PTI MNA Iqbal Afridi needs to remember he has a job, and it’s not policing women’s clothes

If you’re living in Pakistan, you’ve probably complained about your exorbitant electricity bill some time in the past couple of months. No one can escape it, not the rich, not the poor, no one. This is something Pakistanis should be concerned about. PTI MNA Muhammad Iqbal Khan Afridi is instead concerned about what a female representative of K-Electric was wearing to a National Assembly committee meeting on power.

The representative for NA-27 Khyber made a ridiculous statement about a K-Electric official after a meeting of the Standing Committee on Power to which the distribution company was invited to brief the committee on power generation and load-shedding.

According to Geo News, Afridi waited for the K-Electric team to leave the room before calling the woman’s clothes inappropriate and declaring there should be an SOP for clothing when attending a standing committee meeting.

The Geo News reporter noted that there was a consensus among the members of the standing committee — of which Afridi is not a member — that the woman’s clothes were appropriate and ‘sober’. The chairman of the committee, Muhammad Idrees of the PML-N, told Geo TV that it was inappropriate to speak about her clothes and apologised for the incident.

After the committee meeting, Afridi spoke to the media outside where he said people look to the assembly as an example to follow. Inexplicably, he said the K-Electric representative’s appearance would also be looked at as an example to be followed and he feared that if people were to dress like this “in a respectable society, what would children have to say about it”.

He described the woman’s clothes as a “sign of the system, society and establishment’s decline” and said in a society where his brothers, sisters and daughters lived, it was “not okay” for people like that to enter society.

We could write a thesis on how this man needs to keep his unsolicited, ignorant opinions to himself and perhaps sequester himself at home, where there is no risk of him seeing the female gender save for those related to him, but we’ve written all that before. We’re written article after article about how Pakistani men need to leave Pakistani women alone, but they don’t do much good because the Pakistani men who feel the need to speak about people’s clothes don’t have the good sense to keep quiet.

Men like Afridi will be told they are wrong and then go speak to the media outside, expanding on their stupidity and pat themselves on the back for a job well done, forgetting that they have actual jobs that don’t involve them policing women’s clothes. It is frightening to know that at a time when Pakistanis quite literally don’t know what to do about their electricity bills, when people are being driven to suicide because they do not know how they are going to pay these exorbitant bills, our representatives, the ones whose salaries come from our tax money, are thinking of women’s clothes instead of our problems.

The woman whose clothes Afridi found so offensive is a professional with years of experience. She has worked her way to the top and most certainly earned her spot at the table, yet her years of accomplishments and effort were reduced in an instant to a single outfit. She was there to discuss one of the most heated issues in our country at the moment, but there was more focus on what she was wearing.

We don’t care what the K-Electric representative was wearing. It is none of our business what she was wearing. It is none of Afridi’s business what she was wearing. And we won’t dignify these misogynistic remarks with a description of what she was wearing. We want to know what she was saying. What were her and her team’s justifications for electricity bills that have doubled and tripled in a few months? What did they have to say about load-shedding in Pakistan’s biggest city? What did they say about electricity tariffs?

Afridi seemed quite concerned with a ‘respectable society’ and what the children will say, but we care more about how the children and the rest of the citizens of Pakistan will pay their electricity bills. And in a respectable society, men should do better than zooming in on what a woman is wearing.

And if he thinks people look to the National Assembly as a pillar of respectability and decorum or a fashion advice column, he really should — as the unrestrained youth put it — touch grass. People have so much more to care about that a woman’s clothes — they are being forced to choose between basic necessities and paying electricity bills. They don’t think that highly of politicians and they certainly don’t look to them as icons of fashion or respectability. Those days are long gone. Now, we simply hope our representatives won’t embarrass us but it seems even that is too big an ask.

The other members of the committee described her clothes as ‘sober’ but clearly Afridi couldn’t get past his moral outrage to concentrate on why he was at the committee meeting in the first place — to question the power distributor on its practices.

Afridi seems to have been concerned about the message her clothes sent to the people of Pakistan, but his words sent an even more damning message to the women of Pakistan — no matter how you rise, there will always be a man there to belittle you because of their own insecurities, and they could use everything from your clothes to your makeup to your demeanour to your tone. Perhaps that’s the message men like Afridi want to send in the first place. Thankfully, the women of Pakistan don’t give a damn.