To all the girls and women out there, may you be safe from men and patriarchal women

The latest murder of a Pakistan, in our very midst, in F-7 Islamabad,  has shocked and numbed me. The man was found kicking the severed head of the woman he murdered. So, here we have it: the cost of being a woman is torture, murder and decapitation. Furthermore, everyone there tried to cover it up. No one called the Police while she was being murdered and chopped. 

It's a coincidence she is a former Ambassador's daughter. (me , too)

Her face is everywhere on social media. There is even a photograph of her attending the Motorway Gang Rape protest from last year, not even a full 12 months ago. 

These past few days, several other women's murders have been protested against, including the abduction and torture of the Afghan Ambassador's daughter. 

I have to admit , I'm tired with the more activist/political framing of patriarchal violence now. I mean, my senses no longer seem to respond to the more intelligent analysis of how the system produces this violence. 

My senses tell me this is always there: the brutal massacre of a woman. 

The disturbing image of a woman's severed hit being kicked around by a male bastard boils my blood. And, I know from the longest time, since the age of 9 or 10, that women are not considered equal and violence against them has been around for thousands of years and is always justified. It's ingrained in the very teachings of our culture. I've always known it. 

Long before capitalism or any state, women have been slaughtered, burned, chopped, sold, bought, given as gifts, raped, domesticated and brainwashed into their own slavery. 

Women are idealised for their beauty but also cursed in the same breath as whores. Women give birth , give life but never made to feel their power as life givers. A woman is never allowed to realise her full power. Instead she is brainwashed and conditioned into the most regressive religious notions of her role in a patriarchal society. 

Instead she has to pray and accept her lot in life. She has to beg for her own life. 

A few years ago, I wept inconsolably thinking about a headline I had read about how a pregnant woman was beaten to death outside a court house in Pakistan by her own family for having run away with a man she loved. The image haunted me and still does. I kept weeping , the plight and suffering of a woman and, how she must have faced the death blows by her parents. 

Somehow, a Woman , the very life giver, the female who objectively has superior powers to a Man, has to somehow be fashioned into an inferior creature than a man, and then has to worship not only a Supernatural Entity but also the Man she gives birth to. And,  through her life, she is tortured, killed and violated.

The suffering of women is relentless in history. And, it is completely invisible. 

Of all the Tweets, righteous columns, headlines, cries, the line that struck me the most in the past couple of days was the one by Muhammad Hanif : 

Silence please, we are busy killing a girl. 

How true, for thousands of years, men have been busy killing girls. 

To all the girls and women out there, may you be safe from men and patriarchal women.