It is no secret that Pakistan is a challenging place to live in as a woman. The consistent battle for acceptance, space, and agency fought by and over female and feminine bodies ensures that the country is consistently located at the bottom ten spots on various global performance indexes. The most recent of these being the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Gender Gap Index (2024) where Pakistan ranked 145 out of 146 countries1. The WEF measures gender parity across four dimensions: economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment.
Despite such dismal records when it comes to women’s rights, Pakistanis are often heard remarking how deeply they ‘respect’ women while touting that feminist movements are trying to upend local cultural norms because ‘Islam already affords women all the rights they could ever need’ regardless of whether the country can deliver on any of them2.
Much of the public revulsion against feminist movements such as the Aurat March and other feminist activists stems from the broad perception that Pakistani feminists do not respect cultural norms and are working to upend traditional values. Broadly, this charge rings true, given that much of what has been institutionalized under the label of ‘culture and tradition’ in Pakistan is repressive and violent, especially for women. Given this state of affairs, it becomes incumbent on any feminist worth the name, to challenge and confront such norms. According to Gloria Anzaldua “Culture forms our beliefs. We perceive the version of reality that it communicates. Dominant paradigms, predefined concepts that exist as unquestionable, unchallengeable, are transmitted to us through the culture. Culture is made by those in power – men. Males make the rules and laws; women transmit them3.” One aspect of the reality that Pakistani culture communicates at every turn is the policing of social behavior through the refrain Log Kya Kahenge4? This phrase is used as a consistent litmus test for controlling and policing both respectability and piety across social classes throughout the country.
This makes unpacking how this phrase operates as both a surveillance framework and social control mechanism, essential for feminists. Who are log in this context and what do they say that impacts a woman’s social position? Is it every Pakistani or does it specifically speak to social peers in terms of class and ethnicity? What are the parameters for the performance of social respectability and who defines them to what ends? While it is obvious that much of the macro frameworks of piety – the control and regulation of female bodies and sexuality, mobility, and honor frameworks are constructed by men, the task of monitoring women is often delegated to other women, especially women within the same households. For this reason, women tend to form the first line of defense in preserving the social status quo and worrying over a presumed loss of izzat in the face of any social transgression on the part of other women. Judith Moschkovich reflects on this dynamic in these terms, “Think of it in terms of men’s and women’s cultures: women live in male systems, know male rules, speak male language when around men, etc. But what do men really know about women? Only screwed up myths concocted to perpetuate the power imbalance5.” More than anything it is this extreme power imbalance that underpins the influence of cultural catch-alls like Log Kya Kahenge? Given that cultural piety is almost exclusively framed around female and feminine bodies, this framework allows men to define everything from who a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ woman is, to what femininity is and how it ought to be performed, policed, and propagated.
The first layer of this power defines how space is framed and the corresponding log allowed to transcend the public and private divide. Add to the mix the factor of precarity and safety, where women are generally rendered unsafe in public spaces by weaponizing the public/private divide locally known as the chaadar aur chardivaari and men now have the power to define which women are inherently ‘good’ or ‘bad’ based on how they navigate space. Once space is marked in this way, it becomes possible to weaponize sexual abuse, assault, and rape by socially framing victims of such violence as somehow responsible for what happens to them because they transgressed the boundaries carved out for them. According to Andrea Dworkin “Rape is the direct consequence of our polar definition of men and women. Rape is congruent with these definitions; rape inheres in these definitions. Remember, rape is not committed by psychopaths or deviants from our social norms – rape is committed by exemplars of our social norms6.” Women who enter the public domain – markets, workplaces, schools and colleges are all considered to be taking a risk as men cannot ‘protect’ them in these spaces the way they claim to in private spaces. This framing of safety, whereby men cast themselves in the roles of guardians and protectors of women, protecting them from other men, allows yet another layer of control and surveillance. This faulty framework inherently ignores and invisibilizes forms of abuse that take place in ‘private spaces’ where the framework of Log Kya Kahenge is rendered impotent because what happens to women in private is also regarded as a private matter.
There are many other peripheral layers of surveillance and control that fall under the policing ambit of Log Kya Kahenge – complete strangers monitoring women’s bodies and femininity from childhood till their deaths – what they wear, what they say, in what tone and to whom. Young girls who have not yet formed ‘their own’ opinions and are ‘easy to mold’ are regarding as ideal candidates for marriage because the purpose of women in marriage is defined in strict terms to suit a social contract that generally only regards them in relation to someone else – wife, mother, daughter in law etc.
Ambition in women is universally regarded as an unattractive trait, so it must always be camouflaged and downplayed as accidental or secondary to more familyoriented goals such as being a wife and mother. In Wages Against Housework, Sylvia Federici writes “They actually expect us to be grateful because by marrying us, or living with us, they have given us the opportunity to express ourselves as women (i.e. to serve them). “You are lucky to have found a man like me,” they say. Only when men see our work as work – our love as work – and most important our determination to refuse both, will they change their attitude towards us7.” It is precisely such refusal to adhere to feminine roles designed in service of men, society, nationhood, and even religion, that marks women as social outliers that then need to be controlled and brought back in line through sociocultural inflections like Log Kya Kahenge.
The final and arguably the most pervasive layer of control that this policing proverb holds over us all is that of silence. Women’s obedience and goodness in Pakistani society is inherently gauged by their ability to tolerate all manner of circumstance from slights and barbs to abuse and invisibility, in silence. Expressions like ‘Aik Chup Sau Sukh8’ are reserved and passed on exclusively to and for women because a woman’s silence is designed to absorb a man’s aggression and anger. Log Kya Kahenge, is first and foremost, a silencing tool – a hush call that is located in the body. This is why women’s bodies in Pakistan are framed as belonging to anyone and everyone – parents, partners, spouses, brothers and sons, the state, ethnicity and religion, complete strangers monitoring them on the streets – anyone, but themselves. It is why slogans like ‘Mera Jism, Meri Marzi9' are regarded as social triggers, because a woman seeking agency over her body is also doing so over her voice.
In the Feminist Killjoy Handbook, Sara Ahmed describes a scene at a table, where family gatherings turn uncomfortable because of the tension that women are expected to swallow and mitigate through their smiling silence. It is these tables and these conversations where ‘Haw Hai, Log Kya Kahenge’ thrives as a social solvent maintaining women’s silence in the face of slights, barbs, and dismissals. Ahmed writes, “To be unseated by the table of happiness might be to threaten not simply that table, but what gathers around it, what gathers on it. When you are unseated, you can even get in the way of those who are seated, those who want more than anything to keep their seats. To threaten the loss of the seat can be to kill the joy of the seated. How well we recognize the figure of the feminist killjoy! How she makes sense! Let’s take the figure of the feminist killjoy seriously. One feminist project could be to give the killjoy back her voice10.
Becoming this voice in the face of consistent attempts to silence women is an integral part of the feminist project. In Pakistan, this means, recognizing the fact that what people say is used as a prison to keep women in check and perennially bound to the existing social order. For anyone dissatisfied with that order, the only option is to accept the consequences of being framed as unlikeable and disruptive by the Log in question and foregoing Log Kya Kahenge in favor of centralizing one’s own voice.
Maria Amir is a former human rights journalist and gender scholar currently working as a Teaching Fellow at MGHSS, LUMS. She primarily works on South Asian Feminist Movements, Punjabi Folklore and Media Theory. She has an MSt in Women’s Studies from St Annes College, University of Oxford, and is presently completing her PhD in Global Gender Studies from University at Buffalo, SUNY.
1. Dawn - Pakistan’s Dismal Position in Global Gender Gap calls for Action. https://www.dawn.com/news/1844081
2. Dawn - Embracing Feminism. https://www.dawn.com/news/1823040
3. Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera. The New Mestiza (1999): 16.
4. Translation ‘What will people say?’
5. Moschkovich, Judit. “But I know you, American woman.” This bridge called my back: Writings by radical women of color
(1981): 74.
6. Dworkin, Andrea. Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics (1976): 45-46
7. Federici, Silvia. Revolution at point zero: Housework, reproduction, and feminist struggle. PM press, 2020: 21.
8. Translation: One moment of silence equals a hundred moments of peace.
9. Translation: My Body, My Choice.
10. Ahmed, Sara. The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. Random House, 2023: 39.