When Tariq Jamil drew the absurd correlation between women’s “immodesty” and the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, he was expressing the widespread belief that women’s bodies are inherently obscene, shameful and wrong. The immense burden of an entire nation’s safety, modesty and propriety was outsourced to women’s bodies, exposure to which can cause everything from earthquakes to deadly pandemics. It is ironic that just days before, the same man felt no shame when discussing in lascivious detail the sexual availability of “hoors” with an avid audience of men.

This pathology creates a contradictory obsession with women’s bodies which both relegates their existence to the private realm, the proverbial chaar divari, and makes them the sites of society’s sins. Hardly a month and a half ago, when women across Pakistan chanted Mera jism, meri marzi, the entire country was offended by the demand for autonomy over their bodies but also titillated by the use of word jism in the public realm. It is hardly surprising, that the obsession with women’s jism translated into the discourse regarding coronavirus as well. If you are a regular user of the wildly popular social media app TikTok, you will have encountered hundreds of videos celebrating the coronavirus for introducing modesty in society by forcing ‘those’ women to cover their faces, avoid contact with men and confining them to their homes. The implicit message is that not only are women’s bodies inherently shameful but more insidiously, rape-able. The messaging is that women are meant to be leered at, or offered to assuage the sexual appetite of men as hoors, but never to enjoy any agency or freedom. When women attempt to contest the view that they are objects, or placeholders for the nation’s honour, they upset the social order manifested in the patriarchal structure – a seismic change nothing short of a pandemic in the eyes of the beneficiaries of patriarchy.

It is not just the visibility of Jamil’s message due to his status as a supposedly respected religious figure that should cause alarm, it is the confluence of the state and religion that should outrage us more. The fact that Tariq Jamil felt comfortable to express his misogynistic views in a nationally televised telethon for the Prime Minister’s Covid-19 Relief Fund, and was not corrected by any of the participants including the prime minister, lays bare the ways in which such institutions view women and their bodies. Imran Khan’s continuing silence speaks of complicity in the normalisation of hatred of women in polite discourse and the deployment of religion lends a degree of ‘respectability’ to the entire exercise.

The plausible deniability in Jamil’s Twitter apology this week belies the entrenched attitudes that make such beliefs common-place.

Women’s bodies are being treated as community property, to be commented upon and blamed. Women are often employed in the process of nation-building; the collective consciousness is replete with images such as that of sacrificing mothers biding time before their sons return from war and celebration of women as literal vessels for birthing citizens. Thus, it is no surprise that at a time of national crisis when a majority of Pakistani citizens are facing immense economic hardship, another type of woman is evoked in the public consciousness: the immodest kind. History is witness to the fact that women’s bodies often become forums to adjudicate societal sins. Conflicts between families are too often resolved by inflicting violence on women in the family.

Tariq Jamil’s ignorant comments should offend us because they trivialise the very real violence on women’s bodies during the coronavirus lockdowns. Domestic violence cases across the world have gone up considerably as women become targets of the anxieties, insecurities and frustration caused by the pandemic. It has been reported that in the past month, six women were killed in the name of honour in Swat. Jamil’s remarks are an affront to women who are suffocating at home with increased care work indicated by the lockdowns – hours upon hours of unpaid domestic work to be rewarded by callous comments on live television.

The plausible deniability in his apology posted on Twitter this week belies the entrenched attitudes that make these beliefs common-place. His comments were not misinterpreted, he meant exactly what he said, and given his previous musings on women, whose bodies he has habitually ridiculed and sexualised in videos that have resurfaced since, it was not the first time.