A review by mi7sma
Working with Sharks: A Pakistani Woman's Story of Sexual Harassment in the United Nations - From Personal Grievance to Public Law by Fouzia Saeed

challenging emotional informative medium-paced

5.0

Dr. Fouzia Saeed has eloquently explained her unfortunate encounter with the Pakistani united nations in her book "Working with Sharks". The premise of the book entails the feudalist,myopic and phallocentric world view in Pakistani society while regarding incompetent individuals constituting the upper echelons of large scale international agencies such us the UN as 'sharks' who don't think twice about exploiting working women's images and continue to sexually harrass them to the point of deterioration. They call such women slurs and undermine their rights as equal human beings. Men like Tariq Khan(head of organizations in the UN) shamelessly exploit not only working women sexually but also stoop so low as to immerse their superiors in a fantasized yet distorted image of reality which serves as a crutch for them to discredit any complaints regarding abuse of power. Unfortunately, the  corporate sector of Pakistani society has fallen prey to this malaise since the inception of the British rule where such tactics were used to gain political leverage in the face of adversity. One other fun fact about all this is that fouzia saeed's description of men like tariq Khan colluded with the description of ghulam Mustafa Khar aka the ex spouse of tehmina durrani, who explained In vivid detail about his attrocities such as love bombing and emotionally/sexually abusing her including blackmail to name a few. We can see the similarities between the 2 stories and ascertain that the phallocentric worldview discredits women's perspectives in their respective societies since individuals rely on a tactic called 'filling in the gaps' in a story to make it more tantalizing and gossip worthy no matter how distorted and false it may become. So, in the end the truth is only what people make it out to be with their faulty logic and with no experience regarding the actual cases of harassment. 

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