Not TikTok, just patriarchy

"Another life lost to internet fame", wrote a seasoned journalist on my timeline, reacting to the brutal murder of Sana Yousaf in Islamabad, as if visibility, not violence, was the real crime.

As if the screen pulled the trigger, and a seventeen-year-old girl deserved to be gunned down for daring to be visible. This kind of commentary isn't merely a harmless opinion; it's complicity in a culture that justifies violence by blaming the woman every single time.

We've heard this before.

Qandeel Baloch was too bold, so she asked for it. Noor Mukaddam made a bad choice; she should have stayed home. Every time, the same poison: that women are to blame for their own murders, and that men are simply reacting. This narrative doesn't just miss the point; it protects the killer and indicts the dead.

I am furious, and we all should be, because if we keep swallowing this story, more girls will die, and we’ll keep calling it a consequence instead of what it is: cold-blooded, gendered, unforgivable murder.

Sana Yousaf didn't die because she was famous on the internet. She didn't die because she had too many followers or because she posted videos online. She didn't die because she was too bold, too visible, or too modern. She died because a man couldn’t stand that she said no. And because the patriarchy continues to excuse that kind of violence as "inevitable".

She was shot dead in her own home by someone she had reportedly rejected, a man who felt entitled to her attention, her affection, or perhaps just her compliance. When he didn't get it, he pulled the trigger. And then came the second violence: the familiar, suffocating campaign of public blame. Was there a video? Was she too loud? Was she asking for it? That’s what patriarchy does best. It demands silence from the victim and attempts to ‘understand’ the perpetrator.

Let’s be very clear: social media didn’t kill Sana. Our analogue misogyny did. We brought centuries of control and violence into the digital age, and now we’re punishing girls for using the internet with the same fury. The only thing that’s changed is the backdrop.

The control is the same. The rage is the same. The men – unchanged. We have raised boys to believe they must possess what they desire. That rejection is humiliation.

That their love must be rewarded. And when it isn't, violence is their final word. We've seen this play out too many times. A woman says no. A man cannot accept it. And society quietly offers him a justification.

We have failed women not just by allowing this violence, but by participating in the chorus that blames them for it. We blame their clothing. We blame their confidence. We blame their presence. And then we blame their silence, too. If a woman is quiet, she is weak.

If she is loud, she is vulgar. If she is visible, she is reckless. If she is hidden, she must have something to hide. There is no winning this game because the rules were written to break her.

In the digital age, visibility cannot be a death sentence. And yet, for women, it often is. Whether you’re a journalist, an actor, a politician or a TikToker, the cost of being seen is dangerously high. And when something goes wrong, it becomes the weapon used against the victim.

Every woman who says no is at risk, not just of heartbreak or harassment, but of being erased. Honour killing, domestic violence and acid attacks all share the same root: men who believe they own women, and a society that gives them every reason to believe it.

What makes Sana's case even more tragic is that it’s being flattened into a cautionary tale about technology and presented as a case against being visible or daring to own your space in the digital world. That is the wrong story.

The real cautionary tale is this: you raise boys like this, and then you mourn the girls they kill. You raise them without teaching boundaries. Without teaching that no means no. Without telling them that love does not entitle you to ownership.

You raise them with dominance as virtue and silence as a woman’s safest option. And then you act surprised when one of them decides that the only way to restore his pride is with a gun.

This whole region has a femicide problem. We just don’t call it that. We call it "honour". We call it "personal issues". We call it "family tragedy" or "an affair gone wrong". We do everything except name it for what it is: the systematic killing of women for exercising autonomy. Sana isn't the first. She will likely not be the last. But she could be the one who forces us to finally say what needs to be said: that men are killing women because they think they can, and we’re not doing nearly enough to stop them.

More than digital safety workshops or gender-based violence campaigns, we need gender justice. We need law enforcement that acts as quickly as Islamabad Police did in this case. We need a judiciary that dispenses justice swiftly, and most importantly, we need a media culture that stops framing women’s deaths as morality tales. We need to teach boys that their masculinity is not defined by how much power they can exert over a woman’s body, mind, or future.

And, finally, what provoked me to write this: media framing matters deeply. When headlines reduce Sana Yousaf to just "a TikToker", they risk turning a femicide into a spectacle. That label, detached from context, shifts focus away from her cold-blooded murder by a man and redirects it toward her public persona, her content and her choices. The implication is subtle but deadly.

It strengthens patriarchal ideas: namely, that maybe it was the lifestyle or her visibility that killed her. This kind of framing feeds the culture of victim-blaming. Contrast that with how we react when a journalist is attacked or a political worker is arrested. The first assumption is often that they were targeted for their work. Because language cues context.

Because how we name or title the victim determines who we hold accountable. And because when women are punished for being seen, calling her just a "TikToker" flattens the violence and forgives the entitlement that got her killed.

Let’s stop pretending this is about TikTok. It's about control. It's about violence. It’s about patriarchy. It's about how a girl lived joyfully, loudly, freely — and was punished for it with death. She didn’t die because of a screen. She died because we keep letting men think they’re entitled to a woman’s silence — and her life.

The writer is the founder and executive director of Media Matters for Democracy. He posts @asadbeyg

Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed in this piece are the writer's own and don't necessarily reflect Geo.tv's editorial policy.

Originally published in The News