A girl in Lahore went through this absolutely sickening experience two days ago:

Incidents like this show us that we need to open our eyes and ears and stop pretending that we don’t need feminism or common sense or gender equality for this country and its horrific norms because we’re doing “just fine”.

For starters, let’s just make sure we’re all on the same page.

Feminism refers to the belief that men and women should be treated equally with equal opportunities and given the same level of importance. If you believe that women deserve the same privileges as men, then you’re a feminist, whether you like it or not. Women in Pakistan are being burnt, raped, assaulted, groped and cat-called left, right and centre.

This girl’s experience means that we can’t even be safe in our own houses.

There are things like this, or many girls are even inappropriately touched (or worse) by their uncles or cousins or sometimes even their fathers in the “privacy” of their own homes. So maybe it’s time to stop policing your daughters’ bodies, what they wear or putting limits on their freedom by calculating how much they can step outside of their own houses. And instead, perhaps it’s time to teach our sons to stop thinking that, by virtue of having certain genitals, they belong at the top of some hierarchy.

Of course we all know some absolutely wonderful boys and of course this does not apply to every single man. But seriously.

Stop to dissect every single action you mindlessly perform and try to understand where you’re going wrong. If a girl goes out to dinner with a bunch of friends, why do the guys seem to order for her? Why does the waiter only look at the guys to find out what the order is? It’s the littlest and most “innocent” of things that expose the ingrained sexist power relations that we ascribe to.

Perhaps the worst part is that most people’s reaction to this so far has been this:

“Why were her curtains open?”
“What proof is there that this note is real?”

This tells us exactly where our priorities lie: blame the one who is easier to blame because that requires much less work and courage on our part. It’s high time we raise our children differently.