“Mera Jism Meri Marzi” has divided the home.
There are people who say the slogan — quick turning into a marker of the motion this yr — promotes promiscuity. However for the ladies who coined it, the offence lies not within the slogan, however in how centuries of oppressive social constructions have taken girls’s basic proper to bodily autonomy hostage.
Actor Ahmed Ali Butt, no stranger to controversy, joined in on the anti-slogan marketing campaign.
In an Instagram story he lately posted, Butt equated the slogan as a western marketing campaign that’s being exploited domestically and that desires to make prostitution authorized.
He highlights what he calls the hypocrisy being “sold on social media and how everyone jumps on the # bandwagon.”
Butt continues to ‘inform’ his uninitiated viewers that that we should not comply with ‘tendencies’ and a ‘foreign-funded’ motion.
This is similar actor, who in his defence, works on media initiatives primarily based on the identical borrowed ideologies that he now claims to be hating on in relation to girls’s rights. Now you’ll be able to see why we will not sit this one out, despite the fact that we have simply been by way of this.
To start out with, if Butt, who appears to imagine that feminism is a ‘western’ assemble, had stepped out of his little bubble, he’d be shocked to search out that the grassroots motion, which has slowly been taking form over a few years is a collective of girls, totally different minority teams, and people who’ve mobilised round points that have an effect on those that do not have the privilege or the chance to talk and be heard.
By calling the native girls’s rights motion ‘foreign-funded’, Butt has discounted the great thing about natural initiatives which have a bigger social resonance.
Secondly, if the actor had solely taken the effort and time to analysis the slogan, which accurately signifies that girls need bodily autonomy and have the suitable, as enshrined within the Structure of Pakistan, to make selections regarding their very own our bodies, he would not be fast to guage.
These selections basically embrace girls having the suitable to make vital calls about their our bodies, their well being, and actually, their lives. Easy, is not it? Of all of the discourse that has been occurring round Aurat March, if what Butt chooses to remove is that feminists by some means wish to legalise prostitution, then that basically says extra about his interpretation of the slogan than it does about girls’s precise calls for. The slogan is about consent, an idea clearly misplaced on Aurat March naysayers.
Additionally learn: Earlier than you get all labored up about Aurat March, learn what it stands for
Feminists say the ‘private is political’ as a result of our houses are one of many first areas the place girls bear abuse, discrimination and management. The surface is even worse.
So we ask you Ahmed Ali Butt, do YOU have any proof to assist your claims? If not, please do not get on the bandwagon and ‘comply with tendencies’.
We want you had learn the Aurat March’s constitution of calls for, moderately than singling out one slogan out of hundreds. Sorry to say, whereas your credentials do not qualify you to touch upon this, we urge you nonetheless to suppose — and maybe educate your self about what the Aurat March stands for and who it represents — earlier than you converse.
A photograph posted by Instagram (@instagram) on Mar 22, 2015 at 11:21am PDT
A photograph posted by Instagram (@instagram) on Mar 22, 2015 at 11:21am PDT
A photograph posted by Instagram (@instagram) on Mar 22, 2015 at 11:21am PDT
A photograph posted by Instagram (@instagram) on Mar 22, 2015 at 11:21am PDT
A photograph posted by Instagram (@instagram) on Mar 22, 2015 at 11:21am PDT
For many who are nonetheless misinterpreting the slogan and utilizing it to remark in opposition to an already oppressed gender, we really feel horrible that you’re not capable of see issues for what they’re, even with hundreds doing the labour to interrupt it down for you.
