"Aunty, ab kya? Allah Allah karein. Itna kuch toh kar liya".
(Aunty, what now? Go say your prayers. You have done plenty already.)
Nobody tells a woman she is too old. They say the team is looking for a different profile. Nobody tells her that her husband outranks her. They call it a personal matter. Nobody says her face has expired. They simply stop looking at it. Patriarchy has a polite voice, and it does most of its work in that voice.
Every 25 November, the 16 Days of Activism ask us to look at violence against women. According to UN estimates, around 50, 000 women and girls were killed by intimate partners or family members in 2024—roughly one every ten minutes. Behind every such number is a woman who was weighed before she was counted: how old, how low in rank, how presentable. This piece is about three things that rarely reach the poster: ageism, classism, and lookism.
I write in the first person, and I know what that risks. Many of us hesitate, writing about "some women" or "a certain generation", because "I" sounds like confession. I am not using it to put myself forward. I am using it to show how polite patriarchy is, and how rarely that politeness reaches a poster. Someone has to say "I" first.
I have been told I was not for the camera, and I have been sidelined in job interviews, never for a reason anyone would put in writing. Then comes the pious send-off, "Aunty, ab kya?" respect handed over as a retirement notice. A woman is useful, then decorative, then invisible, and the dates are set for her. Age also hides abuse. The WHO estimates that around 1 in 6 people aged 60 and over experience abuse in community settings, with only about 1 in 24 cases ever reported a silence that falls even heavier on older women.
Rank decides who is believed, and I learned that at home and at work. I co-founded an organisation, and I lived through harshness and mental torture in my marriage to a high-profile husband, backed by a board he had hand-picked. When a man holds the name and the structure, a woman’s account becomes a personal matter, her distress becomes temperament, and her co-founding becomes a footnote.
Feminist thinkers from bell hooks and Angela Davis to the Combahee River Collective and Kimberlé Crenshaw named this decades ago. They showed how class, race, and gender collide in a single life, and why class remains one of feminism's quietest taboos. Their ground was America. I speak from Pakistan.
Then there is the face. In 1995, I was selected through auditions, out of 400 contestants, to anchor live morning transmission on PTV. In the make-up room, the first comment about me was, "Yeh toh gol mun hai". Round face. I chuckled and asked them to lengthen it with blush and contouring. On camera I turned out to be photogenic, yet over the years I kept hearing about my face, and about how well I spoke, as if that were the consolation prize. I carried on with confidence, but something shattered inside me. I recognised the feeling from the rishta ritual, where families who are hardly stunning themselves inspect an ordinary middle-class girl, score her, and reject her. Appearance first, person later.
The standard has since moved to the golden ratio, fillers, and Botox. Women over 50 comply or fade, and those who refuse are made invisible. Ironically, women now pay for the chubby cheeks I was once told to contour away. The joke has an edge: the standard was never about beauty. It is about compliance, and it changes whenever the market needs it to.
These barriers can be overcome. I overcame them, to a major extent, and I am no superwoman. But "it can be overcome" should never turn into "it is yours to overcome alone". So I keep asking why we hide these aspects. Why must a woman look thin, wrinkle-free, and "high class" to be seen? And why do polished, elite feminist voices here keep such a careful distance from them? I live and work in Pakistan, and I have been sidelined, humiliated, and mocked more than once. I am not alone in this silence. Many of us carry the same stories and trim them to stay respectable.
A movement that edits out its own wounds ends up serving the hierarchy it says it opposes. I am not asking anyone to perform pain. I am asking us to treat vulnerability as evidence.
This is a brief, not a conclusion, offered during the 16 Days to start a conversation we keep postponing. Which of patriarchy’s children have you been told to keep quiet about?
