In an earlier post I twigged the anti-feminist conceit that men would be better off without feminism by pointing out that uber-anti-feminist Afghanistan isn’t exactly a male paradise. A bit after I posted that I ran across Twisty Faster’s perfectly accurate (but not, in this case, terribly relevant) point that patriarchy might be more genteel than places like Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan but is still well-entrenched in places like Texas or Washington State.
Anyway, in my post I’d linked to a disgraceful law originally backed… but now backed-away-from… by U.S. supported Afghan President Karzai designed to make life suck even worse for, particularly, religious-minority Afghan women.
Megan of Jezebel cuts to the heart of something I only alluded to…
Of course, Mohammad Asif Mohseni, the law’s primary architect, disagrees, and wants us all to butt out of it.
“The Westerners claim that they have brought democracy to Afghanistan. What does democracy mean? It means government by the people for the people. They should let the people use these democratic rights,” Mohseni told reporters in the capital, Kabul…
Mohseni argued that women and men are very far from equal in today’s Afghanistan and should not be treated as such. He pointed out that many rural women are illiterate and would not be able to find work if they were asked to provide some of the family’s financial support. Men are typically the breadwinners in Afghan households, expected to provide for their wives and children.
“It is not possible for all women to pay the same amount of money as men are paying. For all these expenses, can’t we at least give the right to a husband to demand sex from his wife after four nights?” he said.
Yes, since women are prevented from education and working  by the law Mohseni wants, in fact  they should give it up as recompense for their living expenses.
Exactly! Whatever else one can say about the culture relative to others, there’s no denying that thanks in large measure to cultural norms Afghanistan has terribly low opportunity rates for women (Megan cites a local who says that at 13% Afghan women have the lowest literacy rate in the world.) Not surprising since the Afghan equivalents of Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin routinely incite their cohorts to murder female school children and their teachers. (Twisty’s right that the Malkins and Becks of the 1st world lack differ only in their lack of opportunity rather than of means or motivation to do likewise here.)
But look at the self-referential result! Mohammad Asif Mohseni feels sorry for the poor men who must work twice as hard because… their wives are forbidden to work at all. To them their anti-feminist paradise is no paradise at all! And yet the solution he proposes is… to make things even worse! Worse for women, obviously, but remember the motivation for making it worse for women is the evidently sincere believe the system is so bad for men! The assumption being, evidently, that if you keep digging you’ll eventually come out at the antipodes and you’ll be on top. Meanwhile the men might be slightly less deep than women but everybody’s still in a hole! That men, complaining bitterly all the while no less, are actively digging.
A more obvious solution would be to stop digging at all and begin climbing out instead. A lesson as valuable for men and women outside of Afghanistan as in.
