DATELINE: Why Society Frequently Blames Women for social disorder?
Men have parties, clubs, unions, committees and chai (tea) circles that run for decades without anyone asking what is being discussed. Women open a group chat, and the social order is declared to be in danger.
Peerzada Masarat Shah
Every few months a familiar argument returns to our timelines, dressed as concern and carrying the same old complaint underneath. This time it arrived through two men who decided that women’s private online groups were a public problem. The charge was made in the usual way: that women gather in small circles, that they gossip, that they trade stories about the men in their families, and that the whole arrangement is therefore shameful and ought to be examined. Others joined in. One critic went further and questioned not just the conduct of these groups but their right to exist at all, suggesting they are run by a certain kind of woman and represent something that needs to be dealt with.
Consider what is actually being alleged. Thousands of women have joined online spaces where they talk to one another. That is the offence. Not fraud, not extortion, not organised harm. Conversation.
Now hold that against the world these same critics live in comfortably. Men have political parties with membership rolls and closed-door meetings. They have trade associations, bar associations, press clubs, traders’ federations, mosque committees, welfare committees, alumni networks, cricket groups, property dealers’ circles and WhatsApp groups with four hundred members where the discussion runs from politics to personal grievance without anyone demanding a transcript. Nobody has ever stood up in this valley and asked what men talk about when they sit together after Friday prayers, or what is said in a shopkeepers’ group chat at midnight. That privacy is simply assumed. It is the water they swim in.
The moment women build the same thing, the assumption reverses. The space is presumed suspicious until proven innocent. The members are presumed to be doing something they should not. And the burden of explanation falls entirely on them.
This is the real content of the argument, and it has nothing to do with morality. It is about supervision. A private male space is understood as ordinary social life. A private female space is understood as an absence of oversight, and that absence is experienced by some men as a loss. Not a loss of safety, a loss of information. They do not know what is being said. They cannot walk in. They cannot correct the record. For men who have always been present in every room where a decision about a woman’s life was taken, being outside one room feels like being overthrown.
Hence the vocabulary. The word that keeps appearing is revolt. Rebellion. Feminism, used as an accusation rather than a description. Sometimes conservatism, aimed at the same women from the opposite direction. The labels contradict each other, which is the giveaway. They are not diagnoses. They are attempts to give a name to a discomfort that would sound absurd if stated plainly: these women are talking, and I am not there.
Then there is the charge of gossip, which deserves to be taken apart rather than defended. Yes, some of what is said in these groups is gossip. The same is true of every gathering of human beings since the invention of speech, including every male gathering that has never once been asked to justify itself. But look at what else is in there. A woman asking how to handle a husband who has stopped paying for the children’s school. A woman comparing notes on a doctor before she spends money she does not have. A woman describing symptoms she is too embarrassed to describe to a male physician. A woman asking whether what is happening in her home is normal, and receiving, for the first time, an honest answer. A widow asking how to get her late husband’s papers transferred. A student asking about a scholarship nobody in her family has heard of.
That last category is the one that unsettles people most, though they will not say so. Advice travels in these groups. A woman who did not know her rights learns them from a woman who does. A woman who thought her situation was uniquely shameful discovers that it is common and that it has a name. This is not revolution. It is information reaching people who were kept away from it. The only reason it looks like a threat is that ignorance was doing useful work for somebody.
The second charge, that some members misuse these spaces, must be answered honestly rather than waved away, because it is partly true. In a group of thousands there will be people who leak private screenshots, who give reckless advice, who settle personal scores, who encourage a woman toward a decision she will regret, who turn a support space into a marketplace or a courtroom. Some of these groups are badly run. Some have no rules worth the name. Real harm has been done in a few of them, and women have been the victims of that harm more often than men.
But notice the standard being applied. Nobody proposes shutting down a political party because its workers have committed crimes. Nobody proposes dissolving a traders’ federation because some members cheat. The remedy for a badly run association is moderation, clear rules, accountable administrators, a complaints mechanism and the ordinary law when a line is crossed. That is the remedy every male institution in this society receives as a matter of course. Applying collective guilt to thousands of women on the evidence of a few is not a safeguard. It is a pretext.
There is also a local truth here that the critics avoid. In much of Kashmir a woman’s access to public life is thin. She may not have a workplace outside the home. She may not be able to travel alone to a district office. She may not have an elder in the family who will explain a legal right to her rather than a duty. For such a woman, a phone and a group of a thousand strangers is not a luxury and not a fashion. It is the only public square she is permitted to enter, and she enters it in silence, at night, after the work is done. To call that space a conspiracy is to say that she should have no space at all.
What is striking, finally, is the arithmetic of attention. The men objecting have now spent more hours discussing these groups than most members spend in them. They have made speeches, recorded videos, written posts and demanded action. The women, meanwhile, are still discussing their children, their debts, their health and their families, and have mostly not noticed the controversy at all.
A society that can tolerate a thousand men in a party office can tolerate a thousand women in a group chat. If it cannot, the problem was never the group chat.
(STRAIGHT TALK COMMUNICATIONS EXCLUSIVE)
