Embodied Sharam: Sexual “Liberation” and Class Erasure in Contemporary Pakistan
“But when the case for a woman’s worth is built partly on the unfairness of what’s leveled at her, things get slippery, especially as the internet expands the range and reach of hate and unfair scrutiny into infinity — a fact that holds even as feminist ideas become mainstream. Every woman faces backlash and criticism. Extraordinary women face a lot of it. And that criticism always exists in the context of sexism, just like everything else in a woman’s life. These three facts have collapsed into one another, creating the idea that harsh criticism of a woman is itself always sexist, and furthermore, more subtly, that receiving sexist criticism is in itself an indication of a woman’s worth.”
The Cult of the Difficult Woman, Jia Tolentino
Four years ago, VICE published an essay I wrote on Pakistan’s “hook-up culture.” Initially, the piece was less of a personal essay and more of an informative one. However, if there is one thing I have learned, it is that Western media loves publishing people of colour’s trauma and compensating them poorly and unfairly for it while positing South Asian sex communities as regressive or backward. By finding an “ally” who resists their culture, the world of whiteness is saved from being the one shaming these cultures (that would be racist!). What ensued after its publication was beyond my comprehension. I had written the article naively, unaware that it could spread like a virus, and be attacked as if it were one too. For four weeks, I woke up to thousands of notifications. I experienced a range of emotions, answering interviews at ungodly hours, and even book offers, the kind of attention I’m sure many aspiring writers try to attain. “I did not write this piece specifically to highlight my sexual experiences, or to become a celebrity!” is what I would say to swarms of people and journalists. I was a South Asian girl, filled with warranted rage, trying to find a way to heal her wounds by sharing them with the world, which can be both a helpful and problematic tool. I didn’t monetize from the article because it was simply a rage and resistance piece, but I want to be clear, it was a piece that centred my rage and resistance, that piece left out the rage and resistance of poor women, trans women and sex workers in Pakistan.
After a whirlwind two months, I began sinking into a deep depression. Stereotypical symptoms of depression were something I had successfully (albeit painfully) managed to ward off under the guise of being high-functioning. Then, Qandeel Baloch died. Shortly before her death, an informant of mine whose family is intimately involved with the ISI (Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence), told me a specific Islamic group wanted two women dead. One was me, the other was Baloch, who was murdered by her brother on July 15, 2016, in their family home. Karo-Kari, “honour killing,” a term the West has enjoyably lapped up, is no different from domestic violence cases or homicide. Karo-Kari is premeditated gender-based violence. Baloch was made fun of by many on social media for simply, courageously, and unapologetically being herself. The patriarchy is so terrified of a woman’s power, of her claiming control of her own body and agency, triggering it into a violent frenzy of insecurity and inadequacy — a reproduction of colonial violence. In Pakistan, a woman choosing to embrace her sexuality or her agency can often result in disownment, both public and private shaming, physical mutilation, emotional abuse, and even her death through murder or suicide. But which women does this happen to, exactly?
I wrote the article, not because I embrace nor value Western ‘liberal’ ideas, but because I was enraged. I wrote the article because I felt defeated by the violence men had inflicted upon my body and the bodies of other women I loved and admired. From the age of seven (perhaps even younger, I have no recollection), men made it clear to me that my body belonged to them and that it was theirs to colonize. Whether it was sexually, emotionally, or materially, there was always a strict reign of control and a lack of agency. I struggled to maintain my silence and the anger that had accumulated in my body. I wanted to encourage a discourse about women’s sexuality and the burden of shame tied in with patriarchal hypocrisy. As a teenager, I began to rebel to the point my father felt there was no choice but to take me for a psychiatric evaluation. I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (which later turned out to be a misdiagnosis, a common one for those who, instead, have Complex PTSD). Instead of trying to figure out why I was behaving the way I was, the patriarchy tries to find a solution to fix for their benefit — or, in extreme cases, simply discard. Gendered gaslighting has occurred far too long, where a woman is shamed, told she is “unruly” and perhaps even “psychotic” for her resistance. There is nothing to fix, nor abandon.
I wrote the article mostly because, as mentioned, I was infuriated. When I was sixteen years old, my father, with whom I had lived for seven years at the time, exited my life. He was physically unwell and decided he was incapable of caring for his rebellious teenage daughter. I still remember the day I was sent to live with my maternal grandmother, a day drenched in uncertainty and regret. During this time, I felt extreme patriarchal rejection and abandonment. I remained in a state of ambivalence for quite some time, unknowing whether I was loved at all because my father insisted (an insistence so strong that it resembled parental kidnapping) on having me with him for most of my young adolescence. I had become an inconvenience on a foggy and crisp January afternoon. I began to self-harm through drinking alcohol and smoking hash, anything to quieten the voices in my head, suggesting I was ‘defected’ and not ‘good enough.’
It was during this period of my life I decided to have sex for the first time (mind you, I had sex much later than many in my social circle, mostly due to a desexualized sense of self). It resulted in more rejection because the person I had sex with, who was an old friend and reassured me of my safety — fell completely disinterested afterwards. Once again, the shame erupted and felt like a violent burning. What propelled me to have sex in the first place was an indifference. A few months before this, someone I was dating within my social circle (whom I will refer to as J) sexually assaulted me. And it was because of this sexual trauma and having my agency stripped away from me that compelled me to let go. I cared little for the romanticized notion of sex and with my “fuck it” attitude, I did it to fill a void.
J took advantage of me in the passenger’s seat of his car. We had been at a mutual friend’s party in Islamabad until I realized how late it was and urged J to drop me home to my Nani’s as quickly as possible. On the way home, I passed out in the car, quite drunk. Being drunk is not an anomalous experience for young and privileged Pakistanis. He managed to remove all of my clothing and violated my body in ways I had never felt before. The pain raised me to consciousness, and I immediately kicked him off of me while screaming, threatening to call my father and have J arrested. I was also fifteen, and he nineteen. The pre-existing shame that inhabited my body began to boil into a fury. Not only because he had assaulted me, but because at the time, my boundaries around not being ready for a sexual relationship were cataclysmically disrespected.
Ironically and shockingly, half a decade later, J was engaged to someone quite close to me — someone who was practically an elder sister to me, and with whom I always felt a sense of safety and womanly understanding. She refused to believe my story of sexual assault. Her relationship with J ended, but she and I still do not communicate, as to me, she has contributed towards systemic patriarchal violence. Women who silence or normalize other women’s sexual assault stories are contributors to patriarchal violence. And these contributions can be more subtle, such as fearing no-one will marry her daughter for being too fat or dark-skinned, or shaming other women by gossiping about them. However, these behaviours are not limited to South Asian women and would vary much dependent on different socio-economic intersects.
Instead of addressing sexual resilience or my resistance to the patriarchy, the words “dozen guys” echoed in my social media comments and inboxes. “She had sex with a dozen guys, what a [insert misogynistic slur]!” To address those who shamed me for mentioning a number, or for telling me I “shouldn’t have mentioned a number at all,” I have one question to ask: why does the number matter so much? I wrote “almost a dozen,” a vague estimation I threw out because I didn’t give it a second thought. To throw out a casual number implied that my logic had assumed that quantity is irrelevant, yet I was severely mistaken. What do you think, that the more men a woman has sex with, the more she is tainted, unworthy, and less deserving of respect? Or, having seemingly “heterosexual sex” a dozen times makes me a sex expert or a resilient sex-positive woman?
I have responsibilities to women who are sex resilient in Pakistan, and I didn’t touch upon these responsibilities let alone mention them in my previous article. ‘Purity’ and ‘virginity’ are both constructs, meaning neither of those things truly exist because they have existed as a tool to govern bodies and sexualities throughout patriarchal domination. How is it that a woman’s hymen is such an important — if not essential — symbol of her worth? Many cisgender women are born without a hymen, and many tear the tissue in prepubescent years through physical activity or sexual assault. It is merely a tissue, not even a physical body part, yet the meaning that has been given to it is symbolic of something much more significant than feminine ‘purity’; it is the sickness of the patriarchy.
Another aspect I find relevant to address was the idolization I received from cis-gender, heterosexual brown women, mostly from upper-class communities. My article was not representative of the violence and marginalization the queer and trans community in Pakistan face. I possess an exemplary amount of privilege to have experienced “hooking-up” in Pakistan the way that I did, with access to resources, birth control, and no-questions-asked type attitudes. More so, I am privileged to be in a position where I felt courageous enough to create a conversation about sex and its societal repercussions, without fearing the consequences I would, later discover, have to tackle on a personal scale (whilst compromising my mental health). Many queer and trans-Pakistanis, similar to religious minorities, cannot share their sexual experiences for public consumption without fear, and instead are criticized for giving into ‘identity politics.’ In Nivedita Menon’s essay How Natural is Normal? Feminism and Compulsory Heterosexuality, she writes:
“Caste, race and community identity are produced through birth. So too is the quintessentially modern identity of citizenship. The purity of these identities and social formations and of the existing regime of property relations is protected by the strict policing and controlling of women’s sexualities. Thus, the family as it exists, the only form in which it is allowed to exist — the heterosexual patriarchal family — is key to maintaining both nation and community […] In other words, challenging patriarchy, capitalism and anti-democratic forms of identity politics is inescapably linked to challenging the naturalisation of the heterosexual family.”
Menon discusses how the patriarchy requires institutions of “compulsory” heterosexual family dynamics to survive. Sexual identities were more fluid in pre-colonial South Asia, and the coerced normalization of a heterosexual identity was enforced as part of colonial modernization. What exactly is ‘normal’ and who gets to decide? Queer theorists have attempted to highlight that the violent and discriminatory term “natural” has been constructed, i.e. made up, to keep specific social reforms and practices in place. The longer a social norm is enforced, the more likely people are going to conform to it. Yet, those who have enough resources and possess a particular type of privilege can remain unseen and unmarked in regards to their gender and sexuality.
An example is the elite queer community in Pakistan, who have the resources to feel safe within their sexualities, or at least the funds to travel to the West to do so. Within the context of my social class, accepting someone’s queer identity is an unspoken agreement — however, due to their own parental pressure, forcing oneself into heterosexual marriage is common. The lower-class queer and trans community, of course, does not have the same privilege and are more exposed to community violence, particularly Kothis (a feminized male identity). Hijra is not interchangeable with transgender, because they are born intersex, and the Hijra community have their own culture, explain Arvind Narrain and Gautam Bhan in their publication Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in India. Labels deem what “natural” is and what is not, and this caters to binary-thinking and marginalization.
At the time of the article’s publication, I was twenty-two — and my views were not as nuanced as they are now. An essential class analysis is another aspect that I wish I had touched upon at the time. Sex resilience and women’s resistance is different for upper-class Pakistani communities, and while many thanked me for making them feel “seen” and “understood,” women from lower-class communities are resilient/resistant in different ways. Many choose sex work or are born into sex work as a profession, yet many do not have access to the health and safety resources the upper-class community does. Many women find themselves in reproducing sex work because they choose to or because they feel choiceless. Due to feudality, some find themselves in domestic roles where they either want to or are coerced into having sexual companionship with their employer. The film Mughal-E-Azam depicts the symbolic dehumanization that has occurred towards courtesans (tawaif), yet mujra is a large part of Pakistan’s cultural production. Courtesans from Heera Mandi were widely respected and were considered the cultural elite of Pakistan before the transcending of cultures, globalization, Pornography and a redefinition of what prostitution is ‘supposed’ to be.
An excerpt from “The Social Lives of the Elite: Friendship and Power in Pakistan” by Rosita Armytage.
The Pakistani bureaucratic elite makes for an interesting sociological analysis, as many of them reproduce colonial and patriarchal violence under the guise of ‘liberalism’ and progressivism. Many speak as if aware of democratic politics and behave as if armchair leftists while repudiating these beliefs to reap the benefits their social status and class provide them. Many of them are patriarchs. The conceptualization of space is an essential component of class analysis, as highlighted in the excerpt from Rosita Armytage’s essay. Growing up, I knew young men who had visited sex workers at their brothels, and the same men would take their upper-class girlfriends to one out of two of Islamabad’s five-star hotels. Those who lacked the connections or finances needed to obtain a suitable temporal ‘space’ would instead go to a guest house or park their car in an isolated spot. And some couples engage in what is referred to by them as “wife-swapping” or collective sex (i.e. orgies).
I know this because I know these men. However, sex is often unrecognized for its nuances within the heterosexual community (my VICE article claimed Pakistani men don’t like to perform oral sex on women, which of course, was a generalization, but there are cultural processes tied to it). It is mostly accessible healthily and safely to those with class privilege — many women choose to refrain from having sex, some are raped and are uneducated on consent, so it is normalized for generations to come. Some women are involuntarily impregnated, contract harmful STIs and do not have the resources to have them identified or treated. Some murdered in the act of violence. Some, however, choose to have sex of their own volition.
In Pakistan, class and the patriarchy go hand-in-hand. Growing up between Islamabad and Dubai, I witnessed the relationship between patriarchal violence and classism (citizenship elitism in the UAE, particularly) by observing power relationships between men of different classes. This classist power is seen through sifarish or wasta (name-dropping), status-flashing, asserting dominance and control over minorities and vulnerable persons, displacing rage on-to workers and those of a lower-class (e.g. service workers, public transit drivers). How, then, do these men reproduce this violence that their socio-economic class prevents them from responding?
It is not difficult to imagine they would do so on those more vulnerable than them: women, children, and animals. Historically, this is how colonial violence has been reproduced by “othering” those of different class backgrounds, religious beliefs, and who threaten the system of ‘normal.’ Pornography is another influencer and supporter of contemporary patriarchal violence. While I rightfully faced criticism for including an inaccurate statistic in my 2016 VICE article, in July 2019, The News published a news piece on Pakistan’s Human Rights Minister, Shireen Mazari, stating that “Pakistan is number one in child pornography.” However, not only is this prevalent in Pakistan but in many Western countries too. In the essay Fuel for Fantasy: The Ideological Construction of Male Lust, Michael S. Kimmel writes:
“Pornography can sexualize that rage, and it can make sex look like revenge… Everywhere, men are in power, controlling virtually all the economic, political, and social institutions of society. Yet individual men do not feel powerful — far from it. Most men feel powerless and are often angry at women, whom they perceive as having sexual power over them: the power to arouse them and to give or withhold sex. This fuels both sexual fantasies and the desire for revenge.”
The patriarchy has normalized sex and sexual deviance, more so than love. Love comes second to the desire to dominate and control. Why is that? Is it because men are less likely to be educated on social empathy, to connect with themselves and others emotionally, and to love and respect their bodies?
My privilege has undoubtedly kept me protected, or at least more sheltered than survivors of patriarchal violence who lack the means to escape. I have experienced childhood sexual abuse and sexual assault after that, however, it was in contexts and spaces of privilege where I experienced such. Molested while buying PlayStation games, and assaulted by privileged men after drinking too much alcohol at parties for and by the privileged elite. I learned that being a woman meant I would never be “safe” if I chose to exercise my agency. Still, my class privilege has undoubtedly given me access to a more protected experience.
Unlike Qandeel Baloch, someone from my immediate family would not murder me — disown, yes — but this is an example of the stark contrast in class difference and how it affects women who attempt to assert their agencies and their freedom of movement. Not only was it my family’s name and status, but my appearance, the fact that I am normatively ‘attractive’ and thus more worthy of being ‘saved.’ In the West, it’s been continually educating myself, and asserting my power towards any form of toxic masculinity or patriarchal violence. I am privileged enough to be in a position where men fear me because I behave as a mirror to their abuse. This something I am not proud of yet have learned as a survival skill.
In an ideal society, we would all respond with love.
On a final note, I would like to stress what I attempted to convey when I wrote my article, which is agency over our bodies. Whether we are having sex or not, whether we choose to have children or not, and so on. Essentially, the point I desired to make was in fact, humara mera jism, humari marzi. We all deserve to be seen and understood, throughout class, religion, sect, gender, sexuality, and other intersections that do not fit the mould of the heterosexual and patriarchal nation-state or what is considered “socially responsible and correct.” The nation-state has fed us lies to keep oppressive structures in place, for there is no such thing as a pure or perfect identity. These are fictive myths the state instills in us to create violent patriarchal national subjects.
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Originally published on Propergaanda.
Further Reading: South Asian Feminisms and Embodied Violence: Communalising Women’s Sexuality in South Asia.
