On Truth-telling
By Saba Gul | Sept 14, 2022
Bit by bit throughout my life, I was traumatized into my feminism.
My journey into it, like so many women I know, was born out of my personal experiences—growing up in the straitjacket that culture and religion put on me, but not on my two brothers, experiencing violence in my family, attending a college where women were a minority in my engineering department, leaving an abusive marriage in my 30s—as well as my professional experiences: founding and running a startup with an all-male board and investor group, working in women’s reproductive health and livelihoods, building a career in technology’s sexist, male-dominated spaces.
In living and working across the world, I have learned that the one thing that is ubiquitous across borders—a network of capillaries nourishing all cultures—is the patriarchy and its subordination of women. It has enraged me, fueled my work and guided me to the freedom I had to build for myself. Like June Jordan said: “I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires.”
As feminists, our dreams clash frequently and violently with the reality of our everyday lives. It is a reality that too often remains shrouded in silence. What is visible to the world is a radically reductive version of our experiences, that has passed through the filters of shame, stigma, fear of the harsher judgment we’re subjected to as women, and the notion that silence is the respectable choice. That it will protect us, when in fact, it protects our oppressors.
Meanwhile, those that are privileged by their gender insist that all is well in the world. In their world—a utopia created by their perceptions of our lived experiences. A fiction that erases and diminishes the injustices that are a mundane part of our lives, because they are uncomfortable or inconvenient to look at. Like Anita Hill noted about a young, white man who called her paranoid and told her she was acting as though the sky was falling: “It wasn’t just that the sky wasn’t falling for him. It was because we don’t live under the same sky.” This is why when, in 2021, the Prime Minister of Pakistan reacted to rising cases of sexual violence in the country by stating that he had traveled everywhere, and that Pakistan is among the safest countries in the world for women, I held up a poster at a protest I organized that said: ‘Dear PM, you may have seen the world, but not through a woman’s eyes.”
This is why, among the most important work I want to do as a feminist is to tell it like it is, through a woman’s eyes, because justice starts with truth-telling. To break silences—my own and that of others. To make our stories public, visible, loud, unavoidable, unignorable.
I believe the very things women are taught to remain silent about are the ones where we suffer the deepest injustices, and where our lives and dignity are most endangered—the physical and sexual violence we survive, but also everything to do with our bodies and our sexual and reproductive health: pregnancies, abortions, menstruation, fertility, contraception, breastfeeding, perimenopause, menopause, and life-altering conditions like PCOS and endometriosis (that take an average of 7-8 years to even diagnose because of medical misogyny).
The spaces conveniently relegated to being private, domestic, intimate, sacred—our bedrooms, kitchens and living spaces, our marriages and sexual relationships—have a dark underbelly that I want to make visible to the world. I want to defy the norm of choosing to forget the crimes committed against women, instead of remembering them out loud and often. When I divorced in 2019, I chose to talk about it on my social media accounts, as a call to remove the halo of mystery and shame that follows divorced women. Even though it was a tame, distilled version of my experience, I was overwhelmed by the number of women that reached out to me. They saw themselves in my words, and were relieved that a woman had said out loud the things that we are taught not to. They wanted advice and support, they had questions and fears, they wanted to say thank you, they wanted to talk. We commiserated about the deeply patriarchial institution that is marriage. About the need to break from its traditions that keep women suffering, subordinated and trapped.
I am 39 years old, and I am childfree by choice. This decision—and the journey to it—is an important one that I am currently editing an anthology on, with pieces by women from around the world that have all made the choice to remain childfree. There is no dearth of examples of motherhood to look at (albeit overly glorified ones, so thank you Maggie Gyllenhaal for an alternate representation of motherhood in The Lost Daughter), but when I went on a journey searching for voices of women that have chosen the less-taken, and often demonized path of remaining childfree—I found very few. So I decided to build a collection of these critical voices, and share them with the world.
In rejecting the two roles I was expected to play by default in my life—wife and mother—as a compulsory imposition, as something presented to me as synonymous to my womanhood, I have transgressed in the eyes of the patriarchy. In this transgression, I have learned that for women, what are called “choices” are very often not choices. They are coercion and aggressive conditioning. They are a product of ingrained gender roles in a patriarchial, capitalist world that becomes hostile, lonely and unforgiving if we don’t make the choices it has prescribed for us. These choices are narrow and suffocating. I want to have and make real choices that let me live my values, not the values of the patriarchy. I want to not be hostage to the desire to be liked, as our culture socializes women to do, but to be me—freely and fully.
In the spirit of breaking silences, I also host salon discussions for women where we talk about our sexual experiences. We share our journeys to deepening our understanding of our sexuality, of the shame and trauma we had to shed along the way, and of the ‘good woman’ bind we had to release ourselves from, in order to reach joy and fullness in this part of our lives. We talk about how this is a game that feels rigged against us—of the cultural training that still puts our sexual pleasure well below men’s, of the myths surrounding female anatomy and desire that we need to unlearn, of how women disproportionately bear the burden of contraception as well as the danger of it failing, and of the unavoidable ‘grey’ areas where aggression, coercion, violence and harassment rear their heads. Our sexual lives remain feminism’s unfinished business. We need more spaces and more social acceptance to build community and knowledge around these topics, because in the silence, it is women who are disadvantaged. Some of my best conversations and learnings in this context have come from the queer community. In breaking from the gender binary and rejecting compulsory heteronormativity, they have challenged gender and sexuality in a way that is essential to feminism. Our fight is against the same construct: patriarchy.
I believe the feminist revolution requires defiance, rebellion, profanity and even justified, retaliatory violence. It is not a polite discussion, nor a call to the logic, morality or sense of justice of the gender-privileged that will lead us there. In this context, I am forever indebted to Mona Eltahawy for the insights I gained from reading her second book: “The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls”. Among these sins she speaks about profanity, power and violence in an original and compelling way. This book should be required reading for women and girls in our fight to dismantle the patriarchy. As a Pakistani woman who has been part of the Aurat March for the last five years, I have seen the threat that women’s profanity and power pose to authoritarian, patriarchial states. Our slogan “Mera Jism Meri Marzi” / “My Body My Choice” drew so much ire and hysteria from Pakistani men, precisely because a woman owning her own body is so revolutionary. A woman owning every choice associated with her body—whether or not she bears children, how many and when, whether she chooses to abort a pregnancy, who she has sex with and when—is a threat to the control men exercise over women by way of their bodies.
Nothing gives me greater joy than seeing women win at life, by owning their bodies, voices, ambitions, choices, stories and power. There are countless obstructions and systemic challenges on this path, and there can be no overnight toppling of the patriarchy. But I want to keep showing up for the long haul because I know our sisterhood, our rage, our joy, and our courage can build a world that is a feminist’s dream. A world that does not exist yet, but that we have seen so many glimpses of.
In a world that tells women to shrink because their voices don’t matter, that tells us we’re less capable, less worthy, less accomplished, more dispensable than men – I choose myself. I choose to speak, I choose to make noise, I choose to make people uncomfortable, I choose to take up all the space I want, I choose to write, I choose all this because choosing it is choosing myself. I choose myself because it’s the biggest rebellion a woman can partake in. I choose myself because if I won’t, who will? If not now, when? Because we need a world where every woman can say, “I choose myself” and no one cries “selfish!”
- Saba
