OK, well, a) Tamim Ansary, whose name is on this piece, is a guy, which rightly or wrongly does make me skeptical. However, b) it is true that when feminism is something that is shoved down the throat of a third world country by an aggressive first world imperial power, all that does is set the cause back 50 years, and c) it is also true that most American journalists are not going to be able to grasp the fine points of the long and difficult struggle between feminism and nationalism.
I, however, have spent many many years trying to grasp the fine points of this struggle, and so I will now pontificate. You may lob rotten vegetables if you wish.
First problem: Everyone oversimplifies.
"Everyone" here includes:
The imperial power (which, in this situation, is us), which seizes on any aspects of the targeted society which will be perceived by the imperial power's citizens (again, us) as marking it as "barbaric" and therefore deserving of conquest. For a society that prides itself on democracy and egalitarianism, gender issues work very well; even for societies that, themselves, have completely reactionary gender politics (viz., Victorian England) gender issues still work very well because you can play up the "damsel in distress" thing. Gayatri Spivak wrote a foundational and unfortunately completely incomprehensible essay called "Can the Subaltern Speak?" about this very phenomenon as it relates to women in India. The British made a huge deal out of sati (they spelled it suttee), which they described as the practice of tossing the dead husband's live widow on the pyre and burning her up with all of his stuff. She then goes through a very complex investigation of how sati really worked, how the fact that the British were relentlessly focusing on it as a signal of Indian barbarism made things much worse, and how the "white men are saving brown women from brown men" argument works like a charm in terms of justifying an imperial presence. How can it be wrong for us to be conquering India, when if we just stay at home and do nothing thousands of widows will burn?
Now, I point out, just as she does, that the fact that the British completely exploited this custom for their own nefarious ends does not mean that the custom does not suck, nor does it mean that the custom is not indicative of the subordinate status of women in this culture. Sati did happen, and it did suck, and it wouldn't have happened in a culture where women had equal rights and equal power. That still does not mean that the British were justified in overrunning the entire subcontinent, doing what they could to squash its culture and traditions, sucking out all of its resources, and killing a whole lot of people. Nor does it mean that the British invasion of India solved the problem of women's subordinate status in that culture. Now, instead of getting burned up on the pyres of their dead husbands, Indian women get set on fire by their irate in-laws who are displeased with the size of the dowries they bring with them. Yee ha.
The point, anyway, is that the imperial power's relentless focus on the way the target culture treats women is a cynical stunt designed to a) justify the imperial mission and b) camouflage the violence that they themselves are inflicting on man, woman and child in this country as they take it over. Women can now uncover their faces in Kabul. They also have the opportunity to be burnt up and smashed flat in American air raids, or waste away in squalid refugee camps.
However, the ranks of people who oversimplify for their own ends also includes:
The nationalists who organize to resist the imperial power. What you see a lot of in nationalist movements is what you might want to call opportunistic misogyny. It is precisely the imperial power's attempt to stamp out these "barbaric" misogynistic practices that creates the opportunity. Once people in your country hate the imperial power bad enough to organize against it, you can whip them up into a frenzy by pointing out all the ways in which the imperial power has destroyed your indigenous culture, and the various attempts at gender equality that have been made fall into that category. The guys in charge of the nationalist movement (and somehow, they usually are guys) use the association between the imperial power and gender equality to justify their own patriarchal biases. Now, all of a sudden, things like domestic violence, female genital mutilation, repressive attitudes toward reproductive freedom and hostility to women entering the workplace aren't just patriarchal bullshit: they're distinctive features of the culture and heritage that the nasty imperial power is attempting to deprive them of. So the more you oppress your women, the more you're stickin' it to the Man. You can do what you were gonna do in the first place, and it'll be patriotic and courageous! Everybody wins! Well, you know, except for the women. They pretty much lose.
What Ansary is describing happening with the split between Kabul and the rest of the country is a classic example of this pattern. The influence of the West is felt in all kinds of ways that are too complex and too insidious to resist directly; but one of the most visible and simplest to explain to other people is the sudden change in the status and behavior of women. How difficult is it to explain why even though Western-friendliness has made life so much better for the elites in the metropolitan areas, it is doing either no good or active harm in the rural farming areas; and how easy it is just to say, "But of course they're evil, look at the way their women dress!" And since the change happens first to the privileged elites, who are well-hated anyway for being privileged and elite, it very quickly becomes the biggest, baddest symbol of Western Domination. Which of course means that when the revolution comes, it's women's rights that are the first up against the wall, right along with the privileged elites.
Second thing: Somehow, in the middle of all this, everyone forgets that the oppression of women is not, in fact, culturally specific.
When people start talking about how, say, domestic violence is "just part of [insert third world people]'s culture," it's always helpful to say, "Well, domestic violence is part of American culture too, it's just not a part we acknowledge." In isolation, the "we have to leave it alone because it's part of the culture" argument is ridiculous. Everything that happens in a culture is part of that culture. That don't make it right. The thing is, this argument is never made in isolation; it's made in the context of imperial politics, and that fucks everything up. Specifically, it means that something that's "part of the culture" now suddenly has value independent of whether it's actually *good* for the culture, just because it's ours and not theirs. In other words, something like female genital mutilation becomes super-valuable to nationalists precisely because it's a sign of how different the indigenous culture is from the culture that's been trying to assimilate it. Look! they can say. We're still standing! We haven't been assimilated! Our culture is still intact! See, our women are still staying at home, serving their husbands and working twice as hard out in the fields as we are!
The terrible irony of it all is that oppressing women does *not* make a culture special. I will give a free toaster to anyone who can find me a culture still thriving today in which women are not oppressed in some way, shape, or form. All that changes are the ways in which that oppression is expressed. I'm not gonna claim that those differences don't matter. I'd a heap rather be living here than in Kandahar. But this is the thing. Given the way things are, it's highly likely that both the imperial power and the target culture, in any given situation, will be riddled with patriarchal bullshit. So when they become locked in combat, both of them exploit that culture's women, cause that's just what comes naturally.
So the practical application of all this pontification is what now?
Well, for one thing, I think Ansary is perfectly right when he says that assuming that all women all over the world will define "liberation" the same way is dangerous, and a fallacy that Westerners are particularly prone to. The focus on the burqa is a much-cited example of this. We fixate on the things that look most oppressive to us, because they violate norms that we consider universal. The freedom to wear whatever the hell you want is one of those norms, and that's why people wig out about the burqa. We can relate to that. What we can't relate to is being a woman in an agrarian economy who has to live off the land while raising a family. Or, let me not speak for everyone: I can't. So I can't imagine what it is that a woman in that situation really needs and wants. I'm comfortable saying she probably doesn't want to be beaten up, raped, tortured, killed, and whatnot; those things are fairly universal. But once you get past that basic level, cultural specificity does come into play; and this is where Western feminists need to be willing to stand back and say to the women who actually live and work there, "OK, you guys tell us what you need, we'll see if we can help you get it."
What I don't buy about his piece is the way he keeps bringing it home to what traditional Afghan culture is like. Maybe he's right; but then again, maybe the reason he's celebrating traditional Afghan culture is because it works for him. Maybe if he were a woman, he'd feel differently about traditional Afghan culture. Then again, maybe he wouldn't. Lots of women loooove that traditional patriarchal culture. Just look at Phyllis Schlafly. Anyway, it's an example of what I was talking about up there in the nationalists paragraph: valorizing all aspects of the indigenous culture, regardless of what they mean for its people, just because they're indigenous.
It seems like it should be easy for people to avoid that kind of trap; but then, it seems like that to us because we've never been colonized. Not till it happens to us will we ever really be able to appreciate what living under that kind of pressure does to the way people act, write, and reason. If the Taliban actually won, and came over here and colonized us, I guaran-damn-tee you you'd have people celebrating strip joints as a valuable expression of American freedom which we must die to defend and then enshrine with legal protections int he new constitution we have to draw up once we expel the hated imperial invaders.
Whether the push for women's equality comes from inside a culture or is imposed on it by an imperial power, there's always resistance to it. Guys don't like having to do half the work. But the struggle is made a lot harder if gender "reform" is just a clever disguise for imperial conquest. That's why I can't get too excited when I hear Laura Bush talk about all the wonderful things we're gonna do for women in Afghanistan. You want to help a country's women, you start by not flattening it with cave-busting bunker bombs. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
The Plaid Adder
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