Double standards
Has anyone noticed how double standards prevail literally everywhere in our society?
Take for example boys from conservative families who go abroad to “study” - they party their hearts out, are deemed players by all their friends, drink, smoke, smoke up, generally livin' la vidaloca. And then come back and let their parents pick a girl for them and settle down into a decent job with a wife who usually has no idea what they were up to in their past. And all their friends are bewildered as to what happened to them. What brought about this big change? Often,this is not a sudden transformation. It is the plan from the start.
"I think it’s a silly form of rebellion, not teenage angst but deliberate hypocrisy,” says a colleague who has seen many of her friends do this. “They are completely different people when they are abroad versus when they are in Pakistan”. But another friend sympathises with them.
“Don’t blame them. Blame the society which has created such a stifling environment that they feel they have no choice left but to live it up for a few years before returning to Pakistan and doing what is expected of good Pakistani boys.” She feels that it is best they get the partying out of their system so that they don’t have any regrets later and are left with a sense of ‘been there done that’.
Some say this phenomenon is more noticeable among boys because girls are worried a tainted reputation could mean the end of rishta possibilities. After all we come “from one of the most dangerous places on earth, a land where women didn’t matter,” right? (The tagline from the new Bhutto movie, don’t even get me started.) But it’s not that they don’t do it, it’s just that because men can get away with more, women have to hide it better.
Published in the Express Tribune, June 14th, 2010.
Take for example boys from conservative families who go abroad to “study” - they party their hearts out, are deemed players by all their friends, drink, smoke, smoke up, generally livin' la vidaloca. And then come back and let their parents pick a girl for them and settle down into a decent job with a wife who usually has no idea what they were up to in their past. And all their friends are bewildered as to what happened to them. What brought about this big change? Often,this is not a sudden transformation. It is the plan from the start.
"I think it’s a silly form of rebellion, not teenage angst but deliberate hypocrisy,” says a colleague who has seen many of her friends do this. “They are completely different people when they are abroad versus when they are in Pakistan”. But another friend sympathises with them.
“Don’t blame them. Blame the society which has created such a stifling environment that they feel they have no choice left but to live it up for a few years before returning to Pakistan and doing what is expected of good Pakistani boys.” She feels that it is best they get the partying out of their system so that they don’t have any regrets later and are left with a sense of ‘been there done that’.
Some say this phenomenon is more noticeable among boys because girls are worried a tainted reputation could mean the end of rishta possibilities. After all we come “from one of the most dangerous places on earth, a land where women didn’t matter,” right? (The tagline from the new Bhutto movie, don’t even get me started.) But it’s not that they don’t do it, it’s just that because men can get away with more, women have to hide it better.
Published in the Express Tribune, June 14th, 2010.