A federal minister while he is giving a policy statement in the Parliament is heckled by opposition members. In a fit of calculated rage he selects his target; a well-known woman member from the opposition. Likening her to a “tractor trolley”, he asks the speaker of the Assembly to “get her switched off”.

In a television talk show we see a female anchor and four participants; three men and a woman. The woman is rights activist. The men are a lawyer, a political worker and a Mullah who happens to be a Senator. Question of women rights is being debated. The lawyer derides another Mullah who holds an official position for his misogyny.

The woman rights activist agrees with what the lawyer says. The Mullah flies into rage unprovoked. The lady shows maturity and restraint. The “holy man” in an uncontrollable outburst glares at her, gets up, threatens the lady;”I will strip off your trousers”. Pretending to leave the studio, he lunges forward and he tries to punch the lady who is saved by the political worker’s timely intervention.

A girl from a working class family marries a man of her choice against the wishes of her parents. The woman’s family approaches their son-in law and persuades him to send his wife, their daughter, to her parents’ home so that they could arrange her ceremonial departure. The young woman is burnt alive in her parent’s home for bringing “disrepute” to the family by contracting marriage without its consent. The mother confesses to murdering her daughter.

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This is the brief summary of the stories we heard and watched during the last 10 days. There is a common thread running in all these separate but inter-linked episodes which are no longer uncommon.

Uniting link is woman and attitude towards woman. The stories cover a wide spectrum of socio-political activities. We see men and women from upper, middle and working classes in action exposing the cultures of different classes in terms of how they view and treat woman. In all the cases, the victim is woman who is battered or demolished socially, emotionally and physically. The villains or protagonists of the stories are equally ruthless.

The hoary minister dressed in expensive suit in sizzling summer in the air-conditioned Assembly hall ranted about his achievement of having reduced the duration of power outages.

Members of the opposition, male and female, raised pandemonium pointing to never ending power “load shedding”. The minister stopped and chose his target.

Pointing to a senior female member, he asked the speaker to “silence the tractor-trolley”. Why did he choose a female, not a male, to vent his anger and frustration on is self-evident.

It’s easier to ridicule female body. It’s butt of every man’s salacious jokes in private conversations. What happened at the elite club is revealing. Class couldn’t help the minister to be discreet and humane simply because the upper class male when pressed flaunts his superiority as much as any other.

Thinly veiled patriarchy is concealed in apparently refined cultural mannerism which in this case was thrown out of the window. When social pressure forced the minister to apologise, he tendered his apologies to the Speaker and the House, not to the lady he insulted and hurt.

His male ego wouldn’t allow him to apologise to the woman he wronged. Upper class woman is as expendable as any other in a patriarchy ruled social order when it comes to “male honour”.

Mullah (a cleric) Senator who seems to have ubiquitous presence on the idiot box is one of the leaders of politico-religious party that represents ultra-orthodox tribal belt of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan where woman is a commodity; bought and sold in the name of primitive cultural norms.

How could he tolerate a woman who dared to criticise the leaders of his “holy party”. It is worth-noting that it was the lawyer who excoriated his party leadership for its anti-woman crusade, not the woman activist.

She just nodded her agreement that put the Mullah in a state of uncontrollable fury. Like the Punjabi minister, this Pashtun (some say he is an Afghan who got Pakistani citizenship) Mullah chose woman as his target though he knew well that the “original sin” was committed by the male advocate, not by the woman activist.

It’s always easier to humiliate the vulnerable. And who can be more vulnerable than woman in a society that treats her as if she is nothing more than a baby making machine.

Even the most articulate and challenging woman can be silenced with what male has in his quiver; an obscene gesture, a lewd remark or allegation of moral laxity. The Mullah puffed up by his ill-conceived notion based on the twisted interpretation of faith believes he has the right to dishonour a respectable woman but ends up being dishonoured by his hubris.

In the former case it was patriarchy fetishism that prompted the minister to insult his respectable female colleague. In the latter it was patriarchy fetishism coupled with the wrong interpretation of religious texts with the underpinnings of primitive tribalism that egged on the cleric to use the most despicable language against a respectable lady. Not just that. He tried to physically assault her in the full glare of studio cameras.

The case of the young woman burnt by her mom shows the false consciousness the working class suffers from. It apes the ruling elite in the domain of culture as it has internalised the ruling ideas by osmosis. Economic base of feudalism may weaken but its cultural norms in domain of super structure tend to linger on in the forms of psycho-social habits.

Male chauvinism is rampant among all the classes. The entire order from top to bottom stinks of putrid waters of misogyny. An affluent politician, a seminary trained cleric and a poor illiterate woman behave in the same way; they express inveterate prejudice against woman. In a world afflicted with the enervating disease of traditions woman suffers from agoraphobia and man from gynophobia. — soofi01@hotmail.com