THE women’s movement in Pakistan has come a long way since its inception. It has assumed different forms and strategies during the course of its development while focusing on the fundamental human rights of women and their empowerment. What was noticeably missing was the female sexuality dimension in the discourse. It was too sensitive an issue to talk about in public in Pakistan’s conservative environment that was fraught with controversies.

Ours is a society that is so prudish that an article I wrote on breast cancer in 1978 had prompted a horde of bearded gentlemen claiming to be the guardians of our morality to crash into the editor’s office to denounce the fahaashi (vulgarity) the paper was publishing. Being progressive and a feminist himself, the editor had shooed them away saying that breast cancer was a life or death issue for women.

In such a society, it needs guts to write about the female reproductive organs in explicit terms. There are far too many readers whose thinking is misogynistic and patriarchal. Even an innocuous piece of writing becomes pornography for them. Their anger stems from the belief that women are sex objects created to give satisfaction to man’s desires.

That would explain why Dr Tahira Kazmi’s blogs on the social media have invited the wrath of her critics who are in abundance. Mercifully, the doctor, a gynaecologist by profession, also has admirers. She has brought enlightenment to many female readers who feel after reading her blogs that they understand their bodies better. Being highly qualified — MBBS from Fatima Jinnah Medical University Lahore (1990) followed by a train of higher foreign degrees — Dr Tahira knows what she is writing. She holds prestigious positions in Oman’s Ministry of Health and the Sultan Qaboos University.

Our society’s misogyny is sickening.

Four collections of her blogs have already appeared while the fifth is under publication. A fair-minded reader would take them as a scientific piece of prose written in the social context with a strong underpinning of feminism. She describes herself as a ‘Gynae-Feminist’.

All the subjects covered are familiar to women reading English-language newspapers but no one has written on them in Urdu so frankly. Childbirth, labour pain, menstruation, menopause, incontinence and prejudice against the girl child have been covered in different social contexts. If the frankness is shocking it is because these issues have been kept under wraps. It is time they were brought into the public space to make them socially acceptable.

But what will continue to shock are the horrendous crimes against women Dr Tahira exposes. How else would one describe the practice of putting a lock on a woman’s vagina with the key kept in the husband’s pocket for safekeeping to ensure that the wife is not unfaithful to him.

It is the feminist in Tahira that is most striking. She is quick to note an injustice done to a woman. She recalls how observant and curious she was as a child and still is. “You have to convince me with solid arguments if you think I am wrong. If you force me I will hit back. I am not afraid of what people say,” she says boldly. She also has the discretion to know when silence is a befitting way to snub an obnoxious critic.

Her greatest assets have been her medical knowledge and her writing skills that helped her produce blogs with literary elegance. It was motherhood that led her on the road to self-discovery of her latent talent. She wrote her first blog on the night of her mother’s death. She was suffering from Alzheimer’s. Grief drove Tahira to write, “I saw my mother melt drop by drop” and the blog went viral. That was 2019. She turned to gynae blogging in 2021 when she saw her daughter in severe menstrual agony. It prompted her to write to explain how the female anatomy makes pain a handicap for a woman needing male understanding. Pain also makes a person creative, with reference to Faiz’s verse on his heart attack and the pain he suffered, Tahira wrote, “Kash Faiz ko mahwari aati”.

What angers Tahira is the traditional view that women carry the honour of the family — meaning the man’s. Hence shame is attached to the woman’s reproductive organs that are given derogatory names. Why can’t the spade be called a spade one may ask.

Our society’s misogyny is sickening. Pakistan is a place where men fight and attack each others’ women to take revenge. Where were these critics when women were paraded naked in the streets of Nawabpur (1984) and when Mukhtaran Mai was gang-raped on the orders of a male jirga (2002)? Presently, 30,000 girls are trafficked every year to be sold into prostitution to satisfy men’s lust and not a voice is raised. It is this distortion the good doctor blogger is trying to correct.

www.zubeida-mustafa.com

Published in Dawn, January 12th, 2024