Sexism is extremely prevalent in Pakistan. 

The elders are sexist, and that’s what they teach their children. In Western countries, this cycle is broken by education, which moves people’s ideologies away from such demeaning stereotypes. In Pakistan, many people don’t get an education, and even when they do get a traditional education, the problem still remains. Earlier, I thought that if we just increased educational access, the problem would be solved. My interaction with a close friend of mine has led me to believe otherwise. 

He comes from a very conservative household where such sentiments are common to begin with, but he’s very good at studies, is one year my senior and studies at one of the best universities in Pakistan. I was sitting beside him, and I saw him liking some reel from the manosphere part of the algorithm—you know the type, the red pill talk, promoting misogyny by spouting something along the lines of “Why women are inherently dumber than men.”

I was taken aback when I saw him liking such content. “You don’t really believe all that, do you?” I asked him.

He then pulled up the list of the biggest achievements in all of human history and pointing out that all of them were done by men. 

I was dumbfounded. This was clearly a logical fallacy, I thought to myself.

I told him the famous maxim by scientist Carl Sagan: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

I then proceeded to let him know that historically, women have not gotten equal educational opportunities, nor have they gotten equal time and support. They needed to take care of the housework and raise the children while the men worked. There might have been many women who might have discovered gravity before Isaac Newton, but such intelligent minds just did not have the societal support to pursue their curiosities. I mean, did no one before Newton wonder why an object fell down? 

And I let him know that this sort of historical lack of opportunity has not only affected women but also all other marginalized groups. I mean, a lumberjack might have also wondered why a tree fell down and not up, but he just did not have the time and luxury to pursue these questions. He had a house to run and mouths to feed.

To all this, he grumbled and went on scrolling. “Let’s agree to disagree then,” he said.

That’s when I knew that education isn’t the important thing. It’s the right sort of self-education. We shouldn’t blindly trust the things fed to us by any part of the internet, whether it be the red pill society or not. Instead, we should learn to counter ourselves against these logical fallacies through formal study because on the surface all these arguments seem convincing but really aren’t. Just like my friend, it's very easy to get enticed by these extreme and debilitating perspectives, especially at the impressionable age that we are at.