Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about ease, the ease with which people can direct their worlds. The ease with which many of us were awarded our flashy educations and our excessive lifestyles, our periodic vacations and our seasonal clothing. The comfort and security with which we choose to exist in our worlds. And I’ve been thinking about how the definition of ease changes as we get older – it morphs and contorts and complexifies to the point of being impossible to direct in one course. I like to think I’ve lived a life of significant ease. That is, until I began to navigate my world as a young woman.
I remember clearly, the comfort of my life before a bookseller felt me up in some rancid corner of a Karachi market on Chaand raat, while my 7-year-old cousin browsed his books a few feet away. His hands piercing my body like infected needles, his heavy breathing like poison dripping down the side of my face. Keep quiet, I remember thinking, don’t let the child see. I remember when, by some miracle of god, it was over. When I readjusted my dupatta, walked to my cousin, and helped her pick out a Junie B Jones book to devour in the car on our way home. When I handed him 100 rupees and he smirked and told me “for you, 75”, and I went home and threw up my insides. And I remember the time when I realized, years later, that it was only fitting for me to hope to slice off every part of his body that touched mine. So that another woman doesn’t feel like she has to rip off her skin to cleanse herself of him.
I remember clearly the next day, when a distant family member put my hand on his dick at an Eid gathering because he knew that he’d get away with it. When the men sitting next to us looked at me and then looked away to comment on the hall decorations. When the women saw his hand piercing mine and continued to whisper about how Maria was wearing Sana Safinaz’s collection from last year. And how I also wished that in that moment, I could be just as vacant as they were – maybe then I could drown out the feeling of ants crawling their way into my veins and chewing my insides. I remember the time when I realized, years later, that it was only fitting for me to hope to chop his hands off. So that another woman doesn’t feel like she has to burn her hands over an open flame to erase the memory of his.
Is it really immoral to want to inflict violence upon those who are so carelessly brutal?
These are men. Men who took so much from their mothers in the womb that they made them complicit in the oppression they raged against their kind. These are the men who are handed comfort and ease on a platinum platter, who toss the crumbs to women and expect them to be satisfied. The same men who butcher intellect to maintain their positions of authority, and massacre generations of free will to make themselves feel powerful. The men who impale the bodies of women with their unwanted touch, leaving remnants of violence trapped in muscle memory. The men who look at themselves in the mirror and feel power in their violence, who feel masculinity in their aggression, who have grown used to walking a world sculpted perfectly for them.
But we are women. Women who do not need to silence others to be known. We are the women who do not need to oppress to feel strong, or violate to feel superior. Without us, these men have no source from which to draw their power. Even when they take advantage of us, they are a derivative of us – because they depend upon our exploitation to exist, to feel masculine and strong, to feel at ease. And imagine if we were fully cognizant of the power we possessed – imagine how it would feel to crush these men, to subject upon them the beauty of accountability. Imagine how we’d conquer the world.
I recognize that my very existence as a woman is threatening to men who believe I should stay indoors, men who believe they should be able to control what I say and what I wear, where I go, who I interact with, what I take interest in. The men who crave to take from me by force the right to my own mind and body. And even after my dealings with men, or rather as a result of them, I savor every minute of my choices. I find joy in speaking my mind with men who wish they could sew my mouth shut. I find gratification in using my intellect to make them feel small. We share a common understanding, an understanding that if I made it this far with the shackles of misogyny around my ankles, I would’ve built heaven on earth with the privileges that they’ve been fed.
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