Both the countries for whom I have passports and some sense of allegiance continue to show where a woman’s place is.
Pakistan, of course, remains the most hurtful and the most deadly. The Aurat March with its frankly anodyne slogan of ‘mera jism meri marzi’ – my body, my choice – in Pakistan ‘please don’t rape me, please don’t force me into marriage’. Or ‘apna khana khud garam karo’ – heat up your food yourself, in Pakistan, I am not your slave, don’t take me for granted. For this, women are targeted by women and men alike. This year, when they were so careful to avoid anything that would inflame rage, their banners were photoshopped to show blasphemous slogans. And that, in Pakistan, marks one for death.
In the UK, the death of a young woman walking alone at night could not be protested. There have been countless articles, tweet, posts etc about ordinary experiences of terrifying harrassment. In London I worked at a university in central London, and walking between meetings a man stood a few feet away and shouted at me, calling me a cunt. I am quite fearless, but part of that fearlessness is being very alert when I am walking alone, no matter where in the world it might be, and hyperaware of everyone near me, of keeping away from dark bushes and parked cars. In highly respectable Hampstead, there is an alleyway known to the locals as Rape Alley. I doubt many rapes have happened there, but it speaks to women’s fears.
Today’s British papers were dominated by two photos. One of a woman held down by police at the vigil for the woman who died, and who is known in the press, disrespectfully, by her first name. I wondered if the photo would have been so striking had it been another woman, not a a pre-Raphaelite young woman with long auburn hair. In any event, the rest of womankind should be grateful that it was she who was trussed up by the police – the rest of us might not have aroused the same degree of outrage.
The second photo was of the Duchess of Cambridge visiting the vigil alone, in what the papers call a shocking and unprecedented intervention by a member of the royal family. That a woman attending the vigil should be a shocking and unprecedented intervention by a member of the royal family itself shows why the institution should be burned to the ground. But also, though I daresay it was a genuine impulse on her part, I also have little doubt that it is the first countermove against the recent interview.