“Isn’t sex a basic human function? Can this natural impulse be refuted? How does gender figure in this? Don’t we need to be educated on the matter, whether premarital or post? Frankly, I just wanted to use myself as a personal example because that is the best way to be a voice for people who may need to hear it. Believe me, I was tired of the double standards of many South Asians when it comes to sex,” laments Zahra Haider, an author from Pakistan, who is in her 20s and shifted to Canada before her 19th birthday.
In a candid overview of her own sex life, Haider recounted sneaking around to sleep with almost a dozen people in Pakistan before her 19th birthday, which was around the time she moved to Toronto for school.
She described the deep sexual repression she experienced as a young woman living in Pakistan. While many women are punished for having sex before marriage, she said men “generally aren’t judged for it,” adding that she believes Shariah law can be blamed for many gender discriminatory policies in Muslim societies.
Haider pointed to statistics indicating the country has the highest porn-watching population in the world, and described Pakistanis as “horny and desperate for sex” — even though, she argued, sex is a “taboo topic” in the country and premarital sexual encounters must be done discretely.
Haider, whose article has kicked up a storm in the virtual world and is facing much social media backlash, insists that if a man had written such a piece, the reactions would have been totally different.
The author is facing a lot of backlash from Pakistan too but she maintains that women’s rights issues are a consistent problem all over the world and culture of silence around women’s sexuality is not unique to Pakistan. Neither does she think that religion is a dominating factor in everyday life there.