Around the world, the celebration of Valentine’s Day amounts to little more than an annual ritual of crassly commercialized love, with vendors of all shapes and descriptions doing their best to flog cards, chocolates, perfumes, flowers, and other sundries to people constantly being told that their feelings can only truly be expressed through the power of cold, hard cash. If the commodification of love in this fashion, and its evaluation through the medium of money, represents an absurd, but perhaps inevitable, quantification of emotion under capitalism, no less ludicrous in the idea that one day, and one day alone, should be privileged over others when it comes to expressing affection for the objects of our ardour and desire. Valentine’s Day, then, is a triumph of marketing, an artificial event designed to exploit the passions of the besotted and the enamoured.
However, it could also be argued that this admittedly curmudgeonly view of Valentine’s Day takes the whole thing too seriously. After all, while it may be correct to see the 14th of February as a pointless festival of consumerism, it is also important to see how, for millions across the globe, it presents a genuine opportunity to engage in ultimately harmless displays of affection and expressions of love. It is possible to lament the commodification of Valentine’s Day while simultaneously recognizing the happiness it brings to people’s lives, and it would take a particularly dour and mirthless mind to take issue with other people celebrating their love for one another.
Yet, that is exactly these kinds of minds that seem to be calling the shots in the Land of the Pure. In the days leading up to the 14th of February, an entire menagerie of officials has lined up to decry Valentine’s Day, with the chorus of condemnation culminating with a frothy denunciation of the event coming from President Mamnoon Hussain, and the reported implementation of a ban on love-related festivities in Islamabad on the orders of the Interior Minister. This has all been accompanied by entirely expected admonitions from Pakistan’s various religious parties and, like years past, it would not be surprising to see attempts at countering Valentine’s Day through protests and the organization of rival events. After all, 2015 saw the celebration of ‘Haya Day’ in Pakistan, promoted by religious outfits that wished to see the 14th of February re-branded as a day devoted to the observance of traditional notions of propriety. That the implication of this was that other days should not be defined by ‘Haya’ seemed to have escaped the notice of the organizers.
Once again, the self-proclaimed custodians of public morality in Pakistan have gathered en masse and whipped themselves into a frenzy of manufactured outrage over an event that, in the grand scheme of things, is relatively innocuous. The foam-flecked invective hurled against Valentine’s Day lays several charges at its door; it is a ‘Western’ tradition that is alien to Pakistani culture, it promotes obscenity and vulgarity, and it leads the ‘youth’ astray, diverting their energies away from more important pursuits.
These ‘problems’ only make sense if you agree with the fundamental assumption that love, and the intermingling of the sexes, is inherently troublesome. After all, there are other Western traditions that do not seem to provoke such extreme reactions; one need only note that the President of Pakistan was wearing a suit and a necktie when he lambasted Valentine’s Day to get a sense of the cognitive dissonance at work here. Similarly, charges of ‘obscenity’ and ‘vulgarity’ can only work if there is agreement that any unsanctioned and unsupervised interaction between (predominantly young) men and women bears a more than passing resemblance to a public orgy of Babylonian proportions. While traditional, religiously inspired suspicion of non-platonic relationships often sees them as being the harbingers of the apocalyptic collapse of civilization, it is worth remembering that societies across the world somehow manage to survive the paroxysms of young love and, in fact, seem to thrive in spite of it.
As far as the ‘energies’ of the ‘youth’ are concerned, it seems that concern for the welfare of Pakistan’s younger citizens has less to do with an interest in their well-being and development, and more to do with general taboos about sexuality. It would be easier to empathise with the concern demonstrated by the anti-Valentine’s Day brigade if it extended to other spheres of social activity. Where, for example, is the outrage at young people being indoctrinated in religious seminaries? What of the way in which the involvement of children and teenagers in suicide bombings and terrorist attacks often takes place sans condemnation from the religious right? How about the scourge of child marriage, and the way in which it blights the lives of countless innocents every year? If even a fraction of the energy expended by religious organizations in protesting against Valentine’s Day were to be turned towards addressing the ideological and material basis for extremism and militancy in Pakistan today, a lot more could arguably be achieved in terms of directing the ‘energies’ of the ‘youth’ towards more constructive activities.
As noted at the start of the column, there are plenty reasons why it makes sense to be skeptical about Valentine’s Day and its artificiality. However, this is far removed from taking the occasion as another opportunity to engage in yet another round of old-fashioned moral policing aimed at regulating sexuality and enforcing ultimately regressive and pointless taboos about love and relationships. Nonetheless, these campaigns are useful, if only because they reveal the emptiness of a way of thinking in which two people expressing their love for one another represent more of a threat to society than guns, bombs, bigotry, and intolerance. Given a choice, one suspects that a more of the former would be better for Pakistan than yet more of the latter.