The current femicide-ridden Pakistani atmosphere has made one thing clear: when the society looks at a woman, it hardly sees a human. Our collective unconscious has internalised this objectification of women. We fail to notice it in our homes, on our TV screens or on billboards. Advertisers gather data on what type of images and words resonate the most with audiences and serve them to us on a silver platter. The adverts we see are the quick and dirty reflections of what the society demands and could be the reality check that we need.

This summer, many prominent billboards in Lahore were dominated with KFC’s advertisements of zoomed-in pictures of women consuming food with double entendres. The close-ups didn’t centre their faces; her identity doesn’t matter, as long as her body makes a profit. This theme also presented itself in KFC’s television commercial, in which a woman was holding a tray of food and her legs were replaced with chicken legs.

It has been made evident that men dominate public spaces in Pakistan, so billboards and banners are intended to hold the male gaze. They are fed such messages every time they cross the road. The ubiquity of these images sends the message to them that women are but pieces of meat. This leads to a power imbalance and creates further room for rape culture.

A banner of a biryani advertisement found in Islamabad had a disturbingly similar message. It personified biryani as female and described it in a flirtatious manner, reading “she is hot, she is spicy.” Such advertisements have been occurring for a long time. In 2015, Hardee’s released an ad campaign in which they photographed food in odd placements so that it could be mistaken for female body parts.

It’s surprising to think that our society, and particularly those against fahashi, have been silent about this. The PEMRA recently banned a Gala biscuit commercial that featured Mehwish Hayat dancing fully clothed. It was banned on the basis that the content of the commercial had nothing to do with the product. The same could be said about the aforementioned ads; not only are they not related to the products they are selling, but they are rife with sexual innuendos. Then where are those same angry YouTube videos that were made for Mehwish Hayat?

Often, people who stir up controversies when women speak up about their empowerment or bodily autonomy, are also the people who delight when women are objectified and stripped of their identity. Could it be that the Pakistani patriarchy is hypocritical?

The writer is an undergraduate at the University of Toronto.

She can be reached at    sarahhameed2@gmail.com