PAKISTANI culture claims to place a high premium on respecting women but in reality, this privilege is just an extension of male conceit. This respect is abstract, conditional, and associated with women’s class status and sexual modesties, not for their independent-mindedness or choices. Masculinity and its discontents are the drivers of fake respectability that decide if women are worthy of respect or scorn.

Two recent women-centric campaigns typify how masculinities are threatened when women challenge norms, prompting reactionary violence. The first was when a group of women journalists alerted a parliamentary committee on human rights to the gender-based profanities and threats of violence that they receive from online trolling. Secondly, a dystopian revenge-plot online series (Churails) with an all-female cast was released, causing anxiety to several male critics. Paradoxically, our cultural defenders dismiss the factual complaints of journalists but consider the fantasy-based, fictional show to be a literal threat to culture and society.

Inevitably, the reaction to any critique of power politics is to discredit the critic as foreign-funded, blasphemous, or motivated by enlightenment-loving liberalism. The simple advice against such puerility is to attend to the content and not the critic.

The backlash to the women journalists’ complaints and Churails is not surprising for those familiar with the pattern of abuse and vitriol directed at those women who dare to hold public office, or broadcast, perform or write subversive content. This is evident in the historical timelines when women entered politics, defied martial laws and protested on the streets, danced at shrines, wrote novels and poetry, played cricket, sat or smoked at dhabas, modelled for fashion or owned their bodies, or marched across cities displaying slogans that spelled out patriarchal practices. Defiance in words and action — at home, schools, offices — results in punitive social action from the gatekeepers of masculinist power and resources.

Gender-based abuse has become a virtual form of violence.

The media is the fourth estate with a duty to monitor state and government excesses, but digital and social media are unregulated neoliberal tools that displace textual analysis or investigative reporting. Govern­ments use this gap to their advantage to dismiss any critical reports as ‘fake news’. The market comes up with its own ‘corrective’ by way of trolls who muscle out criticism by peddling alternative versions of events and deluging opposing views with curses and threats.

Trolls can be any gender and many have the privilege of an expensive education. But the power differential between men and women, military and civilian, and ruling party and journalists, means there is no level playing field for influencing the narrative.

Where governments sponsor censorship, immunity is inbuilt for trolls (paid or voluntary), who believe they are performing a patriotic duty by silencing dissenters or critics through intimidation and abuse. Where leaders use their power to discredit select women, minorities, journalists and dissenters, they encourage mass bullying. Leaders who deny, deflect or rationalise this violence are complicit.

The internet is lauded as a democratising equaliser but online gender-based abuse has become a virtual form of gratuitous violence where anonymity allows even more cowardly impunity. There are now rescue services being set up for women journalists in some countries after it was found that 40 per cent of online threats directed at women converted into physical violence.

The abusive indignities that Pakistani journalists recounted to the human rights committee echoed the experiences of many women journalists across the world who feel compelled to leave journalism, stop writing, or worst of all, to self-censor or blunt and tame their reports. Govern­ments should be concerned less with journalistic neutrality and more with the impartial application of media ethics. Respect needs to be a baseline, not a conditional commodity.

Journalists or artists who try to tell the story are becoming the story. The stalking, threats and gender-based slurs are not psychological obstacles which women need to ignore. It is a crisis of masculinity that expresses itself in violent ways. The seeds of every potentially abusive act germinate in intimidation, rumours, ganging up, sexualised insults and sexist jokes.

‘Churail’ is a polite euphemism for the most common profanity (‘tawaif’) favoured by internet trolls to address women of opposing views. The connection between women, sexuality, the performing arts, perceived treachery, and bodily and economic autonomy is summarised in this expletive. It is an indictment of the journey of Pakistani male respectability that proudly connects its historical lineage and Muslim cultural pre-eminence to the courtly period in Lucknow and which is now reduced to a term that reflects misogyny and political intolerance.

The writer is author of Faith and Feminism in Pakistan.

Published in Dawn, September 6th, 2020