u/Prestigious-Rope3089

I couldn't think of a title, so here it goes.

I'm a gay guy from Karachi, and I currently go to a place—not regularly, but often enough. There's a bakery behind it where I usually wait to get a bike ride through the apps. Now, there's this hot guy across the street, probably the shopkeeper, who seems to be in his 20s. He looks older than me, but still young. He often stares at me, and whenever I get there, he's usually sitting in his chair inside the shop. But the moment he sees me, he gets closer to the glass door or comes outside and just looks at me, sometimes pretending to be on his phone.

I do the same thing. I sit on the bike across the street (it's not my bike, btw 😭). Today, I deliberately stood across the street again. This time, he didn't come outside, but I know he got up from his chair and stood next to the glass door, looking at me. I looked back at him but immediately looked away and pretended I was on a call or scrolling through my phone.

Also, I was wearing a black shirt and black trousers—the kind of outfit I usually wear to the gym. I'm not built or anything, though 😭.

Like, in an ideal world—not Pakistan—I would just go into the shop and see where things go. But damn, he was so hot and exactly my type, which is rare for me to find IRL. And he seems to show some interest in me too, although I don't know if I'm just making it all up in my head.

I've never dated a guy before or had a hookup, so I don't really know how to read these things.

I don't even know why I'm writing this confession. I kept it vague to protect my identity, so sorry about that. I know this might come across as creepy from my side, but his attention was definitely welcome.

This doesn't usually happen to me. Well, it happens, but this time I actually liked the guy back, and he seemed to show interest too. On the ride home, I was literally daydreaming about him. Ahhh. 😭

And when my ride finally came, I just left without even trying to get a second glimpse of him or looking back. Now I'm sitting here wondering why the hell I didn't. 😭

I felt like I needed to talk to someone about this, so here you go. Tea. ☕️

We talk all the time about the horrific rape epidemic in Pakistan, but we rarely dig into the exact legal machinery that makes it impossible to fix. People point to police corruption or culture, but the core issue is structural. Our legal system applies a 1,500 year old evidentiary standard to modern crimes, effectively turning the victim’s own body into state certified evidence of their own guilt.

The numbers are damning. In Pakistan, the conviction rate for rape sits at an abysmal 1 percent to 3 percent. Meanwhile, the estimated percentage of sexual assault cases that go completely unreported is somewhere between 70 percent and 90 percent. Why? Because filing a rape report in Pakistan is treated by the system as a confession to a crime.

The Math of Impunity: The 4 Witness Rule
This crisis traces back to 1979, when the military dictatorship of Zia-ul-Haq passed the Hudood Ordinances. Under this framework, rape (Zina-bil-jabr) and consensual sex outside of marriage (Zina) were shoved into the exact same legal category. To convict a rapist under the traditional maximum penalty (Hadd), the prosecution is required to produce four adult, Muslim, male eyewitnesses who literally watched the act of penetration occur. Think about the sheer, twisted logic of that. Rape does not happen in front of an audience. Because finding four male eyewitnesses to a sexual assault is practically impossible, almost every single Hadd rape case fails.

When an Accusation Becomes a Confession: The Safia Bibi Case
But the law didn't just let the rapist go free; it actively hunted the victim. Under the Zina laws, if a victim came forward and stated, "This man had sex with me against my will," but failed to produce those four male witnesses, the court flipped the script. The system essentially reasoned: "You just admitted that sexual intercourse took place, but you have zero witnesses to prove it was forced. Therefore, you just confessed to having illegal sex outside of wedlock."

This resulted in shocking legal precedents of extreme injustice. In the infamous Safia Bibi case (1982 to 1983) in Sahiwal, a nearly blind teenage girl working as a domestic helper was raped by her landlord and his son. She became pregnant from the assault. Because she was completely unable to produce four adult male eyewitnesses to visually identify the perpetrators, the courts acquitted both rapists on the exact same day. Instead of receiving justice, Safia Bibi was tried for Zina (fornication) because her pregnancy was used by the court as a confession to extramarital sex. She was sentenced to three years of rigorous imprisonment, a financial fine, and 15 public lashings. While a massive wave of public protests by groups like the Women’s Action Forum and international embarrassment eventually forced the Federal Shariat Court to acquit her on technical grounds, she had already served six months in jail and suffered the trauma of state sponsored punishment. Before the Hudood laws, there were roughly 70 women in Pakistani prisons nationwide. Within less than a decade of this law being active, that number skyrocketed to over 6,000 women jailed. The vast majority of these inmates were working class women and domestic workers who had originally tried to report rape or were falsely accused by vengeful family members.

The Death Penalty Trap for Boys and Children
This Draconian system didn't just destroy women; it entirely erased male and child victims. Because the archaic definition of Zina was explicitly framed around heterosexual extramarital intercourse, the legal system lacked a proper framework for the sexual abuse of young boys. Predators exploiting children through underground practices like bacha bazi or predatory abuse in local institutions knew they were entirely safe. If a young boy or his family dared to report the abuse without four adult male witnesses, the system turned on them with even greater violence. Under section 377 of the Pakistan Penal Code, which criminalizes same sex intimacy, failing to prove that a sexual assault was forced transforms the report into an admission of unnatural offenses. As a result, a young boy or his family making a rape accusation without impossible eyewitness proof could find the victim or the accuser suddenly subjected to life imprisonment or the death penalty. The legal system effectively engineered a trap where reporting the rape of a boy could get the child executed or jailed for life, making total silence the only option for survival.

The Modern Reality: How Morality Laws Facilitate Rape
Activists fought for decades, leading to the Protection of Women Act of 2006, which technically moved rape out of the Hudood Ordinance and back into the civil Penal Code to remove the four witness requirement for standard trials. But you cannot undo decades of systemic judicial training with a piece of paper. The residual impact is everywhere.

Defense lawyers in Pakistani courts routinely downgrade a rape charge to a Zina charge. If the rapist can convince a judge that the victim knew them, talked to them, or consented at any point, the charge drops from a death sentence or 25 years in prison to a minor 5 year fornication charge. The system rewards rapists by allowing them to use morality laws to get less harsh sentences.

Furthermore, because sex outside of marriage remains illegal, defense teams spend the entire trial tearing down the victim's moral character. If a court decides a victim is of easy virtue, her entire testimony is thrown out. Victims don't just fear the judge; they fear the community. An accusation of Zina carries such a heavy social taboo that families will actively honor kill or violently attack a victim just to erase the shame of the allegation before a court even hears it.

Pakistan’s rape epidemic is a direct symptom of a state that is obsessed with policing private morality. Laws against consensual sex, whether same sex or opposite sex, do not protect morality. They systematically facilitate rape, weaponize the legal system against victims, protect predators with lighter sentences, and force victims into absolute silence. How do we even begin to dismantle a crisis when the very act of demanding legal reform is branded by society as an attack on religion?

I was always under the impression that Latin American people due to their history with American imperialism and European Colonization etc were more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and these views were often reinforced by seeing big political leaders like Brazil president and out going Columbian president's being vocal in their support for Palestine.

Ik a lot of Latin American who vote for the right have pro Palestinian views as well but then why are right wing latin leaders so pro israeli like one of the first things the elected Columbian president did was hug the Israeli FM and yk Mellie bromance with Netanyahu.

It's sad seeing a humanitarian stance being torn between the right and left.

They all seem expensive when I look at them online. The only Pakistani whey protein powder I found that was relatively cheap is Nutrifactor. I want good recommendations that aren't too expensive. I'm looking to bulk and gain muscle, so I'd like recommendations that are popular among bodybuilders. I want results and I'm open to all recommendations.

When you can't love a friend back in a non plutonic way. One side love.