5,000 honor killing incidents occur internationally per year out of which a thousand per year occur in Pakistan. 

How many of those 5,000 murderers every year are sentenced to capital punishment? Was our government or parliament ever held answerable for the 1,000 murders committed in the name of so-called ‘ghairat’? It burdens my heart to know that all those women were buried in the graves of our insensitivity and ignorance.

Shockingly and ironically, the word ‘ghairat’ slips so easily out of the rolling tongues of the most beghairat men these days.

Even the druggies, woman-beaters and criminally insane are entitled to ‘ghairat’ because the osmosis of the ideology of male supremacy has unknowingly seeped into our bodies and all of us succumb to it. We worship at the altars of male ego every day, when we celebrate the birth of a boy, when we pay more attention to the boy over his sisters, when he is taught that women are lesser because of what he was born with between his legs. The word ‘ghairat’ has become so masculine in nature, it threatens every woman who decides she is in charge of her body and destiny altogether.

What the misogynists fail to understand every time I have an argument with them post-Qandeel is that I never am suggesting Qandeel Baloch was the epitome of womanly grace and dignity when she was alive. In fact I remember inwardly blaming her for reducing women in general as a piece of joke, to men who with their ‘ghairat’ so enjoyed every single video and interview of hers. But never was she a threat to my femininity. But what made her a threat to the ‘ghairatmand’ man of our society?  So-called ‘honour’ – based violence (HBV) occurs in populations where the concepts of honor and shame are fundamentally associated with the expected behaviors of women. In our society it is expected of such women to sin in darkness, behind closed doors and to be a shadow of a man who will shield her from other men. All in all, declare body and soul, she is but a woman; weak and dependent.

You know why the women who sell their bodies at the red-light areas, do not threaten their ideologies of honor, because those women come from a place of weakness. A weak woman who hides her face in the morning and disguises herself at night with lipstick that eludes men are better than her, with clothes that shout that her body is merely for a man’s pleasure and perfume that defines her boundaries of existence set by the lustful men. That is her ticket to survival. Those red-light areas are lit bright at night and mark my words, they will always be. Prostitution is the oldest profession and it has been kept alive by men. If the women are selling, men are buying. Yet one suffers and the other just feathers it off his shoulders and moves on. I believe the ‘ghairatmand’ men walk past such streets and never question the dishonor they bring to these women because it does not threaten their supremacy.

The problem again cycles back to women, why women though?

Why didn’t the man blame all the ones she had presumably dishonored herself with? What about the men who go to red light areas to get served at night? They will always remain ‘ghairatmand’?

What kind of logic is that?

A woman, sentenced to be the ruin of her husband’s desires decides she will take the path she desires to, on her own terms. The path of “sin” allegedly, she was not inclined to, but pushed towards for financial liberties every man is born with. She realized soon enough, she doesn’t need to beg a man for a life she wants. What she forgot was that men don’t like such women.

You ought to be a man’s muse, a politician’s pet or simply yield to your father’s, brother’s or son’s will. Even, the drug addict brother, who most probably begged her for money to pacify his hunger for drugs has an upper hand. He automatically becomes the guardian of his family’s honor. He doesn’t have to prove he is honorable before he squeezes the life out of her. Why don’t you understand? He did not have to prove it. Why? He was born a man.

Shockingly and ironically, the word ‘ghairat’ slips so easily out of the rolling tongues of the most beghairat men these days.