Before women can start pointing the fingers at men that they know outside their homes, they should start with the men inside their homes. Often, we are outraged about the things that men do but when asked our response is always: “I love my abu, I love my bhai”. The very same father and brother that don’t allow women to freely travel, have quick meetings when it’s dark outside, or simply wear clothes that they like, never get mentioned when we are pushing feminism. I had to wake up and smell the air at one point in my life when I found my brother looking at young girls on the road as though they were a hamburger. If you ever meet the kid, you would never think him capable of doing something like that. In addition, if I am being honest, my first reaction was to pretend I did not see him do what he was doing. Then I realised that by ignoring him I was actually part of the problem. When confronted my brother — to my utter horror — said: “It’s not like I raped them, I was just looking!” As though rape is where you draw the line. You may leer at, call out to, or even touch a woman, so long as you did not rape her you are still going to heaven. What rubbish, I had asked him at that point. However, in that moment I also realised my next mistake: reacting with anger. I had to calm myself down and tell my brother of all the times I had been harassed on the road, and how it had made me feel. How what he was doing felt like fun to him but probably made the young woman want to run into her home never to return. It was a difficult conversation, but one that was needed. My brother said, “So women on the road get scared? But I thought they liked the attention!” The disgusting conditioning that we do to our kids makes them grow up with these idiotic ideas. Women are taught to be afraid so they are afraid, and men are taught to take what they want and so they do. It has been two years since this conversation — and many others — with my brother and the lad now calls himself an ally. The two of us are currently teaming against my father, who has extremely problematic views. The only thing I know for certain is that without more conversations with the men we do know, this problem isn’t going anything. Maria Zahid Karachi Published in Daily Times, July 1st 2018.