Re: y
Ironically, you are speculating about my intent.
Anyway, you don’t know her intent, or whether this actually happened to her, so my position that this could be a statement about Pakistani girls is valid, **because other people also mentioned something along the lines of “this is probably not representative of every Pakistani girl”. **
If this is her experience, then, as tragic as this is, it’s only the experience of one very unlucky girl. Most girls don’t have the luxury of naukars or schooling, so she is far from the average girl. Secondly, boys and girls all over the world suffer from bullying and abuse, although the number of unreported rapes is much higher in Pakistan. That said, a lot of those rapes happen in rural areas, far from this girl’s class and neighbourhood.
The only thing which is probably universal to every woman in this thread, albeit to varying degrees, is the double standards. But just like the trolls were putting forth hyperbole in calling this propaganda, so were the women who claimed that “men don’t understand” etc, when they only thing they (most likely) have in common with the author is the double standards. And it is also highly presumptuous to state that a brown, Muslim man wouldn’t understand what it feels like to be discriminated against in a Western country, post 9/11, especially if he (or she) happens to work in a field dominated by white men.
Anyway, my point is simply this: if this is not meant to be a statement about what Pakistani women go through, then it is just the very unfortunate experience of one girl. The trolls calling at propaganda are wrong, but so are the women who are jumping in to defend this piece as if it is representative of all women, double standards not withstanding as (I hope) we all agree do exist. Like Jolie said, the line is somewhere between “this doesn’t happen” and “see all that we women have to go through”. And I don’t just mean what’s written, but the underlying attitude which a lot of posts are laced with.