Freedom Is Not a Passport: Why “Rule-Based Country” Arguments Miss Real Lives

 It’s an odd feeling, being told your children are free because of where they live, not because of who they are or how they were raised.

I read the comment slowly.
Your daughters are lucky because they live in a rule-based country. Had they been in Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Afghanistan, things would have been different.

It sounded polite. Reasonable. Almost sympathetic.
And yet, something in it felt wrong. Too tidy. Too certain.

I live in Karachi.
My daughters grew up here. Studied here. Became doctors here. Their lives were not shaped by an abstract Western legal umbrella. They were shaped by daily choices, family norms, and a society that is far more contradictory than internet maps allow.

The comment wasn’t cruel. But it revealed a habit worth examining.

When Freedom Becomes a Geography Test

“Rule-based country” is one of those phrases that sounds neutral but carries a verdict.

It quietly suggests that freedom is something granted by borders, not built through lived practice. That women’s agency is accidental, conditional, borrowed from the state rather than exercised by individuals.

In this framing, women are free because they live in the right place.
And unfree because they don’t.

That logic turns freedom into a passport privilege, not a human condition shaped by family, culture, resistance, and negotiation. It also does something more troubling. It removes women from the story of their own lives.

The Problem With Moral Shortcuts

Invoking Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Afghanistan as a single reference point flattens reality.

These countries have different legal systems, histories, social movements, and forms of resistance. Women in each are pushing back in distinct ways, often at real personal risk. Collapsing them into a single symbol of oppression may feel morally efficient, but it is intellectually lazy.

It also turns those women into props. Their struggles become rhetorical tools used elsewhere, rather than realities that deserve attention on their own terms.

Solidarity should illuminate lives, not simplify them.

What Gets Erased When We Talk This Way

When freedom is framed only as a product of “rule-based countries,” several things disappear:

• Families that actively choose not to police their daughters

• Societies that contain both coercion and space, often at the same time

• Women who live ordinary, unheroic lives without seeing themselves as symbols

• And places like Karachi that do not fit neatly into Western moral maps

My daughters were not saved by geography.
They were not rescued from culture.
They were not liberated by slogans.

They grew up in a household where choice was normal, disagreement was allowed, and religion was not enforced through fear. That reality doesn’t trend online, but it exists.

Quietly. Persistently.

Freedom Is Not a Western Export

This is not a denial of oppression. Forced hijab is wrong. Forced unveiling is wrong. State control over women’s bodies is wrong everywhere.

But freedom loses its meaning when it is reduced to a comparison chart. When it becomes something only certain countries can produce, and others can only fail.

Real freedom often looks boring. It shows up in deadlines, hospital shifts, travel plans, arguments at the dinner table. It doesn’t announce itself as a victory. It just lives.

And that ordinariness unsettles people who prefer clean narratives of rescue and blame.

Maybe that’s why comments like this keep appearing.
They preserve a comforting idea: that freedom is simple, geographic, and owned by the right side of the map.

Reality is messier.
And far more human.