What did a British film theorist see in 1975 that Pakistani prime-time television still hasn't learned to unsee? Laura Mulvey's famous essay on the male gaze was published in 1975, arguing that mainstream cinema often organises looking around a masculine spectator: woman becomes image, man becomes bearer of the look. Those nine pages changed how generations of us watched films. But here is what interests me now: what happens when the gaze leaves the cinema?
Here's the structural reality; here's how the culture narrates around it. Pakistan has remained near the bottom of global gender-gap rankings. In 2025, the World Economic Forum placed Pakistan 148th out of 148 countries; in 2026, 143rd out of 145. It climbed in 2026 to 143rd of 145, its strongest gain in a decade. Progress, if you squint and still third from the bottom of the planet, if you don't.The numbers matter. But the gaze, I have come to think, is bigger than the camera.
It becomes a social habit the way women are interpreted, praised, protected, corrected, desired, categorised and occasionally patronised. Turn on any drama tonight and the spectrum is wide, which is itself the trap. Not one woman, but every kind the wife who suffers beautifully, the career woman whose ambition is a flaw only love can cure, the younger colleague whose neckline exists to be discussed by other characters before the plot even has a use for her.
Television here does not lack range. It has simply found a role in the frame for every woman there is. And I say this as someone who once watched one of those frames with absolutely no critical distance. I watched Dhoop Kinare when it aired on PTV in 1987. I was a medical student and, half in love with Dr Ahmer, I was completely charmed by a man too serious to flirt properly. This was Zia's dark regime, repression everywhere, a conservative state broadcaster and this romance quietly making its way into our living rooms. Oooff!
In the medical-student hostel, even the nerdy ones gathered around a small television. Textbooks were open, ward rounds were waiting, and yet we found time to warm ourselves by Dhoop Kinare. The next morning, our real professors met our na-laiqi with considerably less patience and absolutely none of Dr Ahmer's tenderness. And then there was Dr Zoya Khan.
Dr Ahmer fell for her apparent incompetence, followed by convenient bursts of sudden competence. She did not exactly look like someone spending her evenings immersed in textbooks. We, as medical students, knew that competence took work. Years of it. Sleepless nights, exams, wards, mistakes, repetition. We just didn't care. Not then.
Years later, in my thirties, I accidentally met Sahira Kazmi in the powder room of a five-star hotel. I had tears in my eyes and said, “Aap Sahira Kazmi hain na, aap mujhe buhat achi lagti hain?” I told her she was intelligent. She smiled, laughed in that husky voice, and said, “Aur tumhein Rahat acha lagta hai na?” Oooff.
What a damn Parveen Shakir moment:
کانپ اٹھتی ہوں میں یہ سوچ کے تنہائی میں
میرے چہرے پہ ترا نام نہ پڑھ لے کوئی
And there I was, trying desperately to change gears — from the lovestruck medical student to the feminist doctor who had just delivered a talk on workplace codes of conduct and male manipulation. But how does one suddenly become composed and respectable in front of an ace director and actor, while standing in a hotel powder room with tears in one's eyes? Zameen phat jaye. Kash. Sahira had caught me: the woman who had helped create the fantasy, and who knew the real man behind it. I failed?
What does a culture teach men to want, women to tolerate, and audiences to call romance?
Perhaps that is what age has taught me too: I can remain hopelessly in love with a fictional man while being perfectly cognisant of one boundary in real life — I do not fall in love with married men. Yet I have watched married men claim all kinds of liberties, sustained by carefully falsified versions of themselves, and often thrive on the very freedoms women are taught to police in themselves. But I did manage to say, “No, Sahira jee, I love Dr. Ahmer. Aik hi thay aap ke Dhoop Kinare mein.” And please, do not ask me what kind of men I have met since.
It has taken me decades to name what that charm was actually built from: a senior physician correcting a junior intern, his disapproval reframed, slowly and expertly, as devotion. Nothing in that show is criminal. Nobody is assaulted. And I still do not know if I can admire it the way I did at nineteen. I can admire Haseena Moin's ear for dialogue, Sahira Kazmi's restraint as a director, and still notice, uncomfortably, that even our gentlest classic ran on a hierarchy. The softest gaze is still a gaze. It just has better writing behind it. And perhaps this is where I need to catch myself inside the machinery I am analysing.
I am fifty-eight now. That is an advantage here, not a disclaimer. I have been Rakhshinda, Dr. Rakhshinda, Dr. Perveen, “Dear Dr Sahiba,” Rakhshi, Rax — and, in foreign schools, names shortened, altered, mispronounced and occasionally reinvented. I seem to have swung between them like a pendulum doctor and girl, formal and familiar, feminist and fantasy, the woman who analyses the gaze and the woman who once surrendered to it. The names changed. The accents changed. The countries changed. The selves did not always move in a straight line. And perhaps that is the point. The feminist in me did not kill the fantasy. The fantasy did not cancel the feminist. Both remained intact.
I can still love the memory of Dr Ahmer and ask what, exactly, I was being taught to love. I can still laugh at the ridiculousness of my own nineteen-year-old self and refuse to disown her. I can still recognise the hierarchy inside a scene that once made my heart flutter. At fifty-eight, I don't need to pretend that one self was the enlightened one and the other the foolish girl. They are both me.
Perhaps maturity is not choosing between them, but becoming curious about why they were never really separate. And then there is Main Manto Nahi Hoon, a more recent reminder that the script has hardly disappeared. A professor-student romance in 2025 produced the familiar argument: should we read the tension as chemistry, or should we notice the unequal positions before we romanticise the chemistry? Social media did what social media does — some defended the attraction, others questioned the premise, and ratings became part of the conversation.
The reverse-gender scenario is useful here. We are often much quicker to recognise the discomfort when a male teacher is pursuing a young female student. Put a celebrated woman in the position of the powerful teacher and a young man in the position of the student, and suddenly the language can become very different: chemistry, liberation, fantasy, romance.
Gender does not simply change the people in the story. It changes what the audience is prepared to excuse. I have also watched older, powerful men retired professors, former CEOs, the quintessential parha-likha babu carry respectable public identities built over decades, long marriages and grown children. Their Facebook statuses may celebrate women's sabr, modesty and purdah. Their private inboxes can tell another story. That contradiction interests me because it is not always dramatic enough to be called violence. Sometimes it is simply entitlement dressed as familiarity.
My 1999 PTV Gender Watch segment Sinf aur Mard was an early attempt to look at that other side not to turn men into victims or heroes, but to ask what happens when a person is handed a gender script he did not write. The male loneliness now being discussed more openly deserves that same curiosity.
Perhaps it is time to research men's psychology in the Pakistani context too. Do they carry their own burden of masculinity, their own private moralities? Do they know the violence of a forced marriage, the ammi-ki-bhanji arrangement decided before they were old enough to object, a wife they were never taught to know, the quiet dread of a prostatectomy, or any real understanding of what a woman moves through between heavy menstruation and menopause? But understanding the script does not require pretending that everyone who performs it is harmless. We have spent decades talking about violence against women on screen.I have contributed to that conversation myself. But perhaps there is another question worth asking: what does a culture teach men to want, women to tolerate, and audiences to call romance?
The gaze is not confined to the screen. It travels through emails, Facebook statuses, jokes, compliments, invitations and late-night messages. Sometimes it is violence. Sometimes it is simply another small, dismissible thing sent into someone’s insomnia at 12:42 a.m. But must I always wonder what is malicious and what is simply a delicious message? And can feminism accommodate intellectual teasing, curiosity and even pleasure in exchanges between women and men without treating them as inherently suspect? What happens to women’s agency when we assume that they cannot distinguish between being objectified and being engaged, between unwanted attention and attention they freely choose to receive? Is any of this human? Probably. Instinct, clad as culture, usually is. But natural is not the same as neutral, and normal has never been the same as harmless.
The question of the male gaze also brings me, inevitably, to men. Feminism has sometimes been written as though men arrive in the world fully formed as beneficiaries, rather than as people also handed scripts about masculinity, marriage, desire, class and emotional restraint. There is no single villain here. Writers write within cultures. Audiences bring their own desires. Ratings reward some stories. Institutions preserve others. And those of us who watch, enjoy, criticise and sometimes fall in love with fictional men are not standing outside the machinery either. That is why Mulvey still matters to me. Mulvey's male gaze outlived the camera. Hasn't it become an inheritance? I am less interested now in proving I was always right than in noticing what I was trained not to notice. Perhaps that is where I want to leave this: not with a lesson, or a verdict, but with a question. What exactly were we taught to love?