Am I brave, or a falsified feminist? Or was it a British insult, sir?

A short scroll through social media and some of Pakistan's leading newspapers has made me realise, once again, that perhaps we are becoming a little more "mature" as a society.

The quotation marks matter. For years, some of the most visible disclosures of childhood sexual abuse by well-known women, particularly from showbusiness, involved chowkidaars, maalis and other men who entered the household through work. Those disclosures were important and should never be belittled. But have we quietly created a mental map in which abuse belongs to that constituency? A perpetrator has no particular occupation, beard or bank balance. He can be a driver or a doctor, a cook or a civil servant. Respectability is not a risk assessment.

Recently, senior civil servant Maliha Sehr, Additional Deputy Commissioner (Headquarters), Rawalpindi, filed a police complaint alleging prolonged domestic violence by her husband. He is on judicial remand. The allegations remain to be tested in court. In her complaint, she said she had remained silent for a long time in the hope of saving her marriage and family. Her photograph travelled. In the coverage that reached my own feeds, I saw her face and not his. I was relieved she was heard, and uneasy about what comes next. Because what happens after we call a woman brave?

"Brave" can be praise. It can be solidarity. In British usage, depending on the tone, it can even carry a faint sting: You are brave to do that. Meaning, perhaps, I certainly would not.

I have spent decades supporting disadvantaged women from different backgrounds to name what happened to them. Yet I have also stayed silent when many respectable men wronged me in many ways, including matters of money. I knew how paperwork and friendships could line up. Was that cowardice or calculation?

What I keep wondering about is the afterward. The remand ends. The news cycle moves on. Who sits beside her at work on a Monday? Who asks what she did to provoke it? What does a woman owe the public once she has become a headline? These questions have followed me under a title I gave myself: falsified feminist.

By "falsified" I mean the self that edits, conceals and weighs every word. It is not an accusation against feminism. I turn it on myself because I notice the distance between the woman who speaks in public and the woman who measures her language when the subject comes too close to home. That distance is rarely forgiven. The intimacy is always forbidden.

We do not ask every man who writes about morality to be a saint at home, or every human rights lawyer to have a flawless family life. Yet a woman who speaks about equality is expected to demonstrate it perfectly in the most private corners of her life. I do not believe every private truth must become public. Confidentiality and secrecy are not the same thing. Confidentiality can be an ethical choice, a protection offered to another person or to oneself. Secrecy can be imposed by shame, fear or the demand to protect the family's reputation.

Aik chup sau sukh: one silence, a hundred comforts. Taali dono haathon se bajti hai: it takes two hands to clap. We teach the "good girl" not to speak, and expect her to carry the khandaan ki izzat on her shoulders, as though family honour were packed into the few inches of her female body. I know women raising children born of rape, and that is before we count marital rape.

In many homes, even today, a dead daughter is preferred to a divorced one. There are exceptions, but they remain exceptions.

When a woman screams, someone does the math. What will it cost her family, her job, her children's marriages, her name? In our part of the world izzat (honour) works like currency, and it is the woman who pays, whether she speaks or keeps quiet. Whatever she does, a label is waiting. Call it my shorthand history: say no in the 1600s and you were a witch; in the 1800s, unladylike; in the 1900s, hysterical; in the 1970s, frigid; by the nineties, a bitch; in the 2010s, bossy. In 2026, we have become gentler and simply say "difficult" and leave it there.

Violence against women is everywhere, and many countries treat it as their own private embarrassment. What gets reported is only the tip. The distance between what happens and what gets counted is where izzat does its work. Even the tip has a class. A few cases become names we all know; the rest remain a line in a report. The woman with a surname, a lobby, a donor, who speaks the language of the press club, is more likely to be remembered. I am not against anyone's fame. Every scream that gets heard helps all of us.

Behind the activist, researcher and inspirational survivor is a more inconvenient woman. She may still be angry. She may not yet know what she thinks.

Women should not need to be "allowed" that unfinished state. So which feminism do we need? The visible kind, which gives other women courage but can cost the speaker her safety? Or the careful kind, which protects her and leaves the silence intact? Should I suspect we need both? I believe we also need to question feminism more loudly, beyond the restrictions of sanitised Urdu, immaculate English and rigid frameworks for getting donors' funds. And perhaps we need to stop judging women by which one they can afford. Visibility is easiest for those who can survive it. A photograph, once published, cannot be taken back.

So, am I brave, or a falsified feminist? I do not know yet. Or was it a British insult, sir? Survivors are not diplomats. They do not have to be politically correct. I would rather be as truthful as I can, even when some truths must stay private.