A few weeks ago I met a pleasant Austrian woman at a party in a bar in Prenzlauerberg, the formerly East Berlin area now home to the young, professional and cool. It was a weeknight, lights in the bar were violet and dim and conversation was possible. We were celebrating a friend's journalism prize awarded by the German feminist magazine Emma.
My companion promised me Sachertorte – the famous Austrian chocolate cake – from her next trip to Vienna, and I instantly warmed up to her. This was before the fireworks began. When I mentioned I was from Pakistan, her reaction was the oft-expressed assumption that it must be very difficult to be a woman there. I have lived and worked in journalism in Berlin for a year and a half, and the experience has made me appreciate the way I am treated back home as a career woman. I told her as much – that I find that I am more respected back home. I was about to tell her that my mind is more appreciated and I am, of course for several reasons, taken more seriously there than in Germany. "Respect," she said, cutting me off mid-sentence, "You call walking three steps behind a man respect?"
I was aghast. I also had no idea what she was talking about. Later, I found out that some cultures had a chivalrous custom where a man walked in front of a woman to protect her, for the same reasons men walked behind women according to other chivalrous conventions. The argument proceeded to where my Austrian friend insisted that women from Afghanistan and Pakistan aspired to become "Western" women, and equal to men, and that I chose to live in New York and Berlin to escape the treatment I received back home. I insisted that women all over the world had a long way to go, and that Pakistani women had achieved some things before German, or in that case Austrian, women did. I said that every woman needed to choose her own path to get what she wanted, and the fact that I liked to travel did not mean I was fleeing my own country.
"Do you really think you are more progressive than we are?" my Austrian friend asked me.