My Feminist Friend

The room was hot, and we shifted uncomfortably on the couch. The air conditioner in the poorly maintained apartment building had a habit of shutting down unexpectedly. To turn it back on, one of us would have had to press a switch in another room. But neither she nor I would get up—our eyes were glued to the woman speaking on the television. It was September 27, 2018, and the woman was Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. She spoke carefully, slowly—her voice tremulous—of being pinned down, suffocated, and groped at the age of fifteen by Supreme Court justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh. 

Over the last year we had been energized by the #MeToo movement’s successes in removing abusive men from positions of power. This was a different sort of test, we told each other, our voices hushed even though there was no one else in the apartment. The arrangement of the hearing—the story of one woman, the aggressive interrogations of men who sought to discredit that story—was a public reenactment of our struggle to assert the right to freedom from sexual violence. Consumed with anxiety, we listened to Blasey Ford as she recounted the details: the boy standing by the door watching, drunk on beer, Kavanaugh’s heavy body atop hers, the one-piece swimsuit she wore under her clothes, the lucky escape she made through the front door. 

To us, Blasey Ford’s words were stirring. When she stood, hand raised, the pose seemed sacrificial: one woman baring her wounds in the stead of many. When she spoke, her answers were carefully composed, even if her voice shook. We cried with her when she spoke of running down the stairs that day, and again when she confessed that she remodeled her home to have two front doors. (Escape is a universal strategy for women, we agreed.) As long as Blasey Ford sat before the Republican senators, we sat before her, desperate for some sign that powerful men could not be so glibly absolved of the assaults, the rapes, the opportunistic groping and grabbing. We hoped that it would now, finally, have consequences.

*

Amna and I had been friends for more than thirteen years. We met because two women had been raped thousands of miles away from us, in Pakistan. This was in 2005, a time when Pakistan, where both of us were born and raised, was enduring yet another spate of military dictatorship. Two women had been raped and they were, unexpectedly, speaking out. Most people in Pakistan were unwilling to listen, but one of them had turned, somehow, to Amnesty International. 

At the time, we were unlikely advocates, mired in the confusions and constraints of our own lives. Amna...