feminine, goddess.

Object.

Women are not better off when we are forced to adhere to such standards of perfection. This narrative perpetuates the idea that women must always earn the love they want. This ‘love’ we are promised is not a reward attained upon becoming the dream woman, it is a bone the patriarchy throws for us to trap ourselves in a never ending game of fetch. The only thing it rewards is the avoidance that men have learned to weaponize by claiming that it is impossible for them to go against their ‘natural’ characteristics and impulses.

It is important to realise that the main (intended) audience for such content is women because it is '“our nature” to be more accommodating and nurturing. As long as women are expected to shape-shift in order to extract better treatment from them, men will deny a need to change themselves. When such videos land on male algorithms, it often leads them to use it as an excuse to justify incel culture. They will claim that the existence of such high expectations on men to perform masculinity perfectly is the reason for the ‘male loneliness epidemic’. When such men turn to self help guides in response, it is unlikely that it is books like The Will to Change by Bell Hooks.

A tumble down the alt-right pipeline

The alt- right is incredible at subtlety. It has been at work for several years now to condition our minds to become more conservative and tolerant of facist ideologies. Many people’s descent to the alt-right often begins with a desire to understand how the world works and how to navigate it better. Most literature on self-help offers support to such people by ‘opening their minds to the true nature of things’ (which is also known as red-pilling). These books promise guiding principles to become your best self and acquire everything your heart desires. They essentially function as a means to navigate the feeling of powerlessness and the loss of agency that living under a hyper-capitalist model of society causes.

This is evident through the rise of new-age spirituality, manifestation content and modern stoicism. When women are red-pilled they are told to perform hyper-femininity. When their male counterparts are red-pilled they are coached by men such as Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson. The latter is definitely more dangerous than the former but it is important to understand how these two intersect:

Conservatives are occupied with preserving the natural order of things. They want everyone to behave exactly how they are ‘meant to’ in order to maintain their desired social order. The recent rise in content rooted in essentialised gender roles and the resultant shaming of identities that do not fit in sets out to achieve this exact aim.

Most of the content regarding dating, situationships and relationships presents itself as a prescription to our ailments when it comes to love. It tells us that the reason men are such terrible partners is not because they have been raised to avoid any accountability for their harms but because men just aren’t men anymore. The sassy man apocalypse and videos focusing on real men knowing how to act and treat women work to reinforce the ideas around masculinity being glorified in the manosphere. Even though the red-pill women espouse identities that do not pose threats to the safety of other men, their attempt to pin our society’s lack of a love ethic onto a lack of ‘manliness’ fuels incels.

This is how the far-right creates consent to marginalise everyone who does not fit in.

The sassy man apocalypse, is an example of shaming directed towards men for not behaving the way they are ‘supposed to’. It attacks men who display emotional vulnerability or voice their needs — traits associated strictly with women. Annabelle Shania Gunawan in her essay titled The 'sassy man apocalypse' is reinforcing toxic masculinity writes:

There has been a considerable pushback against hookup culture and casual sex in the past few years. Many women online complain about the transactional nature of hookups and how such a culture benefits men disproportionately. There is a growing amount of content critisizing situationships, friends with benefits and anything that does not offer a conventional structure of commitment.

And all of it is valid. Emotionally avoidant people (often men) have been able to exploit the sexual liberation of women in their own favour. The ambiguity that makes situationships thrive is an incredibly painful and anxiety-inducing experience. It makes sense then, that women are refusing to have sex with men and demanding greater commitment from them. It is a feminist goal for women to experience a better quality of love and so it is our right to protest for it. The only issue is that these very valid critiques of our relationships with men under capitalism have been hijacked and laced with propaganda not visible to the naked eye.

To ensure that our movement for better love is not jeopardised by the conservatives rooting against us, we must pushback for the right reasons.

None of us is immune to propaganda.

Two years ago on a random day in August I decided I was ready to get married. When I told my parents about this decision the confusion they experienced was so profound that for a moment they forgot that they were brown parents and this admission was a dream come true for them. For 23 years of my life I was sure that marriage was not an institution I wished to participate in and here I was non-chalantly expressing my desire for a traditional relationship. It was unlike me and my family was able to see through it. When father asked me why now I responded with almost a resignation in my voice.

Marriage just sounds easier compared to the hellscape the current dating scene is.

At that time I was dating someone who was extremely emotionally avoidant and refused to show up for our relationship. I was also recovering from a manic episode and self soothing by watching hours upon hours of content trying to figure out why love was so incredibly difficult for me to come by. A few months before that I had recently come across the manifestation community and I think that is what led me to discover most of these dating coaches. I was in pain and had no sense of where my life was headed. This content came with the promise of some structure and guidance. It became a hyper-fixation. I could literally feel my beliefs shifting. It started with wanting monogamy (something even my 17 year old self knew was not for me). Next it was marriage (again, not the first thing you think of when you hear my name). Then suddenly I found myself jealous of people in committed relationships even though it is incredibly difficult for me to feel jealousy (I think it might be the autism). This concerned me because I was comparing myself to other women and craving normalcy in a way I was not familiar with. I just wanted my incredibly complicated dating life to be easier to experience but here I was for some reason quitting my ADHD medication because I convinced myself that I did not need them. I experienced full blown psychosis as a result of possibly being a passive member of the alt-right cult culture. Everything I remember from last year is incredibly hazy and simply recalling it has me breaking out in sweats.

Six months ago, after a breakdown I led myself back into therapy and restarted my medication. I no longer want to get married and have absolutely no desire for a monogamous relationship either (this has changed since then and I believe will evolve as a sentiment as I age). The disconnect between my actual values and the values I was being indoctrinated with that I started to conform to caused a great amount of cognitive dissonance. Allowing myself to accept that I was brainwashed into betraying myself and helped me compassionately deal with the fallout of the whole thing.

- a lose retelling of the time I nearly lost my mind

The reason propaganda works is because it strikes a cord. When I convinced myself that I was ready to get married I was consuming content that solved the “commitment crisis” (men not committing and stringing you along) by telling women to not settle for anything less than marriage. When I was comparing myself to other women, the content was dream girl or doormat focused. Everything I was watching sold me the fantasy of finally fitting in — something I had always been denied.

Wanting to belong is a human instinct and the alt right is incredible at making you feel included. They use accessible language and —despite alpha males parading the supremacy of logic over emotion — the alt right excels at appealing to emotions, especially ones rooted in shame.

The only reason I was able to escape was because my politics and identity are completely at odds with conservative ideology. Even though I was on a steady diet of right wing propaganda, I made sure to keep reading books on the other end of the political spectrum. I think the reason I love Bell Hooks so much is because reading Communion and All About Love on repeat has played a huge role in me avoiding a complete decay of my critical thinking abilities.

Questioning the ideas and beliefs we are told to espouse is incredibly important. Do you oppose hookup culture because it is unfair to women or have you been subliminally brainwashed to buy into purity culture? Do you think polyamory may be toxic because men who refuse to do the work exploit it to deny responsibility or do you think polyamory is evil and responsible for our society’s downfall?

Most of the content that pushes us further right benefits from our inability to process why something is being vilified. The details that guide our morals lie in the subtleties and intentions behind our beliefs and actions.

If we wish to navigate and survive this new tide of fascism we must make it a habit to be mindful and critical of the content we consume. Propaganda can be incredibly difficult to spot sometimes but once you start seeing it, you are able to identify it no matter how subtle. Be critical of your favourites. Ask questions. Stay curious.

This essay is the first part in a three part series on navigating love and relationships under fascism. Read part two here: Controlling Love

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I will never know how you would truly feel. I can never know who you truly were.

But I wish I did.

I wonder how you would have reacted to me acting on stage or singing in front of strangers. How you would feel about me thinking that I am a lesbian every three weeks and yet sleeping with musty men without marriage. I know you would never find out because your daughter is so ashamed of my sexuality that she is always trying to erase that part of me. It doesn’t stop me from being curious about it though. How many of the women before me have been denied the right to be themselves and why do I get to live this life? I know technically it is because my parents worked for it but I can’t help but feel guilt when I see how the rest of the women I share my blood with live.

Maybe you died before I was born as some form of divine punishment for this privilege to be myself.

I tell myself that the shame you taught my mother dies with me but maybe a part of me holds onto it because it is the only thing that connects me back to you. I try to picture how you would tame my rebellious aura and sell it to me as your love. There is so much more than just shame that you could teach me though; for one, I do not know how to care for my hair. I blame you for it. Every girl I know has a nano who oils and braids their hair. Some things are just better learned when your mother’s mother teaches it to you. Maybe this is why your daughter failed to teach me how to have some sharam (shame). I think I would have turned out very differently if you had instilled in me all the values necessary to be the desi dream girl.

Think of how gol (round) my rotis would be.

Mum also struggles to make gol rotis and yummy salans. Can you blame her though? She lost you at the young age of 27 — she had barely experienced girlhood by then. Do you know how difficult it has been to raise her by myself? In two years I will have known her for longer than the time you and her spent together. I have tried so hard to help her untangle herself from the web of shame, insecurity and sadness you left her with. In two years I will be the age she was when she got married.

I don’t want to get married I have nothing to pass on.

Your copper cutlery adorns our drawing room. The concept of this room is so weird to me. So hollow and devoid of soul. It contains within it our most expensive furniture for all to see. It is our most prized possession because now all the people who once knew us as poor, can see that we have finally made it.

Nano I wish you were alive to witness the distastefully simple pleasures of the upper middle class. I know you would have hated designer lawns and ready-made kurtis. I wish you were alive so I could witness the horror in your eyes when you looked into my closet and found it a disorganised mess—or when I would tell you about my ADHD medication and therapy sessions. Maybe you would call me a churail (witch) like Dado (dad’s mum) used to.

Your death has robbed me of so many joys and now I try to replace that hole by staring at myself in the mirror hoping to catch a glimpse of you. Your daughter’s middle child and my younger brother looks exactly like you—or at least that is what everyone says. I envy him. He is connected to you simply through the act of existing.

I guess it is true that the bare minimum gets men everything in life.

Nana abu (mom’s dad) passed away when I was five years old. I remember his love for me. I know if he was alive today he would sit front row when I performed on stage. I think the whole village knew I would grow up to be a shameless woman when at the age of four I would sing and dance and tell stories to him as he was grieving his dead wife and fighting a heart disease.

He loved me despite my shamelessness though. He saw his daughter in me and he was so thankful that I had the freedom to become who she always wanted to be.

Nano, every day I fight for your daughter to live her best life but I am only twenty-five and I am withering away now. I have nothing left to give. This was your job, or at least partly what you owed her for being her mother. I grieve and mourn the childhood I lost raising my mother just like I mourn you not being alive to love us through it.

People wish to pass on the legacies of their ancestors. I never got to know a single one of mine. I am so disconnected to my past that it seems like nothing about me represents where I come from. I never got to know any of my grandparents as people. I feel like the universe gave them such short life spans as some cosmic lesson that I still can’t seem to understand.

The only thing they passed down to me is their offsprings riddled with guilt and trauma. I spend all of my money and free time now trying to purge myself of the fears that my amma and abba have carried with them in their blood—but god how I wish you were alive so I could complain to you about it endlessly.

I hope heaven is real and I meet you there. I hope heaven is real so I can prove to myself that fear and shame and playing it small is not the recipe for a life well lived and nor is it the guide to make it big in the after-life. I don’t believe in any of it but some days I miss you so terribly that I pray for it all to be real—just so I can see you once. Even if it is in death.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with sex before marriage

of course you don’t, besharam jo ho (because you have no shame)

Acha? (okay?) then tell me why its wrong.

It just is.

No, I need a justification now. If sex is wrong then why is it essential for human existence to sustain itself? Aap ne nahi kia to have us? (did you not have sex to have children?)

Gandi baatain nahi karo (don’t say disgusting things), you know that is different

HOW???

IT JUST IS.

I have had this conversation with my mother several times over the past few years–each time it came to the conclusion that she thinks sex between two unmarried people is gross and wrong. We have gotten into several arguments simply because she is never able to explain why she thinks this way.

When she fails at shaming me, she pulls fear out of her arsenal. She is an expert at inducing the anxiety required for me to cover my body and avoid physical intimacy at every cost.

I fight back with every bone in my body. The conversation looks something like this:

Pregnant hojao gi, STD de dega tumhe (You will end up pregnant or with STDs)

Condoms exist for a reason mom.

She stops talking and I leave the room exhausted but holding onto my sense of self because I have successfully managed to avoid both things despite being sexually active.

The next day at breakfast she looks ashamed to be my mother. She is compensating for my shamelessness by internalizing it as her failure to be a good mother. I avoid her in an attempt to save my day but she mutters under her breath.

Main tou aapkay bhalay ke liye hi bol rahi thi (I was only saying all that stuff for your own good)

I try to pretend I didn’t hear anything. I do not wish to engage. She gets louder.

All men want to do is use you. You are just letting them use you. Men who have sex with you before marriage will never marry you. They will never commit. Why would they commit? They are already getting everything they want. Believe me he will leave you and you will feel like shit for letting him use you.

Mujhe kya jao apna jism hai ganda karwa lo gandi harkatain karo slut banjao (what do I care? Its your body, go do your trashy acts and become a slut)

She is so loud this time that her voice gets stuck in my head for years. Every single date I go on the faint echoes of her slut shaming follow me. I blame myself now. Any time a man is unable to commit to me I feel it my personal failure because I gave him my body too soon. It does not matter if I even wanted commitment. It does not matter that I was an active participant and enjoyed it. Every failed relationship is my fault because I took my shirt off before I said my vows.

A man’s inability to give me respect is simply a consequence of my promiscuity. After all I knew that all men are like this and chose not to heed the lesson. I must now suffer the pain that I caused myself.

I internalize this shame as a part of my identity. I inherited it from my mother. She tells herself she failed as a mother because her daughter enjoys casual sex. I tell myself I am undeserving of love and respect. The shame becomes who I am and it guides everything I do. We both fail to live up to society’s standards of what it defines as moral. We fail to be good women and we bow our heads in shame so our eyes may never meet again.

NO, I SAY. I REFUSE TO ACCEPT THIS.

I refuse to let this shame seal my fate. Instead of letting it define who I am and the kind of love I deserve I turn it around and look at it for what it really is – an attempt to police me. When I start to see someone's disrespect as a consequence of a personal flaw, the person who disrespected me flees accountability with ease. Perhaps that is entirely the purpose of this shame I am forced to wear.

Human beings infer what is wrong and what is right based on what is punished and what is rewarded. In shame cultures like ours, shaming is a form of punishment and a tool to police us. Incriminating what that society deems immoral serves as a perfect way to outlaw things that might threaten the social order. When one is sanctioned for breaking a certain moral code –even one they do not understand or accept– they may internalize it as their fault for not understanding well enough. This leads them to conclude, in the words of Frantz Fanon, that I am guilty. I do not know what, but I know I am no good.

This self blame obviously does not feel good or even justified but we grow up without alternative explanations for why certain rules exist and so assuming the blame is sometimes all we can do. For example Christine Park notes that children who are abused make sense of it by taking responsibility for this abuse. They conclude that their pain is deserved because something is wrong in who they are or that they have done something to cause this.

Since we organise our moral understanding of what is right and what isn’t based on what is punished or rewarded, witnessing someone being punished evokes a similar idea of responsibility. Stanley Cohen, in his book States of Denial, highlights that this happens due to the existence of “just world thinking” : the belief that the world is fundamentally just. According to him this feeds into the idea that people get “what they deserve”. It shows you what to do and what to avoid if you wish to be spared by society and its justice system.

I was sixteen years old when Qandeel Baloch was murdered by her brother in the name of honour. Everyone around me said she deserved it because she was a promiscuous woman. And though I could not get myself to accept any of the reasons for why a woman’s sexuality is a source of dishonour or why the punishment for promiscuity is death, I rationalized it to myself.

It is important to note that most of us do not accept the idea of a fair and just criminal system easily. A lot of propaganda goes into manufacturing our consent for it as soon as we come into this world. In our houses during everyday conversations and in schools and on television we are introduced to the concept of authority and why those who possess it are always correct.

Many of us in our childhoods have had moments where we feel wronged by our elders but we are discouraged from questioning it. We are told that if a message is coming from a figure of authority, then it is correct and in our best interests. The message is to suppress any denial you may feel and to blindly accept the commands of those in power. In this way, even when it feels wrong and unfair to believe a certain thing, most of us force ourselves to accept it as our reality because someone with authority told us it is the right thing to do.

When societies outlaw entire identities and induce a sense of guilt within individuals who espouse them, the result is a person who centers their life around this shame for who they are. They are convinced that they are fundamentally flawed. We learn that to survive we must not reveal our true selves –for those parts of us are deeply corrupted and a source of shame. Along with censoring our individuality we also learn to look out for ourselves by actively silencing the urge to stand up in the defense of another to avoid any guilt by association. In this way, the paralysing nature in which shame is felt by a person causes their entire life to become a quest to flee this shame –and run further away from themselves.

This is not to say that shaming and showing disapproval for certain actions should be completely avoided. Psychologists Stuevig, Dearing and Tangney et al suggest that feelings of guilt about specific behaviours are less likely to result in a belief that one’s failures and transgressions point to a bad self. Instead the assessment of such failures would lead to the conclusion that it is simply bad behaviour which is a lot easier to change. This is often the justification given by those in power when their relentless shaming is called out or questioned. To them their methods are a foolproof way to avoid the decay of moral and social order —and for them this is in the collective benefit of everyone involved.

Let us say, for the sake of argument that this is true —that shaming allows people to behave better and in turn creates a better society for everyone to live in. Why is it then, that the moral decay in Pakistani society so vehemently obvious that everyone knows our country for its shrewd treatment of women and minorities? Why are we topping the list of countries that search for porn the most?

In a society that is structured around shame, an active effort is made to deem aspects of identity, which clash with society’s standards of morality, sinful and shameful. In John Bradshaw’s 1998 book Healing the Shame That Binds You, he states that once shame is transformed into an identity, it becomes toxic and dehumanizing. This toxicity, according to Brene Brown, is caused by the fact that shame is the intensely painful feeling that causes us to believe that we are flawed and unworthy of acceptance and belonging. Shame creates a perception of our whole self as being fundamentally undeserving and not enough. This feeling, that you are no good or that, as Brown puts it, there is something peculiarly or particularly bad about you as an individual is so paralyzing that it often creates a self fulfilling prophecy resulting in no change within an individual.

After all when your whole existence is the problem, being better would imply an overhaul. Most of us are not equipped with the capacity to carry out such an overhaul without completely losing our minds —especially when we never get the chance to explore who we truly are.

David Keen in his book Shame: The Politics and Power of an Emotion highlights the perverse distribution of shame as a reason for a lack of change. Shaming is directed at the vulnerable and averted from the perpetrators. In Pakistan, a man who sexually abuses and kills a woman faces far less scrutiny than the woman who experiences such a fate. When Qandeel’s brother killed her, her sexuality was cited as a reason to erase any sympathy for her. The popular discourse, in most Pakistani households and religious media outlets, painted her as an icon of shamelessness and celebrated her death as an act of vigilante justice.

Her brother was paraded as a hero who had rescued our values and morals while she was berated, even in death.

Being shamed is also such a painful experience that most people wish to escape the feeling. For us women to escape from shame we are advised to adopt the blueprint for becoming the fantasy of every Pakistani man. Devoid of any sexual impulses or urges, untouched, knows nothing about sex and is willing to feed her husband whenever he is hungry, with food and pleasure in equal amounts. A virgin. A child. And yet somehow also a mother. We are told that once we possess all of these qualities we are finally worthy of being chosen, committed to and hopefully loved.

If we fail, we are worthless.

Keen talks about how a reservoir of underlying shame creates abundant opportunities for manipulation. Learning at a young age that you are worthless will make you go through life accepting the absolute worst and believing that it is truly what you deserve. This is how our culture creates a population of women who become a party to their own subjugation. In cultures like mine, addressing this underlying shame is discouraged because we are told that this shame is an integral part of our identity as women. Most women wear their shame with pride considering it a medal of honour which signifies that they have suppressed all of their desires and urges successfully. Having shame is considered a rite to passage for becoming a woman.

Since shame, like any other emotion, also serves a survival function it is passed on through generations. Through this shame our grandmothers taught our mothers how to be women. It is how we learned what we must do in order to make sure we do not become another Qandeel. It is feared that giving up this shame would lead to us losing our right to womanhood and through that our ‘safety’.

It is another issue that unlearning this shame is not an easy thing to be tasked with. Unlearning the beliefs that we have been raised into is a deeply uncomfortable and in some ways an extremely painful process that could take years. It requires us to learn things about ourselves that we were unable to for most of our lives. You will probably need therapy or some form of self help to get you through the hardest days as you rewire your mind and recreate your relationship with yourself. No matter how hard though, we must do the work for not only our future generations but also the ones that precede us.

Shame creates an identity that is born out of a fear of not being good enough to belong. It tells us that to respect and love must be earned at the cost of our individuality and sense of self. It forces us to erase ourselves. The way in which shame is used to induce guilt and fear so intense that its impacts are paralysing can be explained as nothing short of violence against our being. And so, if the goal is to be truly free we must lose this mental servitude to fears that shame has forced us to carry for the entirety of our lives.

Taylor swift was my most played artist of 2023, kinda cringe I know. I went from hating her in college to obsessing over her in university and becoming a “gaylor” in my gap years to losing interest in her music completely. I have gone through it all – which is why I feel most qualified to write about how we yearn for our favourites to be at least a little oppressed so we can give them a benefit of the doubt and feel better about our choice to support them. 

Last year as we became witnesses to a genocide on our screens, millions of fans called on their favourites to comment on the ongoing crimes against humanity committed by Israel. Most of them disappointed us and showed that they only speak up for causes that directly benefit them. Taylor Swift, who has been on tour for a little longer than the televised ethnic cleansing in Gaza, became a central point of critique in these times. Several fans scurried online to desperately search for clues that she was not a genocide sympathiser. It was sad to witness. It reminded me of when I was stuck with an avoidant man who refused to be nice to me so I forced myself to settle for crumbs and read into everything he did to believe that he was worthy of my love. 

Celebrity culture has devolved into a cult-like commitment and devotion to human beings that do not care if we live or die. Fans put them on a pedestal so high that celebrities transcend beyond human existence. They become god-like divine creatures who can do no wrong and cause no harm. Fans become unpaid publicists ready to destroy anyone who dares to criticise their idol. It makes sense that this happens though. Just like a toxic one sided relationship will have you addicted to crumbs of affection that keep your “they love me” delusions afloat, a para-social relationship with a celebrity–especially with an artist like Taylor Swift–will have you grasping at straws to justify your inability to take them off the pedestal. 

In many instances such a para-social relationship develops when the celebrity “saves” the fans by representing their feelings and emotions and helping them realise that they are not alone. In a culture plagued by loneliness and despair anyone or anything that helps us cope becomes our saviour. For most women, sick of being told they are too much, it is Taylor Swift. At least that is what appealed to me. Popular culture is accessible and easy to partake in. All of my friends were fans of hers and I had vowed to never date a man who hated her music (because that was just his misogyny showing). Following Taylor and her music and her lore offered me a sense of community and a topic of conversation no matter where I went. It was amazing.

When you put the obsession of a fan into this context, they stop looking as insane as football fans make Swifties out to be. 

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Unfortunately though, communities built around the worship of privileged women like Swift often find themselves weaponizing oppression to deflect justified critique towards their idols. For me, the community that Swifties offered was easily replaced by those concerned with the state of the world and the actions of genocidal states. But for many, the world still revolved around the Eras Tour. I do not wish to fault people seeking joy in life, by any means necessary, when the world seems to be falling apart. But I do take issue with people denying that celebrities like Taylor possess power and influence simply because they are women tied to an abusive music industry that constantly pulls their strings.

Taylor Swift is not some small town indie artist. She is a literal billionaire and her tour has had such an impact on the economy that a term was invented to describe it. Her private plane emissions are larger than those of millions of her fans put together. She releases singles and multiple versions of her music to keep new artists from topping charts. Taylor Swift has a sizeable chunk of power. The issue is that she refuses to do anything with it that could jeopardise this status. 

It is not just Taylor. The thing with power is that once you obtain it you will always live with the fear of losing it and so everything you do will be informed by an attempt to hold on to it. 

Something I have learned about unhealthy attachments masked as love, commitment and devotion is that this ‘love’ might make you a little bit stupid. The red flags could be staring directly at you but accepting them would mean taking responsibility for the choices you are making. When you love someone, you choose to invest in them. No one is forcing you to love them–at least not overtly. It may seem that you owe someone love for everything they have done for you or, sometimes in abusive situations you might feel like you do not have any other options but to stay. Often survivors of cults and victims of narcissistic abuse experience this causing them to tough it out for a lot longer than it is necessary. 

As a former ‘directioner’ I will be the first to admit that it is difficult to accept the fact that fandoms are similar to cults in more ways than one. I remember fighting with fellow thirteen year old girls who made fun of one direction. My friends and I knew their favourite colours. All of us brown girls hated Perrie Edwards. We thought we knew these boys the best and anyone who did not like them just needed to get to know them more. It was a connection that offered us thirteen year old girls a meaning of life that we desperately craved at that time. An obsession to save us from the realities of entering into our teen years – a time when nothing makes sense and you have no sense of direction. In that time these five gave us the “direction” that we were collectively searching for and so I felt like I owed them a certain level of devotion. I did that by becoming an unpaid public relations manager just like millions of other fans.

They were perfect to us. Incapable of making any mistakes or causing any harm. 

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The only issue was that they had become superhuman. Beyond human flaws. And for the human mind, anything beyond human comprehension compels us to project ourselves onto it to make sense of it. When celebrities become God-like, fans who worship them do anything to justify their choice to do so. This is where things become murky for ‘stans’: 

When your god-like saviour faces criticism for remaining silent and not using their influence for anything useful, you feel personally attacked for your choices. The criticism feels like a judgement on your sense of morality. If you are actively choosing to worship someone who only speaks up when it benefits them then what does it say about you as a person? The denial that this person is actively choosing to be this way is also normal and so is the urge to prove to the world that in reality this ‘super powerful celebrity’ possesses no agency at all. 

This is when proximity to victimhood becomes a powerful tool to absolve your favourite person. They go from being god to becoming a puppet of the industry with absolutely no control over their actions. When we look at intersections of oppression one way of perceiving them is to think that for every part of your identity that is marginalised, your agency becomes compromised. At the bottom of the barrel is the helpless victim with no free will. This victim is seen as incapable of causing harm because they possess no power. Each one of us lies somewhere on this spectrum depending on what forms our identity. Taylor Swift occupies a space at the very top along with other billionaires and authority figures who need not care about the consequences of their actions because their capital will always save them. Some might accuse me of being too harsh towards a woman in a male dominated industry but that is exactly the issue I have with this type of weaponisation of identity.

Taylor’s fans use her womanhood to deny that she has agency over the choices she makes. They claim that any privilege that she gets from being at the top of the hierarchy in terms of every other intersection does not compare to the marginalisation she faces as a woman. This has a lot to do with how women are perceived as helpless victims, and often placed at the bottom of the barrel. Through this narrative a woman is a victim first, no matter how powerful she may seem. She is always always painted as a passive subject experiencing life rather than an autonomous being free to do what she wills. Taylor’s womanhood therefore absolves her of any guilt caused by her actions and choices. 

When association with one form of oppression fails, try two. This is when Gaylors come to the rescue. Their argument? Taylor Swift is a lesbian woman trapped in the closet because coming out would be disastrous for her. She hides behind queer coded lyrics hoping to be free from the chains of expectations that tie her down to performing the role of a straight woman. In their illustration of Swift, she has no power at all. In fact, she is in desperate need of a saviour – or saviours. Gaylors band together to offer her this ‘safe space’ to drop the act and just allow the world to truly see her.

In my opinion, Taylor Swift is extremely clever for keeping her lyrics so ambiguous that you can project whatever image you wish onto her. In that way, she holds a likeness to the deities we worship. We will never know who they truly are but we take their messages and interpret them in whatever way brings us the most satisfaction and peace. 

She gives us nothing, not even enough to salvage her image but because we desperately wish to exonerate ourselves for blindly supporting a person like her, we claw at any evidence that makes her look better. We wish and pray that she understands oppression in some way so we can pretend that she possesses a moral compass and some level of humanity. More importantly, we hope that she understands what it is like to be a human being without everything in the world at your disposal so we can believe that she cares about us. 

By projecting victimhood onto Taylor, her fans attempt to show that she does not have the power to make change. That her calling for a ceasefire or platforming individuals who are vocal about the atrocities around the world would have absolutely no impact. Her fans wound her superhuman status to perpetuate the myth of her powerlessness to avoid any accountability for her actions. 

The truth is Taylor Swift and the likes of her would never possess this amount of power if they presented a threat to the structures of authority that allow for the persistence of oppression and relentless violence. These structures actively benefit from the pain they cause. We want to believe that our idols don’t have the power to change things because admitting that they do, leads to the painful realisation that these people do not care about us and still manage to make a profit off of our loyalty to them. 

What irks me the most is that people in positions of power are able to easily rely on their devotees to fight their battles for them. These fans pit themselves against the whole world and perform free labour for the already rich and privileged instead of demanding accountability. I think we forget that the power these individuals enjoy comes from us and we have the right to revoke it if that power harms more of us than it helps. The only reason they get away with the harm they cause is because there is no consequence for their behaviour. Taylor still managed to sell out shows everywhere. The Biden administration continues to fund Israel. Fast fashion is ruining our planet and the rich of the world keep getting richer by robbing the planet of its once abundant resources. 

They only thrive when we start to believe that we hold no power to stop them from doing all this. 

In a consumerist society and economy our choices represent what we are willing to accept. Making the active effort to consume more consciously – even if that means not streaming music from your comfort artist and not showing up for them when they disappoint you– is how we show our unwillingness to allow the devolution of human morality. 

We can of course enjoy the art these people produce but we can also try to make sure that we don’t end up selling our commitment and loyalty to these artists simply because they provide us with a form of entertainment.

(I was going to make a funny analogy about how funny it would be if we worshipped other products that we consume in our daily lives the same way we do with celebrities, but then I realised that we do kind of worship these products anyway. Ruined the joke for myself)

With over 43 billion views overall, the popularity of this trend world-wide cannot be disputed. If so many people are consuming this content that promises to completely change your life for the better, then where are the millions of testimonials to prove this? Is it just another fad or is there at least an ounce of truth to these claims? When I first ended up on manifestation tiktok back in August 2022, my brain was riddled with similar questions. This blog post is simply an attempt to explain why I believe that manifestation is both life-changing and a fad at the same time.

The first time I came across a manifestation tutorial, I was in the midst of a depressive episode because nothing in my life seemed to be working. I had just graduated with a degree I didn’t like. I was back in Pakistan—something 19-year-old me had planned would never happen. I did not have a job or any friends in the new city and I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do with my life. I was willing to do anything it took to turn my life around and so when a random white girl on tiktok told me to write a letter to the universe asking it to give me everything I want, I obliged. I followed every instruction and wrote multiple pages addressing each desire in detail emphasising how my life would be so much better if I got it. I knew my life was not going to change overnight but for the first time in a while, I had hope that something good might happen. After writing it all down I felt like I had lost any respect I had for myself. But I was also desperately searching for hope, so it didn’t matter. I stashed my journal away and hoped that no one would find it. I was embarrassed. I thought I was better than this. I never told anyone about it because I knew they would laugh at me for thinking it would work. 

The next morning when I woke up and none of my wishes had come true, I scoffed. I was not surprised. “Of course, it didn’t work”, I thought to myself. I tore out all the pages and threw them in the trash. I promised myself to never believe that stuff again and went back to sulking over how miserable my life was. As I was watching drag race and mentally punishing myself for not being productive, I received a job offer—something I had asked for in the journal. I told myself it was just a coincidence because otherwise I would have every single thing I had put down on those pages that now sat somewhere in a dumpster.

The truth is, I did not care if the ‘tiktok method’ had worked or not because I finally had something to look forward to but this little ‘coincidence’ kickstarted a very complicated relationship between me and this ‘trend’. 

During my daily morning stroll through my tiktok ‘for you’ page, I came across another white girl telling me why I was manifesting “incorrectly”. According to her, I wasn’t getting what I wanted because I was ‘too desperate’ for it, and I was “giving my desires the ick”. She said I needed to stop thinking obsessively about what I wanted and then it will just come into my life. “Don’t chase your desires, let them come to you”. This was very discouraging to hear. I felt like it was my fault that I didn’t have the things I wanted because I couldn’t stop fixating on them. I felt so bad about myself that I made an active effort to get rid of all manifestation content on my for-you page. I hated these people for telling me I could have my dream life but also that I couldn’t. I hated the way my brain worked. I hated everything. The next time one of these people showed up on my tik-tok was when I was anxiously seeking reassurance from someone I thought was ghosting me. I wasn’t surprised that I was once again on the side of tiktok that would attempt to give me a quick fix (that wouldn’t work) for my problems. As I was trying to reset my algorithm so that I wouldn’t feel personally attacked by it, I came across another one of these videos. This one said it wasn’t just my desperate energy it was also my state of mind and the thoughts I was thinking all day. “Change your thoughts, change your life” she claimed. As someone with anxiety and intrusive thoughts, I hated hearing this even more. I wanted to fight someone. I felt so stuck I wanted to cry. I felt like my life was always going to suck in some way because I was mentally ill. Out of spite (but mostly just sadness) I stopped using tiktok entirely. 

Life was finally ‘not too bad’ and obviously it meant that manifestation tiktok had stopped following my trail like a shadow in the night. A few months ago though, everything went wrong and to no one’s surprise I ended up with these same people on my for you page once again. This time I had nothing to lose because I felt like I had already lost everything I had and so sitting in the corner of a random hotel in a city I barely knew anything about, I decided to give it one last shot. This decision changed my life for the worse and for the better and has made me realise why ‘manifestation tiktoks’ have ruined its transformative potential.

I know it took me a while to get to the point, but all this context was important to understand what I am trying to argue. Before I make my case in favour of ‘manifestation’ and against its ‘popularity’, let’s look at the actual definition of manifestation—according to the Oxford dictionary: 

According to this definition, manifestation itself is simply a product of something. This means that manifestation is not a process, but the result of one. The problem with how the concept of manifestation came into most of our lives is that we think of it as magical thing that happens when we do a little trick. Tiktok is filled with these ‘tricks’. The issue is that manifestation is nothing special because it is happening all the time. Everything around you is a manifestation of something or the other, but these creators won’t tell you that. Creating a lore around manifestation and making it sound like a rediscovered relic is what gets them the views they need to make money. I also want to point out that the promise of “changing your whole life” with just a simple trick is not something that is unique to tiktok (and other social media websites). It is a tale as old as time. Witches will sell you spells. Pirs (saints) will tell you to recite certain prayers (some will also sell you spells), billionaires will tell you that it is simply ‘discipline and hard work’. They all do it successfully because we all want the secret to having it all and, in their hands they hold this secret. We think buying what they are selling is exactly what we need to live the life we want and to finally be satisfied.  

The truth is much less exciting though. After months and months of trying several tiktok techniques and obsessively looking for evidence of their success, so I could tell myself I was not wasting time that I could spend actually getting my life together (I was depressed and barely left the house for two months). I wanted it to work so bad because I was so tired of things always going wrong. I have now realised that the magic of manifestation does not lie in tricks and spells and routines and instead is rooted simply in how your subconscious mind works. 

EXPLOITATION

If people understood that manifestation is a boring thing grounded in neuroscience, the crowds swarming to every video, every convention, every podcast promising to reveal the secrets of the universe, simply would not care. It would stop selling. 

Understanding manifestation as a product of our thoughts, beliefs and assumptions is the key to understanding how our brains work and how to make them work for us instead of against us. Which is why I think this trend had so much potential—this information is genuinely life-changing. Unfortunately, ‘complicated’ brain science cannot be taught in a 30 second tik-tok video. It also doesn’t grab your attention the way claiming a simple affirmation or spell holds the power to change your life, does. Some claiming to help you manifest do not understand the science behind it themselves. They have simply managed to be successful at it because of their own underlying assumptions and a relatively strong self-concept coupled with a strong faith in the ‘power of manifestation’. Those who do understand how and why manifestation works will often use very convoluted language to explain it so we can never quite ‘get it right’. This works perfectly because whenever something we want doesn’t manifest, we will end up on one of these videos to search for the answer. “What am I doing wrong now?” These creators will blame you for not being positive or being too fixated on your desire or not living your life enough. This usually ends results in three things:

1. Hyper-fixation

I think for most people who end up in the trap of manifesting their worries away, hyper-fixating on it is the first thing that happens. It becomes a bad habit. I remember when I first started trying these techniques, with varying levels of success—which meant that sometimes they worked very well and sometimes they ‘backfired’—all I wanted was to find the ‘right’ technique so I could finally catch a break. It did not help that every video I watched told me something different and sometimes contradicted everything I had been doing and slowly but surely, I did feel like I was losing my mind. But I also couldn’t stop. For each article I read about how manifestation is bullshit I found several success stories talking about how they manifested their dream life, overnight. And there I was failing to even manifest a text from a random person (I was too scared to try bigger things in case manifestation was witchcraft) I wanted to stop but I could not. Surely, at some point I would figure out what trick works and then my life would be perfect. If you read through the comments of these videos, you will find many like me. Complaining that it doesn’t work, or that their lives were even worse now that they had tried it, so now they are terrified of it–but they also didn’t want to give up. It felt good to know that I was not the only one experiencing this and just like my fellow manifestation sceptics, I was desperate to prove to myself that it worked. That something worked. That there was hope that life could be better.

The good news is that manifestation is not a form of witchcraft (instead witchcraft is simply a way to manifest). The bad news though, is that the solution does not lie in any of those videos, because if it did then we wouldn’t feel the need to consume more of them. 

2. Buying courses 

The hyper-fixation is not only helpful for creators who want their content to go viral because of views but also for those who want to sell their ‘secrets’. There were so many times when I almost gave in and bought these courses or affirmation tapes and everything else that promised a roadmap to an easier life. Thankfully I was too broke to afford them because no one truly needs any of that stuff. What I did end up doing was signing up to their newsletters and joining their free Facebook pages and all it did was make me hate life even more. These groups have all sorts of rules around ‘not complaining’ and only posting success stories instead. The coaches are extremely rude when asked a question because they would just blame you for not understanding a concept that is extremely simple. It is once again all your fault. The free stuff was equal parts discouraging and useless. They tell you just enough to keep you curious and wondering until you eventually give in and buy the thing. I lost count of how many times I wished for just enough money to buy one of these so I could manifest more than a text (which I was also failing to do). My mother almost bought one a few months ago and the only reason she didn’t end up wasting her money was because I told her I am researching the same thing and if she could just wait a few months, I will just teach her everything I have learned—and I did.

3. Giving up

This happens either because you don’t have the money to afford these life-changing courses or because you are overwhelmed by the amount of (unhelpful and contradictory) information you have consumed. It is not only unfortunate but also potentially dangerous. You were promised a dream and you tried so hard to get it and now you have nothing to show for it. It is depressing. If the only result of this was people having less faith in ‘manifestation’ it would be okay, but it is not the only thing that happens. These ‘manifestation coaches’ who have monetised the practise build their legitimacy through success stories. Clients who had results overnight or in a couple of days. Clients who now have everything they want—everything you thought you could have as well. When I was scouring through reddit, YouTube comment sections and reading through random articles claiming that “manifestation ruined their lives”, I found that most of these people felt more depressed. They said it made them feel like a failure because of how simple it is for some and how difficult it was for them. All they could focus on now was how much time they lost and how jealous they felt of people manifestation had worked for. Here, a lot of discourse around privilege and the ability to ‘manifest’ being a product of this privilege was the thing most of these rants had in common. Unfortunately, this is the fate of most internet trends (or ‘shortcuts’ in general) that claim to change your life. They end up creating more devastation and disillusionment than they create positive change. 

When I was researching for this blog post, I found that over 64% of the people who consume manifestation content are people aged 18-24 and the main themes of the videos that go viral are love, money, career and beauty. Everything that makes the world go round. These statistics make sense when you consider the fact that this is the age, we finally have autonomy over our lives—and with that the chance to make our own decisions. Every action is fuelled by the desire to understand the world, to achieve all your dreams and to have the perfect life. In the age of the internet all of our desires feel more achievable but also way less attainable so we are constantly looking for the solution–the formula that will help us get there. So, it comes as no surprise that as soon as the quality of your life begins to deteriorate because things aren’t the way they should be, the tiktok algorithm starts to stalk you so it can offer you a solution.

These ‘coaches’ and ‘content creators’ exploit the desperation of these individuals with the promise to change their lives.

THE CRINGE FACTOR 

Even the thought of claiming that manifestation tiktoks changed my life leaves a bitter taste in my mouth—because they did not, but they did help me discover the concept of neurolinguistic programming (which kind of did). This is precisely the problem with manifestation as a trend. The way the content is centred on “making someone give you whatever you want” or “getting your crush (who isn’t into you) to be obsessed with you” or “manifesting thousands of dollars overnight without lifting a finger” makes it sound like manifestation is black magic. It comes across as a way to manipulate people and take away their free will. It also sounds like a way to skip all the hard work and be lazy. Most of the criticism you will find in news articles, attempts to tell young people trying to manifest their dreams that manifestation might be real, but they also have to ‘work for what they want’ because that is how they think dreams can be actualised best. This way of explaining manifestation makes it so that even when it works, you are dubious of it. Or worse, you feel like you have done something illegal because these creators will make it sound like the concept of manifestation is something that has been kept a secret because of how powerful it is.

Those who don’t refer to manifestation as a supernatural phenomenon, invent their own scientific theories (which again, are grounded in some facts) to explain it. They use words like vibrations, frequencies, and quantum leaping. According to them, your ‘frequency should align with the frequency of your desire. Some claim that you can shift your realities and enter different universes if you want to. Others focus on the importance of gratitude towards the universe or an external source for all that you have. I hated that I would be associated with these people and laughed at if I claimed manifestation was real. For the longest time I didn’t want to admit that it could work because I would slightly judge myself for it if it did. 

What I have realised is that manifestation is such a simple concept that it is hard for most of us to wrap our heads around it. It seems too good to be true that simply by reprogramming your subconscious mind, you can truly be whoever you have always wanted to be and have everything your heart desires–so we as humans have done what we do best and complicated it. 

Ultimately the problem with manifestation as a trend is that it makes manifestation a commodity that you can purchase and that is where its potential is lost. Manifestation becomes something you have to do, instead of something you are already always doing. If you try to understand the subconscious brain, you will realise that everything you experience externally is a manifestation of everything you have experienced internally first. If it is peace you ultimately want to experience, then it is peace you must create inside you. Making manifestation less about internal satisfaction and more about material desires keeps us in the chase of wanting more and lines the pockets of those who understand that for most of us life is a never-ending pursuit of happiness. It reinforces the fact that we need material things and constant external validation to feel good and live a happy life. 

All I have learned is that no outside source can promise to change your lives because nothing on the outside can shift your internal experiences except for you but if these coaches told you this then you wouldn’t need them. 

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter) and their likes rose to fame because they offered us a feeling of being connected to those we loved without the restrictions of borders. Gone are the days of having to wait days or months to hear back from someone. No more wondering what someone is up to. No more paying for long distance calls. Everything and everyone was now in the palm of your hands, accessible at any time of the day. We can now experience connection with the world in a way we have never known before.

The only cost? Our privacy.

I remember making a facebook account and hiding it from my father. He was always worried about the dangers of his children having unrestricted access to the internet. I did not understand why it was such a big deal. I knew about the concept of privacy and that we should respect other people’s privacy. I did not know privacy was a right that is protected by international conventions but I was taught not to eavesdrop or go through someone else’s things without their permission. I was taught that it was basic human decency. I quickly learned that this standard of behavior was something expected of me but not something promised to me. Since I was only a child, it was okay for my parents to go through my personal belongings. They knew the world better and knowing what I had been up to would help them protect me from any harm that could come to me. My safety was ensured by me surrendering my right to privacy to a figure of authority responsible for my care. Questions of why I was not allowed to have any privacy were met with suspicion. Why? Do you have something to hide?

School was no different. Spot checks to make sure we were not carrying “prohibited items” were a common occurrence. We were told it was because we were kids and could not be trusted. Letting them go through our bags and pockets was the only way to earn the trust of our teachers and avoid getting in trouble. Feeling violated was not an option. If your bag doesn’t have anything you are not meant to bring to school, then you have nothing to fear. Any resistance to your teacher opening your bag in front of the entire class, and inspecting the contents in its entirety resulted in punishment.

Why would I care that having a facebook account meant that my privacy was under threat? At least this time it was a decision I was consciously making–and one that came with many (supposed) benefits.

Privacy. An inferior right?

Many of us grew up knowing privacy only as a word and not as an experience. It is unsurprising then that we do not understand what we are losing when this right is taken away.

References to surveillance in popular culture mimic the imagery of Foucault’s panopticon–drawing attention to the totalitarian state surveillance model. This panopticon is a tower in the middle of a prison with eyes on each prisoner cell. The objective of this tower and the guards is to make sure the prisoners discipline themselves on their own as they function under the assumption that they are always being watched. The issue is that these images are not representative of the surveillance society we live in today and are merely a representation of the cliched cultural references such as Big Brother (Katherine and David Barnard Mills). Shoshanna Zubof, in the Age of Surveillance (2018) argues that when our understanding of surveillance is shaped by a culture that is unable to capture the diffuse practices of surveillance capital, it impedes our ability to resist, neutralise and ultimately vanquish its potency. What this essentially means is that we become primed to see the violation of our privacy by the state as an infringement of the right, but the other means by which we are deprived of this right on a daily basis do not feel as threatening.

To explain how the meaning of privacy is malleable let us consider these examples:

When you step out of your house, you hope that you will not be stalked by a stranger. You are aware that you have the freedom to move and the right to feel safe when you are enjoying this freedom. If then someone invades our privacy, it can feel extremely violating. To defend themselves they argue that you chose to walk around in the same space as them and they were simply trying to connect with you as a human. In this scenario, any justification given by the stalker would warrant a response that calls them out for being creepy, entitled and also blaming the victim.

Let us further translate this scenario into two different contexts:

Taylor swift is walking on the street. She is going about her day–not hurting anyone and not disrupting anything. A swarm of paparazzis and fans suddenly start catching up to her until she is surrounded by them completely. She now has to pose for pictures, be courteous and perform the role of celebrity to the best of her abilities. She is no longer just another human being. Her claim to the right of privacy is diminished by what she owes us–the people who have endowed her with the status of celebrity which implies that since she is not like other humans, the treatment she receives must also be different.

Now consider a micro celebrity or an influencer. Her profile is open for us to view at any time we please. In fact her career depends on it. There is no relationship between her and her followers except for the one she chooses to create to make money. In that sense all of her followers are strangers to her. It no longer feels violating if I use the word ‘stalking’ to define the act of going through her profile and learning about her. A word that otherwise evokes feelings of danger and potentially creates legal consequences, means nothing in this context. I will leave it up to you to decide if that is a good thing or bad.

In all three of these contexts, privacy as a right is discussed but the way we view it is shaped by our relationship with the person whose privacy is being infringed upon. We decide who is worthy of this right and who is not based on who benefits from the voluntary surrender of it. Not everyone is equally deserving of it now. If you are being stalked by a random stranger on the internet, it would feel equally as violating as being followed down the street. Now add this stranger to your list of followers, exchange a few messages, and suddenly ‘stalking’ your profile feels like a way for them to know you so that they can build a relationship with you. In the world of online dating this seems like normal.

We are offered many benefits if we choose to give up this right of privacy. Depending on who you are and how you use it, social media can become a source of income, visibility and a cure for a lack of connection. Privacy no longer feels like a right that is essential in the same way other human rights are and so our commitment to protecting it is only limited to resisting state surveillance or preventing cyber crimes–as previously identified by Zubof.

Privacy and trust

Influencers are like glorified salespersons. They get paid way more than a salesperson for technically the same task–selling a product to people. The most effective way to get people to buy a product is to create a relationship with the buyer. The more we trust an influencer, the more likely it is that we will find their claims to be credible. To build this relationship these influencers put their lives online to prove that they have nothing to hide and are deserving of our trust. They take us through their morning routines. We greet their partners, their parents and friends through their interactions and then they allow us to watch them as they finish the day scrolling on their phone. They paint themselves to be normal everyday people–but they are far from normal. They have large audiences deeply invested in their wellbeing, their relationships and the children (their kids, siblings, nieces and nephews etc) in their lives.

Growing up online

A few days ago as I was scrolling through tiktok, I came across a strange video where a lady asked her followers to ‘watch her baby’ as she took a bathroom break. I saw stitches to that video of people interacting with the child, calling it adorable. The baby was barely two years old, could not speak and probably only looked into the phone camera diligently because she could see her reflection in the phone. She had no idea that she was being watched by millions of people–she didn’t even know what that meant. The rise and success of family vlogging channels means that this child is not the only one being watched by millions of strangers. These vloggers, in the quest to authentically document their life experiences, do not stop at showing us what they eat in a day–they take it a step further by giving us access to the life of those who do not understand what they are being brought into. When the goal is to create trust, even using children can be justified.

People tend to trust children more than they trust adults.

If we grew up not knowing about privacy as an experience, I fear that the generations raised on camera might not even know of it as a concept. To them, the loss of privacy means nothing because for them the concept of privacy never existed. If the argument in favour of giving up your privacy is one of consent and choice, then the existence of content with children who do not know what it means for their lives to be broadcasted online defeats any validity it holds. We could say that it is possible that these parents are getting their children’s consent to post them but that would only be applicable to children who are old enough to be asked how comfortable they feel being filmed. It should also be kept in mind that as children we trust our parents because we know they are responsible for us. Any consent then is likely to not be informed, especially if a parent is telling a child that performing for an audience allows them to have access to a life of luxury–one every kid in a consumerist culture dreams of. This argument of consent also simply does not apply to children who are born on camera. Their first cry, first smile, first steps and first words are all online before they even come close to learning the words consent, privacy and choice.

Secrecy and the search for truth

I don’t think that it is a coincidence that we equate privacy with secrecy. The mantra “if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear” is not something schools and parents invented to discipline kids–it has long existed as an argument in favour of surveillance by the state. When we paint the desire for privacy as wanting to keep a secret any attempt to protect our privacy will be met with suspicion. Secrets are also detrimental when it comes to creating healthy connections and relationships. When you trust someone, you are more willing to share your life with them. By entrusting them with all sides of you, you allow them to reciprocate your efforts and create a balanced relationship.

This is what these influencers do when they let us into their lives. They allow us to have access to them in an unfiltered way to create a relationship with us that feels real. We are not required to win their trust though. All we have to do in return as their followers is consume the content they produce and buy the products they advertise and sell. The information they share becomes a way for us to create an identity for them. This idea of them that we create for ourselves, is what we engage with when we consume their content. It is in their best interest then to provide details that allow us to generate a favourable identity of them. Since this identity is maintained by our ability to trust them, these creators must constantly share private details that align with their brand to maintain our trust. This could be a sustainable model if we did not live in the age of information where access to multiple versions of truth are easily available to us. Anyone can show evidence that challenges the credibility of this creator, causing them to constantly live in the fear of losing our trust–and with that their source of income. To combat this fear, the influencers fall into the trap of giving us more and more access to their private lives to ensure that our experience of them is as authentic as possible.

Despite their efforts to show us their authentic lives by constantly posting new content or even letting us have more exclusive access through shows like Keeping Up with the Kardashians, we as audiences are still aware that we have absolutely no idea what truth actually is. We want to believe that these people are just like us but even when we are told everything about their experiences, it is hard to believe that it is the most verifiable truth. This happens because even though an influx of information exists on social media that helps us confirm our beliefs, we are still aware that what we see is rarely the complete truth. Snapshots taken out of context paint incomplete pictures and tell stories that benefit only the creator.

In the end we are left with one sided parasocial relationships–where one person extends emotional energy, interest and time and the other person is unaware of their existence. We feel like we know the person we are watching, but we still cannot fully trust them. We also cannot count on them for any support. To them we are a means to an end. A way to make more money. To us they are a source of entertainment. There is nothing real or balanced about this relationship.

Feeling seen or feeling watched?

Recently Rahat Fateh Ali Khan, a famous Pakistani singer was filmed by an onlooker as he brutally battered his househelp. Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer was filmed by an on looker as he murdered George Floyd. Gazans regularly share with us the realities of living under a genocidal occupier’s regime. Several other examples can be found where an individual’s ability to use their phone camera to record an instance of abuse or violence has served as a credible tool for us to demand action and accountability. If filming others was only used to try to make those in power fear the consequences of their actions –even though we could argue that most of them still would not care–the world could be a better place.

The problem is that the filming does not stop in the absence of such injustices. It has become normal to film strangers going about their day. I saw a TikTok recently where someone had filmed a customer at a restaurant simply because of how they were eating their food. These people become memes overnight and their privacy no longer matters because these images of them become a source of entertainment for us. We are not being forced to film these individuals and neither is there a greater benefit to society when we film them–but that does not stop us. James Casico in the Rise of the Participatory Panopticon (2005) speaks of this phenomenon as a result of the bottom-up version of a constantly watched society. State surveillance then becomes only a part of a wider process where we as individuals police one another just as the state does–but as we have discussed above, these infringements feel less harmful. We must ask ourselves why that is when in both instances our privacy is being taken away from us.

We do not stop at strangers, but also surveil those closest to us. Many of us complain that someone we texted was online and still did not respond to us. We see them posting stories on their instagram while keeping our messages unopened. Increased access to one another and being able to tell when someone is using their phone, has led to a growing entitlement within us. It is probably the promise of not having to wait a long amount of time to hear back from someone that has led us to punish them if they take their time. Even though we can see the posts someone has liked and the people they follow, access to this information does not help us trust them more. It only makes us curious to find out more–but not through open communication, only through more stalking.

The intimacy of learning about someone through themselves is completely lost.There is no need to ask for the truth when we can simply assume it based on what we see.

It is not only strangers or influencers that we do not trust anymore. It is everyone. Not knowing who to trust and not understanding why privacy is important we put our lives online in hopes of finding connection and a purpose. All we find though are advertisements that promise to fill the void that social media and the society we live in have created.