Around most of the world, teenage romances and first loves are viewed through a nostalgic rose-tinted lens: silly, carefree, fun, and cringe-inducingly cute. Maybe even fond memories to laugh over with your family, to shake your head at how naive you were.
The idea of doing that in most South Asian or Middle Eastern households is laughable. When most of us think of our romantic firsts, the memories are starkly different:
Heart racing at the fear of being caught, sneaking around to avoid suspicion, spinning webs of lies for stolen moments with your partner, and the constant paranoia tainting every serious conversation with your parents.
Do they know? Is this it?
Falling in love as a brown girl is akin to committing a crime, to vandalizing the most precious thing, the thing that warrants more protection than your very life: your family's honor.
Izzat.
It's a deceiving word in Urdu. As a child, you hear it used so innocently. Girls are the honor of their families. That has to be a good thing, right?
You don't realize until much later that this honor lies between your legs, and it's worth more than your life. It is something you barely own, probably because you are the thing being owned, the thing to be transferred from father to husband.
Your whole life, you are raised to breathe, eat, and exist for this future husband: the one to whom this honor will eventually be transferred. But who is this mystery man?
If you're lucky, maybe he will be the kind you like which your parents will approve of and allow you to end up with. If not, you'll be arranged to marry the man of their dreams.
Either way, protect your honor before you become his property.
It's such a fragile thing, too, this honor and we can never get careless because they never let us forget.
We hear the violence in our families’ language when they talk about girls who loved the wrong person, or the right person at the wrong time. We see the disgust and rage on their faces when they discuss girls who got caught having a sexuality, having romantic desires, not being a stoic, chaste blank state, ready to mold herself to the desires of her future husband and in-laws.
I would strangle my daughter to death if she embarrassed us like that.
Shameless.
Characterless.
We know what happens to dishonorable women and girls.
Best case scenario, they lose the freedom they have and live a restricted, heavily monitored life. When they protest, they are reminded of how they broke trust and marred their family honor. Or they are coerced into an arranged marriage with a suitor of their parents’ choice, to save face and prevent them from entering further premarital relationships.
Worst case scenario, death.
These risks come with pursuing romantic love, wth choosing who we love, but we still do it. Despite it all, we still dare to live.
This is a struggle most South Asian and Middle Eastern women share regardless of where their communities are based. Whether they reside in their home country or in the diaspora, the spilled blood of our sisters spans continents.
It eludes many who the culprit is, what system or ideology drives fathers and brothers to butcher the women they claim to protect? Who decided that our honor lies between our legs, not in our minds and hearts?
Was it religion? Is this what God wanted? A lot of coverage of honor killings and honor culture blames religion, especially Islam but we know this isn't true, when our regions have a diverse set of religions including Christianity, Sikhism, Hinduism and Buddhism, yet their followers share these ideas.
Naturally, the blame falls on culture. The most reasonable, answer.
Brown culture.
Desi culture.
Arab culture.
The explanation is satisfactory on a surface level but when you probe deeper, it falls apart. Because what even is brown culture?
Culture isn’t some static rigid thing that societies randomly agree on. Culture is constantly in motion, ever-evolving, and shaped by material conditions. To find the root cause of honor violence, of misogyny, we need to find out what's creating the material conditions which are creating our cultures.
To dig right down to the root of it, we need to go a bit further back in time.
Many of us aren't aware of the primitive era where man and woman were equal. Societies where they hunted together, made the rules together and had equal roles, where women's reproductive capacity wasn't used as a justification to oppress them. It almost sounds ridiculous with how we've been raised to see gender inequality as the natural order, but the truth is, it hasn't always been this way. These egalitarian societies have been well documented by anthropologists and historians.
Then what changed things?
At some point, humans started settling down and the collaborative nature of society, the shared ownership of resources came to an end. They developed class society, the social structure where people are divided into groups based on economic roles and ownership of resources. This created different levels of privilege and power: the exploited and exploiters, the ruling class and the labor class.
And in this new quest to either expand or preserve power, women's reproductive capacity started to be viewed as something to be owned and controlled, rather than something to be revered or viewed neutrally. You needed more workers, more inheritors for this type of society, so women's reproductive ability started to be viewed as a commodity. This is the point in human history where women turned from humans into property, valued crudely for their wombs and flesh. Barely human.
Naturally, this perspective also explains why transgender women and infertile women are often seen as failed women within the context of class society. Their womanhood, lacking reproductive capacity, poses a threat to the established societal structure. Consequently, they face ostracization, with their womanhood being questioned. This phenomenon is evident in South Asian cultures, where transgender women are marginalized and reduced to mere sex objects, while infertile women are stigmatized as curses or punishments.
The reduction of women to objects, as both sexual and reproductive commodities, is what ultimately gave birth to honor culture. Attaching moral value, honor, to women's bodies is one of the ways that makes them easier to control, easier to make them serve their ultimate purpose in class society. The violent consequences further solidify this control.
To end honor violence, we need to destroy the view of women as property and we can't do that without getting rid of the social structure which led to it in the first place. A world without the power imbalance between man and woman, where all groups of people equally share resources, and live and love freely is not a dream. Our ancestors have already lived it. So why shouldn’t we work towards and look forward to it in the future?
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