The feminine experience is a funny thing; it involves dodging, spluttering and plowing through to persevere in the circumstances best afforded to it. The privilege that patriarchy enjoys in Pakistan has seen a very diminished form of the true potential that the female franchise maintains.
In essence, we are warriors, thinkers, doers, creators, innovators and lovers. We are sexual, predatory, nurturing, indifferent, kind, vengeful, bashful and gregarious. We have strength, resilience, passion and opinions and that is probably why it is so frightening for the limitations of the opposite sex to hold the door open to what is now the most venerated gentleman’s club of all: the public space.
Leered at, judged, groped and harassed, women in Pakistan have mostly abstained from truly owning the world just outside their physical four walls. And this is a phenomenon that cuts across all socio-economic brackets.
What a woman wears, what she bares, how she chooses to speak and whom she chooses to speak to, where she goes, how she dares to contemplate the communal pecking order – all are under sacrosanct scrutiny.
In countries where the mob of misogyny and its submissive female slaves have dictated the decrees of civic life, finding prudence-free pockets of equilibrium always ends in failure.
We women have been given the ramrod straight grey line that is so dark and so visible it is a deathly black – there is nothing ambiguous about it.
We can’t swear, we can’t have desires, we can’t have ideas that question the indignity of our condition, we can’t re-group and raise a ruckus; for the good Lord’s sake, there’s even a group that has to petition moral outrage to have chai at dhabas.
The lack of public activity, whilst debilitating in its enthusiastic inconvenience, has increased female traffic of a different nature in a very different place: social media.
A groundswell of gender specific exchange, an unleashing of centuries of bottled resentment finally coming up for air and a no-holds-barred approach towards tackling all the taboos that have been mandated upon us − the girls are back in town.
Social media has provided us with a pariah from the cult of patriarchy and we have rapidly converged over the lost open spaces we so miss in our daily lives.
Facebook has seen a mushrooming expansion of secret women’s only groups, virtual slots allotted to some free expression, administered and run by women, for women and to enable women.
There is a strict sisterhood code, a no-nonsense vetting process, manifestos on how members cannot judge one another or share online threads with outsiders and how no traitors will be tolerated.
Traitorous acts include screen shots of particularly flammable debates, fake profiles and abusing one another (what is popularly referred to as the territory of men). Immediate response teams are at hand and such members are swiftly embargoed.
What is left is like a wonder drug: it uplifts, it refreshes, it soothes and it heals.
On such closed, invisible groups many women feel a kinship that our social dogma has long denied them. Here the talk is inquiring, the lessons imparted are hopeful − not preachy − and the fire of debate is alive and strong. The only common denominator is free expression.
Here we women turn to each other for support, to vent some of that angst we have against the way we have been treated by the modified misogyny of our age and the sorry women who are the part of its agency, the frustration we feel by parental and social constraints and to talk candidly about sex, protection, recreational substances, how to subvert a perverted system that gives and gives to man but vetoes all flexibility for woman.
Women in Pakistan have zero security. In the physical realm they are disallowed dominion, they are made to feel immodest for the simple act of assimilating according to their own persuasion.
A flash mob of young girls dancing in the market place? Ban it.
Talk of birth control during prime time? Ban it.
A marathon that bares ankles? Ban it.
But online we have our stomping grounds. Members typically never meet because we are scattered all over the country − and the globe − but we have become each other’s confidantes in a way even our own siblings will never know.
We support, give advice, come out of closets, discuss the skeletons long buried in them, ogle and leer at men in ways we have become accustomed to and dispense recommendations on how best to play the original players.
As one member puts it:
“I feel as though I have two parallel lives; I am two people simultaneously dwelling in those lives. The Facebook group I am a part of has helped me make peace with who I actually am.”
Another opines:
“This place is my safe haven. As a girl from Pakistan and coming from a very religious, conservative family, I have had to make a lot of effort to explore and understand myself.”
And yet another:
“There is always a fear that someone from my extended family will see my posts and it’s still taking time to fully open up but the Facebook group I am a part of has given me the freedom I need from an all female community.”
Whilst what’s between our legs determines our place in the world of men, what’s in our minds gives us a medley of privilege when we log on and access our virtual syndicates.
We connect and we understand, we surpass the strengths of man to lift one another up and we play the man game much better than the pawns that activated it in the first place.
We are profane, we are majestic, we are revealing, we are shy, brazen and calculated.
We support, we discourage, we send shock and we inspire awe.
It may only be online for now but we are setting the stage because to keep a woman back does nothing more than diminish the rank and file of all humanity, men included.