Last Tuesday, right on schedule, my sister-in-law popped out a happy and healthy baby girl, who was promptly named Lara.
Given that my family has a history of bestowing gender-inappropriate names on its progeny ? my own parents named me ‘Shereen’ at birth, something I later rectified after years of playground persecution ? I had cause to be pleased that the kid had at least gotten off to a good start.
I had a different reason to be happy as well: another child would momentarily satiate the ravenous appetite that parents develop for grandchildren, demanding a new one every year, like some kind of sacrifice imposed by a fire-breathing dragon on neighboring villagers. If Lara could keep them busy for another year or so . Well, that’s another year for me to really work on faking my own death (something they’d probably view with marginally less distress than my thus far committed bachelorhood.)
In effect, my niece was going to be my little rodeo clown, distracting the bull from goring the brave, unwed matador as he dances daintily around the arena – of singledom.
Or something.
Back to business: that night, I got a bout of my world-renowned anxiety. It was the worst kind, the one that starts as an indeterminate rumbling in your stomach and graduates all the way to a dull ache that seems to inhabit every pore. Something was making me worry about the baby and at first, I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was. But then it gradually dawned on me and I recoiled at the force of my own superficiality.
She was a girl. And girls don’t have it easy in this world.
On the one hand, I was worried about the pressure she would face in the world that we live in, to be pretty and thin. On the other hand, I was worried about the pressure girls have in Egypt to be conservative; to be subservient; to not question their realities and their place within the world.
I wasn’t really sure which is worse. Let’s start with the uglier of the two: the beauty standard.
Maybe it’s because I work in that kind of industry, that my priorities are all screwed up, or maybe it’s just the nature of anxiety that seeks out obscure and unimportant things to worry about. All I know is that because of the influence of contemporary media, women, and even young girls, are under constant pressure to live up to a standard of beauty and thinness that is patently unrealistic and overwhelmingly oppressive.
Everyone knows that we live in a hyper-sexualized era: from Abercrombie & Fitch’s widely-condemned efforts to sell thongs to pre-teen girls in the late 90s to the emergence of celebrity adulation ? the Britneys, the Paris’, the Lindsays ? in the early part of this decade, the message that sex sells is reaching girls at an earlier-than-ever age, which leaves them with the impossible tasks of trying to live out their childhood and grow up fast, both at the same time.
At the other end of the scale, I worry about the growing wave of conservatism and religiosity that seems to have gripped our nation since the mid-seventies. The suppression of individuality, the celebration of conformity and group-think and the discouragement of critical thinking and self-exploration. And if it’s bad enough for the boys, it always seems to be 10 times worse for the girls.
The sexual harassment that women are exposed to today, the implication that this harassment is a result of these same women drawing attention to themselves and, probably most egregious of all, the brazen claims by those in power that we don’t have problems in that or any other department, all these things are symptomatic of a society that is hell-bent on suppressing women and their right to self-expression.
In both cases, the media plays a critical role as a magnifying glass to all the blemishes in the human condition. That’s a good thing and a bad thing. It’s good, because it forces us to confront the flaws in our make-up and compels us, if we really want to do better, to figure out ways to fix ourselves. It’s bad because media is like that: it reports but it also sensationalizes and influences.
So far, my anxiety for the future of my brand new niece hasn’t gone away, but I’ve taken comfort in two early signs. One, at least she got a proper girl’s name.
And two, you never saw a cuter rodeo clown in your whole life.
Mohammed Nassarwas kidnapped at birth and forced to work in advertising, in Cairo, New York and London. Today, his main concern is that archaeologists will one day stumble upon his desk, debate the value of his profession and judge him. Feel free to email him at [email protected].
