In Pakistan, it is all too easy to become discouraged at a seeming lack of progress when it comes to women’s rights. As in America, the rot starts at the top. Shortly before assuming office in 2018, Prime Minister Imran Khan told an interviewer, “I completely disagree with this Western concept, this feminist movement ... it has degraded the role of the mother.” Though Khan was widely criticized for his statement, he isn’t alone in believing that feminism is a foreign import, incompatible with Pakistan’s so-called Muslim values.

This position is convenient for Khan, who has been accused of sexual harassment himself. In August 2017, Ayesha Gulalai, who then represented Khan’s party in parliament, alleged that he had sent her inappropriate text messages even after she explicitly asked him not to. While the country’s then-prime minster supported the creation of a special parliamentary committee to investigate Gulalia’s claims, she was widely condemned by her own party and in traditional and social media as a political opportunist. Female members of her party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), even held a press conference to dismiss Gulalia’s allegation and list her possible political motives.

Patriarchy is deeply embedded in the cultural, religious, and political fabric of Pakistan, providing a prohibitive backdrop for the #MeToo movement, which landed in the country with mixed results. The case of #MeToo in Pakistan reveals the ways feminism can be compromised by class, status, and self-interest. But it also offers glimmers of hope that the fight for equal rights can gain purchase even in countries where the legal system, the political class, and the predominant culture are stacked overwhelmingly against reform.

Last January, a video of a Pashtun woman alleging harassment by the Pakistani army went viral on Twitter. The grainy video, shot in North Waziristan, a tribal region close to the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, features the woman telling a group of men that the army had arrested her husband and was now threatening her. She claims that when the soldiers came to her home in the town of Khaisore, they told her, “Prepare the bed and put a pillow on it. If Sharyat [her husband] can’t come to spend the night then we will.”

Though she used social media to make a public accusation against a harasser, the vast majority of Pakistani feminists did not see this as a #MeToo moment and remained silent. It was apparently too risky to support a woman from a politically suppressed group who was taking on one of the state’s most powerful entities.