Misogyny found everywhere – A friend and mentor, who has been an active part of mainstream politics for several years, once asked me if I knew what the problem with Leftist men was. Not quite sure what she was pointing to, I asked her to explain. “Their idea of female ‘emancipation’ is for women to behave exactly the way men behave in this country; with the same level of independence,” she said. “This is extremely unfair to women because here, they aren’t even considered human in the public space!”
She was right. The Left in Pakistan has never really cared about women. While the participation of women has always been encouraged, a lack of understanding of the gender question and the on-ground socio-cultural issues of women in this country has meant that this encouragement has been little more than verbal.
The concentration, as such, has primarily been to display a token participation of women in Left activities and politics; mainly to show that unlike right-wing and middle-of-the-road mainstream parties, the Left is the only political channel for women. While this is theoretically true – patriarchy and the ownership of property go hand in hand, after all – much affirmative action needs to be taken in order to bring things to an even scale for women in this country. And this is something that very few of our comrades in the Left have bothered to try and understand. I say ‘very few’ because in my time as a left-wing political worker, I’ve known some notable exceptions. But these men have been exceptions, rather than the norm; which is ironic, given as how leftist and progressive ideologies lay a lot of stress on the gender question.
Most women here have to wage immense battles with their own families, first, to break the shackles that bind them to restrictive, cultural norms. More fights break out when she decides to be an active part of politics or political movements; the participation of women in street politics is, after all, a huge middle and upper-middleclass taboo. During all of this, she continues to fight against the misogyny that she faces all around her everyday in the streets, at workplaces, even perhaps with friends. After this, the last thing she expects is to experience the same madness within parties that are said to be the sole women-friendly spaces in society. Unfortunately, her expectations are dashed; at least as far as the Left in Pakistan is concerned.
When I’d first started working with the Left here, I’d foolishly thought that maybe the misogyny that I was experiencing from most of my comrades was my fault – that maybe I was expecting too much or that I wasn’t behaving properly; I’d thought of a thousand other maybes, perhaps in an attempt to deny the fact that misogyny existed even in the Left here. But then I started speaking to fellow female political workers and realised that almost all of them had exactly the same kind of experiences as me. All of them had received derogatory comments from male comrades about what they wore, how they spoke, what they spoke about. When they protested, they were generally told to ‘take it easy’, to ‘stop getting so worked up over minor issues’ and to ‘concentrate on the larger picture’. I have myself been rewarded with all sorts of labels, starting with ‘serial ranter’ to ‘anarcha-feminist’.
The problem, however, is that our male comrades have, for the most part, failed to understand the fact that the expectation of being treated as a human being with self-respect is a basic human right; that the women protested because this right was being snatched away from them. They failed to understand that there could be no ‘larger picture’, no ‘revolution’ without the participation of women; and that, women would walk out of these movements, as they have done in the past, if they continued to be treated like appendages with no opinions or thoughts of their own. They failed to understand that a lot of work needs to be done to understand the particular issues that women face before they could be expected to be as ‘independent’ as men.
To make matters worse, in most cases, unable (or unwilling) to understand these issues and assuming that women were just ‘being difficult’, male comrades ended up ‘ghettoising’ their female comrades. The choices given to women were stark: either deal with hardships (that men would never have to face) without uttering a peep, or be sidelined from mainstream activities.
There is no doubt about the fact that the only political parties and groups that can do anything at all about the true emancipation of women are those that follow left-wing ideologies. As such, it is high time our male comrades started listening seriously to what female political workers within their ranks have to say, or the nascent Left in Pakistan which is being rebuilt with gusto and with much hope will soon be back at the point where it was in the 90s: in the living rooms and memories of disheartened former activists.
The writer is a freelance journalist and researcher based in Karachi. She can be reached through twitter (@UroojZia) or email (contact AT uroojzia.com).