Pakistan and the pill — Check your male privilege at the door | Dawn.com |
I recently had the pleasure of feeling my ovaries constrict when reading a news item: the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan seems to think it is quite dandy to warn Muslims against family planning or birth control.
“Rejecting motherhood means giving up on humanity,” he said, and that too, on live television.
…
Consider the consequences of choosing to put off child rearing: women are disrupting the status quo in a world where men have done as they please since time immemorial.It is no wonder then that men will scream themselves hoarse about how this or that religious edict is being made to collapse so that women can cavort and be hellish, but what they really fear is that women will have some spare time, some loose change and some ungoverned flexibility.
Also read: How Pakistani organisations don’t want to deal with pregnant professionals
Their world will have to accommodate another voice, another perspective and a wider social view. Our holy men and their brethren are terrified by this change; they are outraged and offended.
Their masculinity, which has till recently been their monopoly over the world, is losing steam and their male privilege is beginning to look a lot like a deflated ego.
Contraception has toppled their social order and of course they’re going to squeal.
As women, we need not pay heed to the shallow interpretations of men. We need not abdicate our foremost responsibility to them and their fraternity, which is the basic right to move up and out, to breathe, stride forth and evolve.
We no longer need to birth and be banished from widespread acceptability; we can be our own economic and social agents with the help of the little pills they’d rather not let us see.
