Seven years ago, when my opponent debater quoted ‘ignorance is bliss’ as an attack on our team, I thought it was foolish, because wasn’t knowledge and awareness key to living a meaningful, happy life? Seven years later, I think he was correct, and I was foolish. Ignorance, truly is bliss.
Before you scoff and roll your eyes at me for being a hopeless pessimist, I want to tell you where I come from, and why I think so. I am a woman in Pakistan. Today, as on most days since the past few years, this is the most important identity to me. It is all-encompassing, and truest to my nineteen years of living. However, it is not an easy identity to carry, and comes with a heavy baggage; lustful gazes, domestic violence, sexual harassment and patriarchal norms; to name a few tangible forms. To be a woman is to almost always feel a certain way; not valued, not loved, not human. It is to be wronged repeatedly and to not be able to speak up against it because ‘hamesha se aisay hee hota he’, ‘Allah ne mard ko haq aur ijazat di he’, ‘aurat sabar aur qurbani ka doosra naam he’ and ‘iss ke ilawa kya rasta he?’ Then, to say that I am a woman in Pakistan is to say that I am exhausted; of never being enough.
As recent incidents show, be it a woman’s experience told in the form of tweets and screenshots against a harasser, or pictures of a bruised face against a domestically violent husband, it is never enough. The country sympathetically turns to the man for ‘his side of the story’, and by shedding a few tears, attaching some ‘he never made me feel uncomfortable’ statements, and placing his hands on the Holy Quran as he builds lies, he doesn’t disappoint his fellow men. Spinelessly, he shows that he is drunk in privilege and power, and that he will do whatever it takes to shift the blame. For a day or two, scrolling social media reveals updates on the incident, but as the third day’s sun sets, the country moves on to other important missions such as saving actresses from hellfire by telling them to cover up. On the fourth day, a 6 year old girl is raped and murdered, or a wife is killed for not making a gol roti.
These incidents do not occur in isolation, and should not be treated as such. They are systemic and structural, which means that unless we don’t change the system that produces and sustains men that have been exposed in the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, gender inequality will not cease to exist. Patriarchy and misogyny is internalized and entrenched to dangerous extents. Hence, the cyclical repetition with no head or tail. People condemn domestic violence on the grounds that hitting a woman is not ‘what real men do’ and I wonder what that term even means, and how a chance to preserve and glorify manhood is never missed. If by ‘real men’, they mean not inhumane, why not just use the word ‘human’ instead? After all, haven’t similar notions such as ‘mard ka bacha ban’ harbored enough toxic masculinity in the country?
My thoughts fall into a spiral and my brain aches. With every passing day, I see more clearly that existing power webs are built upon and thrive on the difference of gender. Man is powerful, and woman is powerless. And being powerless becomes tiring. It pulls you down. You wish you could tune out. You wish you could become ignorant. You wish you could un-see and un-hear injustices that remind you of your traumatic pasts; how your aunts were beaten up till they bled, how your sister was groped and chased after in the streets of Lahore, how your friend was raped at a party, how your mother was forced to let go off her dream job so she could be a better housewife, and how the 8 year old you was molested by a man whose relationship to you was of a close caretaker. But being a woman means you cannot be ignorant to how it feels to be a woman. And you wish it felt better, but it doesn’t. So you lock yourself in your bathroom and cry, and you wish you weren’t born a woman.