Our obsession with blaming women for their own and others misfortune runs deep in societies. ‘Blaming her’ is a cultural phenomenon dating back to the beginning of civilisation. Women are routinely blamed for men’s actions in novels, movies, and social media.
Seventeen-year-old Sana Yousaf, known for her popular TikTok videos that celebrated Chitrali culture and advocated for girls’ education, was murdered in her own home. Her alleged killer? A young man who reportedly could not accept her ‘no’.
Almost immediately, the familiar reaction and series of questions emerged on social media: Why was she on TikTok? What kind of content was she making?
Didn’t she know her limits? Wasn’t this bound to happen?
What is striking, though not surprising, is that these questions also came from women.
Once again, a young woman’s murder is being framed as a ‘cautionary tale’ about social media, as if her digital visibility was to the problem. This framing dangerously misplaces responsibility. What happened to Sana was not the price of digital fame. It is the result of gendered norms that criminalise refusal, autonomy, and self-expression.
As feminist media scholars have long argued, visibility for women, especially those from marginalised geographies, is never neutral; it is a site of surveillance, scrutiny, and potential violence. In societies like Pakistan, where the digital public sphere is rapidly expanding, the conditions under which women can participate remain deeply unequal.
Women like Sana, who participate in digital public spheres, are viewed as immoral and dangerous. The problem is not that these women are on TikTok. The problem is the cultural discomfort that arises when they claim space for themselves.
This discomfort plays out in complex ways. One of the most troubling is the way some women, who are themselves subject to patriarchal control, turn against other women. Why does this happen? One answer lies in toxic femininity – a pattern where women internalise and enforce the very norms that oppress them. They are taught from an early age to self-regulate and to police other women. They are told that safety lies in conformity and caution.
When another woman breaks those unspoken rules – by posting online, by asserting herself, by saying ‘no’ – and suffers violence, it is easier for others to blame her than to confront the terrifying truth: that no amount of obedience or silence can guarantee safety.
But this logic is both flawed and dangerous. It protects the status quo, it deflects accountability, and worst of all, it lets perpetrators off the hook.
We have seen this before. With Qandeel Baloch. With Noor Mukadam. With countless others whose lives were not just taken by individual men but by a broader system that deems women’s agency intolerable. Systems of law, media, religion and nationalism
often converge to enforce control over women – particularly those who
assert themselves through speech, refusal, or visibility.
The moral panic is not really social media. It is about women using it. Female influencers are viewed as promoting immoral activities. This digital moral panic often absolves perpetrators and redirects accountability toward victims.
Sana’s death compels us to ask harder questions, not just about one man’s violence, but about the many ways our communities, institutions, and conversations enable it. We must reckon with how patriarchal authority is being reconfigured in digital spaces, and how certain bodies – gendered, racialised, classed remain more vulnerable than others within them.
The question should never be how women can better protect themselves online. It should be: why does toxic femininity alongside male entitlement continue to operate with impunity, online and offline?
It is time to stop asking ‘Why was she online?’ and start asking why we continue to believe that a woman’s visibility is a provocation. Until we face that honestly, we will keep mourning women we failed to defend – because we were too busy deciding whether they deserved to be visible in the first place.
The writer has a PhD in sociology and teaches at the University of British Columbia.
