Young Pakistanis Question Masculinity

Mohammad Ahmed Ali, a 22-year-old student at the Institute of Business Administration in Karachi, Pakistan’s most populous city, recalls being told from around the age of seven or eight to be bahadur. This Urdu word translates as brave or strong. “I was always told to not cry because I am a boy and boys do not cry,” he explained in a recent interview via Zoom. “If we men share our feelings, we are considered to be deviating from our manhood and are thought to be becoming like a woman, which is thought to be a bad thing in our society.”

“It’s a man’s world,” sang James Brown. It’s true that women are likely to be oppressed and exploited. Less often talked about, though, is the pain associated with being a man. From early childhood, boys in Pakistan and around the world experience pressure to be masculine. They may be teased for their desire to play with kitchen toys or for wearing pink or “feminine” clothes. Boys learn that something is wrong with them if they do not appear manly, and this pressure follows them at every stage in life. As Indian lifestyle site MenXSP recently noted, it’s a constant hustle to appear muscular and successful.

“I have felt these pressures since I can remember,” said Ali. It was a warm, summery day in Karachi and three of us were chatting after university classes, six days before my Zoom interview with Ali. I was unsure what Ali was talking about until I noticed how he and Abdullah, a mutual friend, made eye contact, an indication that this was an experience they shared.

Guru, a character in the new Pakistani TV drama Parizaad, is a Luca Brasi-like enforcer for a Pakistani mafioso. He’s dangerous. He’s also intersex, and away from his day job, he’s a sensitive individual who takes care of other vulnerable LGBTQ people, sheltering and protecting them from violence. Guru is an example of the growing ways in which some within Pakistan’s entertainment industry are challenging stereotypes of masculinity. And they’re facing pressure to do more from other public figures, like writer Nemrah Ahmad Niazi and actress Saba Qamar, who earlier this year called out the TV industry for not doing enough to challenge toxic masculinity.

Even male cricketers — otherwise godlike figures on the subcontinent — are no longer immune from criticism when they misbehave. In a recent televised interview, former Pakistani cricket captain Sarfaraz Ahmed referred to an incident from 2013 when he was struggling with his form. His wife told him to double down on his batting practice. Ahmed recounted to the show’s host how he’d told his wife to mind her business, and that he didn’t need her to coach him. These comments sparked a flood of online criticism, with social media users describing them as “disturbing.” Jarar, one Twitter user, wrote: “It is this exact concept of ‘Aurat hai usko kuch nahi pata [a woman doesn’t know anything]’ which perpetuates and feeds toxic masculinity and patriarchy.”

This shift in thinking doesn’t only involve public figures and celebrities. Ali referred to a statement from famous Indian actor Sanjay Dutt in which he publicly said that men are not supposed to do house work or look after babies. Ali noted: “I completely disagree with that notion. This is what toxic masculinity is. I do not think that doing my own chores and looking after my own kids will make me any less of a man.”

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Duke University researchers Sarah Gaither and Adam Stanaland have hypothesized that younger men are more sensitive to threats to their masculinity because they are in their critical identity-formation years. Their research findings indicate that men who base their self-perception on others’ opinions are more likely to become aggressive in response to threats, and the more aggressive they become, the stronger they feel.

As licensed social worker Amy Morin has written, being “masculine” is associated with the rejection of healthy habits and, often, unhealthy and self-destructive behaviors. These include excessive drinking, neglecting one’s own health and healthcare, rejecting nutritious foods and physically pushing one’s body, even during sickness or injury.

Researchers Alexander Lu and Y. Joel Wong have studied how racial stereotypes disadvantage Asian American men — particularly East Asian men — in the hierarchy of masculinity in the U.S., creating a dynamic in which they must both prove their masculinity and overcome racial stereotypes. Lu and Wong observed that the men who participated in their research tended to restrict their emotional expression, thus limiting their capacity for intimate relationships and creating further stresses and threats to their well-being.

Professor of sociology Murray Knuttila of Brook University, Canada, contends that boys aren’t born tough but become that way due to how they’re cultured and raised. If they can’t measure up, the pressure to be something they are not can become too much to bear. In 2018 the American Psychological Association published its first-ever Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men, based on research gathered over four decades. It showed that men are 3.5 times more likely than women to commit suicide.

Have you felt the pressures of masculinity? Do you feel that society is becoming any more accepting of men expressing emotion?

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