By Saniya Mujahid Ali, SSH Correspondent
In Pakistan, it is a funny concept, harassment. It’s a daily hazard, just like for any woman out there. Sometimes our male relatives get to witness it on the street and then intervene. Sometimes women get phone calls from strangers in the middle of the night and choose to ignore them. But a lot of times, these women get messages online.
Women in Pakistan who have online social profiles are highly prone to get unsolicited attention from unknown males who spam every other profile they see with the online version of love letters. Their content ranges from seemingly harmless flirtation to sexually explicit material. Their frequency? Well, you stop keeping count after the first few times. It is much more than a mere nuisance. This is harassment. Oddly enough, this is one area no one here ever explicitly calls harassment. They’ve given a much nicer cushion to it.
We term them “frandshippers”, owing to the oft incorrectly spelt and overused word in these messages. Facebook, of course, is the most glaring platform through which these “frandshippers” stalk their prey. Less common, however, is the use of professional online networks. Or so I thought.
A few weeks ago, I was checking my mail and spotted a notification mail from my LinkedIn network. It was a message from a contact I recently added. I am not quite active on it so I was a little surprised.
I opened it, and was shocked with the very first sentence I read: “after a rigorously brief overview of your profile, I wanted to let you know I have already married and divorced you in my mind”.
He went on and thanked me for “all the wonderful imaginary memories” and telling that I “can keep the house in Hawaii” but that he was “going to need half our money according to our prenup” and signed off with “you will always have a special place in my heart. Your ex-hubby”.
I sat immobilized while I tried to comprehend what an employee of a respectable multinational development organization, a person with several hundred professional connections and an alumnus of my university had just said.
What is this? Is he flirting? Is he trying to be funny? Is this his idea of a joke?
I was disgusted. I felt humiliated. And I was furious.
This man was discounting my professional and academic achievements in order to make a wisecrack about me being his discardable object. All I had done, all I was proud of was washed aside because his view of a woman confined me to the role of a being made to service him. The nature of his message tells me that he had no interest in seeing me as a respectable professional, but as someone who was subject to his sexist whims.
Is that all women are even to these seemingly professional men? How is this not considered harassment here? Why can’t I do something about this? I have his information, I have evidence, yet I can’t do anything that can convey to him what his message made me feel. I felt helpless and furious at myself.
About everyone I talk to says that sexist attitudes, harassment and gender related crimes are due to the fact that the men here are uneducated. There was a time when I subscribed to this idea as well. Education is the miracle drug. Education this, education that. Education will save us all!
With a population comprising of 55% illiterates and increasing, it may seem like a probable proposition. It did. But then I realized the problem with it.
What is this “education” that they’re talking about? In the conversations I’ve had, by implication they mean formal education. But what does that mean? So a person, man or woman, will magically become unprejudiced if he or she has a degree? Is that all you need? This man, despite his “education,” his work experience, had still stooped to “frandshipping” me online. My being had been distilled to nothing more than a disposable sexual object. He didn’t even see me as worthy of his respect.
What I wish to impress upon people is that the relation isn’t as simple, as one dimensional as people make it out to be in Pakistan. For one, an educated man is no guarantee to a non-sexist one. Second, it seems a very convenient way to not do anything about it and let the problem ride itself out. Here’s the thing: it won’t.
We can’t just sit around and wait for things to happen in due course. There has to be constant engagement, a conscious effort in recognizing the patriarchal ideas that we are bombarded with every single day. We need to be able to identify the underlying bias and sexism and proactively fight against it. We need action. We need resistance. And the time is now.
I am a woman and I demand to be seen with the respect a human deserves. I refuse to be “frandshipped.”
Saniya is pursuing an undergraduate degree in Sociology and Anthropology. You can read more of her work here.
