My voyeur

Date: 18-10-2025

Growing up in Pakistan, it was drilled into my every waking moment that I have to be continously concious of my “modesty”.

Our daily clothing is a three part dress made of a pajama (preferably loose fitting), a long shirt (preferably loose fitting, preferably with full sleeves and usually down to knees) and a large shawl on top. Every dress is made that way, more or less. While the rules and strictness can vary a bit from family to family, the first and mostly the biggest characterising judgement in any moment is how well a girl is hiding herself within her dress. That is what makes the foundation of the question of a “good woman”, which can then be followed by assessing how well she is doing in her “duties” and “behaviour”.

Since I was 5 or 6 years old, a constant part of my stream of thought was to be aware of myself and to wrap the shawl around myself to further cover any hints of the shape of my body…

EVERY MOMENT IS CONDITIONED AND EXAMINED: Even for young girls, modesty should hold while while you are playing with your siblings OR while you are sweeping the floor in the house OR when you are climbing into your school bus OR when you drop something and have to bend down to pick it up OR while you are sleeping…there is no break. you are always on display and hence always up for judgement and discipline. And it is not just the dressing part…are you talking too loud? are you sitting “in a bad way”? are you laughing too hard or too loud? are you crying “too much”? are you looking directly into someone’s eyes when they talk to you? why is your hair open? are you walking too “provocatively”? Are your bare feet making any sound on the ground when you walk?

Since you exist as a woman, something needs to be decided about you.

Since you exist, you are up for “grabs” to be owned by someone.

Since you exist, regardless of your age or intention or knowledge, you are the object that can tempt any man around you, whether he is family or stranger.

Since you exist, you have to be “tamed” for one group of men and “protected” from the other gorup of men.

So for a society or your “owners”, every moment can involve either goading you to be “good women” or protecting you from “bad men”…

It seems that as a woman, you live through men’s lens, on men’s conditions, to serve men, in a man’s world.

“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.” ― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

I am still learning how not to be my own voyeur…Even after years of trying, I still struggle with this on a daily basis.

When I first moved abroad for my masters and started to wear “western” clothes to fit in, I was constantly uncomfortable. I was hesitant to go out, to walk to the blackboard to answer questions in my lectures or to work on my experiments in the labs. Even with long Tshirts, I was constantly yanking at them to cover more of my behind and my legs. These thoughts were always there even when I was studying in Pakistan too but I felt that the western clothes made me so much more “visible” and did not give me all the tools that I had before with Pakistani clothes to hide myself as “I wanted”. And all this was just on univeristy campuses which were “safe” in my mind…being out in the city was a whole other story. At all times, a part of my conciousness was looking around to see if anyone is “looking” at me or “enjoying” the sight of me. But ironically, my conciousness was not just constantly looking around, it did so angrily – If I did find someone “looking”, my blood boiled and my mind responded with “yeah, go to hell. I will not hide myself for you. I do not care about this”, as I yanked my Tshirt further down…I clearly did “care” and sought out this “validation” of my independence! My sense of my own strength was defined in direct defiance to something external. It was shocking to realize over time just how much of my thought and living revolved around this, from small and mundane things to big and scary things in life.

All women around me were brought up to be invisible to the outside world and to be “pleasing” and caregiving in the home. And this seems quite universal to various degrees in different societies. Even in the “western” media, you routinely see discourse on how women are not dressing “appropriately” anymore which is “desensitizing” men and not “leaving anything up to the imagination”.

“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another…. One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.” ― John Berger, Ways of Seeing

Can a woman ever really exist freely…as a human being?

Is that possible at some future point for the human civilization…?

But what even is a woman, if not defined by all this?….can we even grasp that question? Where do we begin and how much of the voyeur can we really weed out? If we are able to remove the existing (external and internal) validation mechanisms, then how will we define our sense of self? What can replace the voyeur?