Heatwave, Hypocrisy & Hijab: When Modesty Becomes a Gendered Punishment
It is 46°C outside—the kind of heat that makes tar melt and sanity evaporate. Inside poorly ventilated buildings, the temperature offers little relief. Yet, in this sweltering, unrelenting heat, the double standards of patriarchy remain astonishingly cool—insulated not by logic, but by centuries of gendered hypocrisy. Picture a typical workplace somewhere in the subcontinent during a blistering heatwave. Men comment freely on how unbearable the heat is, both outside and indoors. They shift away from their female colleagues, remarking, “Ladies have it easy,” as if discomfort were distributed by gender and not temperature. When a supervisor approaches, a male worker jokes, “Do pardah, the manager is coming,” as though modesty were a uniform women must don at a moment’s notice—like soldiers bracing for battle. But amid all this heat, a single question never gets asked: Why is modesty always a woman’s burden? Women, like men, are biological beings. We sweat. We overheat. We suffer rashes, ...