The perils of saying ‘no’
She had only just turned 17, an occasion she celebrated with 800,000 followers on TikTok and 500,000 followers on Instagram. Her social media feed — featuring quirky, funny and optimistic content — was akin to that of any other teenager marking life’s small achievements.
But for Sana Yousaf, a bubbly girl from Chitral, this small milestone became her last. She was shot dead in Islamabad by Omar Hayat, 22, for saying ‘no’. The inspector-general of the capital police, at a press conference, classified the murder case as one of “repeated rejection”.
Hayat had called her, followed her, and stalked her while Sana repeatedly said ‘no’. To him, not being able to possess her meant she didn’t deserve to live. Unfortunately, in our society, this is a frighteningly common tale. A man looking at a woman — in this case, a teenager — across a crowded room, driving a car, at school or online, and deciding all by himself that she belongs to him.
Whether or not the girl is made aware of this proprietorship is irrelevant. But whenever she is made aware, she must accept the terms. If she refuses, he threatens to either kill himself or, in most cases, such as that of Sana’s, kill her. Just like toddlers break their toys when someone threatens to take them away, men break women.
Novelist and poet Margaret Atwood famously said, “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” And believe me, we are. Whether we talk about it or not, most of us Pakistani women live our entire lives negotiating space and safety around men, both the ones we know and the ones we don’t.
“Why didn’t you just say no?”, “you should have been firm”, “you must not have stood your ground, so he thought there was a chance” are some of the sentences that every woman in Pakistan must have heard at some point in their life. As if a woman saying ‘no’ to a man will fix everything.
Learning the art of not offending men
Women in our society spend a majority of their lives negotiating how to politely (read safely) reject men’s advances. It requires command over body language, management of opinions, and the art of not offending men, because that could prove fatal.
In Sara’s case and several others, men never know how to quantify ‘too much’ because no setting is truly ever safe — not quiet or shy or bold or loud, not hunched or upright shoulders, not pretty or not not pretty. Men can always find ways to weaponise every equation involving women, even those carefully calibrated and cultivated to guarantee safety.
How to say no isn’t just about rejecting marriage proposals but also ranges from negotiating online spaces to workplaces and even within one’s own home — how should women talk back to their male bosses/colleagues without being fired? How should they say no to their husbands without being beaten and abused? How should they say no to strangers who invade her space without getting stalked, or worse, killed?
‘No’ is more than a complete sentence; for women, it is a complex syntax that has been perfected by navigating a complicated web — body language, tone, eye contact, walk, clothes, and even a smile — all to try and ensure that we can draw boundaries with men that keep us safe rather than get us killed.
Then again, what would have happened if Sana had said ‘Yes’? Would she have then been killed for having had a relationship that was “unfortunate for our society and contrary to religion and morality”, as Supreme Court’s Justice Hashim Kakar remarked regarding Noor Muqaddam during Zahir Jaffer’s appeal against his death sentence? There is simply no equitable setting for women shrinking themselves or projecting themselves that keeps them safe from the violence that men consider their fundamental right to inflict upon female bodies to keep them in line.
The politics of rejecting men
Every day, women are beaten, raped and killed in this country regardless of what they wear or where they are because these questions still exist and persist in public discourse. Relying on such qualifiers, exclusively reserved for female victims, is akin to asking what she did to ‘deserve it’. The only answer to that question is: Nothing.
It is always nothing because no one ever deserves it.
At present, the politics of rejecting men is a matter of global debate, framed and marketed as the ‘male loneliness epidemic’, wherein men around the world now imbibe online incel culture, and red pill codes so they can argue how they are owed female attention and sex. Sadly, in Pakistan, incel culture is not a new phenomenon. It is the gold standard, a permanent staple.
Currently, the JUI-F is launching protests across the country to protest a recently passed Child Marriages Restraint Bill because they feel they have the right to marry and have sex with children under the age of 18. The same politics of control play out in deeply troubling ways in online spaces. There is a pernicious vocabulary being developed and weaponised to target women on social media, particularly TikTok.
Most television channels continue to identify Sana Yousaf as a TikToker as if she were nothing else — a teenager, a student, an aspiring doctor. The word ‘TikToker’ has emerged as a deeply gendered term in recent years because men are seldom, if ever, morally targeted for being on an online platform that helps them generate an income.
This is also an increasingly classist phenomenon as TikTok has some of the most diverse user bases in countries such as Pakistan. According to a 2021 Gallup Poll, the bulk of Pakistani TikTok users, around 33 per cent, are under the age of 30 — the number is split almost evenly between urban and rural populations. This means that not only does the medium provide exposure to men and women from varying income classes, but also opens avenues for financial independence along with fame. The latter, however, is considered objectionable for women.
For this reason, the term TikToker is increasingly being weaponised to carve a new terrain for abuse that feeds toxic frameworks of moral/ immoral women as a terrifying new spin on the ‘chaadar chaardivari’ matrix. The implication is that the more public-facing a woman is, the more she is inviting the violence that may befall her. The underlying misogyny behind such doxxing and digital surveillance leads to tangible violence. This is demonstrated in the way dozens of men have ‘celebrated’ Sana Yousaf’s murder by calling it a ‘zabardast move’ to ‘clean up’ the ‘filth’ she was allegedly spreading with her naive posts about books, mangoes, and dinner with her friends.
The same language and fallout was witnessed when Qandeel Baloch was murdered in 2016 or when Ayesha Akram was groped and harassed by over 300 men at Minar-i-Pakistan on Independence Day in 2021. According to a 2023 United Nations report, female social media influencers are susceptible to four times more abuse than their male counterparts. In Pakistan, this abuse is deadly. Literally.
The brand of misogyny
Understanding and recognising that misogyny is not only normalised but institutionally licensed across Pakistan is essential if we are ever to put a stop to the ongoing femicide in the country. The fact that Pakistan repeatedly performs in the bottom five countries in the world when it comes to women’s rights and gender parity is not because there is a concentrated campaign against us, but because we lack the introspection needed to address the real issue at hand.
From Qandeel to Noor to Sana and all the women in between, the public discourse following their murder has always focused on whether ‘they did anything to deserve’ what happened to them rather than on the murderous malignancy of toxic masculinity that permeates down to our very social fabric.
The brand of misogyny that one sees displayed in the wake of the murder of young women, the closure of girls’ schools, calls to uphold child marriage as a fundamental right, and clerics making music videos about girls ‘dancing in school’ is a malaise that stems from shared patriarchal roots. Men’s utter lack of accountability drives our social discourse, and men have to begin holding each other accountable for any sustainable solution to Pakistan’s multiple human rights crises.
Attacking women and verbally abusing them for pointing out that men are violent only affirms the premise. Men need to talk to each other and enforce consequences for their own actions, which they alone are responsible for.
Stop telling women to stay home to stay safe. Most women get beaten, raped, and killed at home. Women are not unsafe because of what they wear or where they walk — they are unsafe because men hurt them. Men tell women that they are our protectors, but never ask who we need protection from and why. Patriarchy’s most convenient causal bind is that men will protect only the women they deem ‘good enough’ to merit safety or the women in their family at the expense of all other women who are some other man’s responsibility.
This way, men never need to address the root cause of the violence — themselves. If we stop being violent and excusing violence on each other’s part, women, children, and other men will no longer require protection.
Header image: Women activists in Islamabad hold photographs of Sana Yousaf, a TikToker who was murdered, during a demonstration to condemn violence against women. — AFP