People who think women empowerment should not be one of the top agendas of Pakistan are part of the problem. While the Aurat March 2019 enabled women in Pakistan to speak up for their rights, its aftermath in the form of misogynistic and ‘holier than thou’ outrage perhaps is a bigger eye opener. Most of the outrage was against the boldness of some of the placards. Even the ‘apparent’ friends of women just could not take it. And then, there were these conspiracy theorists who just branded the whole effort as a conspiracy against the country, its culture and even Islam. One of the more hated placards was of a woman, sitting casually. It said “here, I am sitting properly”. A hater had criticised the way, the woman drawn on the placard was portrayed sitting with her legs not closed together. He called it vulgar and obscene. His rant on social media was disrupted by another user pasting the hater’s own picture sitting in exactly the same way. The same kind of ignorance is prevalent in the west when it comes to the opponents of rights movements like ‘black lives matter’. Those against it try to counter the movement by using slogans like ‘all lives matter’; something that is essentially true but misses the point by a mile. Similarly when women raise their voice to demand their rights, e.g ‘equal rights for women’, many in our society try to drown their voice by saying ‘what about equal rights for everyone’. This is counter-productive to its core and textbook whataboutery. An easier way to understand this would be to imagine a situation where you, as a child, are sitting with your parents at a restaurant where the waiter serves all your siblings, but you. When you complain that ‘you want to eat food’, your parents correct you by saying that ‘everybody wants to eat food’. Once again, that is essentially true, but misses on the real point; the fact that you were not served food. Similarly, when the not-so-funny boys demand ‘equal rights for all’ as a counter argument to ‘equal rights for women’, they are essentially playing down the fact that women in our society are constantly discriminated against and by far – not given an equal opportunity in all walks of life. So while some of the ‘boys march’ participants think it is very witty of them to claim how they can deprive women with make-up on, just by not looking at them, the jokes is actually on them: women won’t care. If there is anything to learn from seeing such miserable displays of inadequacies, it is the lack of sense of humour. The point is that women totally rocked as they demanded their rights and their opponents only exposed themselves to the world. * Published in Daily Times, March 13th 2019.