THE women’s movement in Pakistan has come a long way since its inception. It has assumed different forms and strategies during the course of its development while focusing on the fundamental human rights of women and their empowerment. What was noticeably missing was the female sexuality dimension in the discourse. It was too sensitive an issue to talk about in public in Pakistan’s conservative environment that was fraught with controversies.

Ours is a society that is so prudish that an article I wrote on breast cancer in 1978 had prompted a horde of bearded gentlemen claiming to be the guardians of our morality to crash into the editor’s office to denounce the fahaashi (vulgarity) the paper was publishing. Being progressive and a feminist himself, the editor had shooed them away saying that breast cancer was a life or death issue for women.

In such a society, it needs guts to write about the female reproductive organs in explicit terms. There are far too many readers whose thinking is misogynistic and patriarchal. Even an innocuous piece of writing becomes pornography for them. Their anger stems from the belief that women are sex objects created to give satisfaction to man’s desires.

That would explain........

© Dawn