I am nauseated by the ways in which we American feminists have allowed ourselves to be dragged into the war in Afghanistan. The pretext is that the U.S. is making life better for Afghan women, by killing their sons, husbands and marriage prospects. If the women in that nation were behind our efforts, the U.S. would be winning rather than losing the war.
It is arrogant and foolish for westerners to believe that women in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East lack agency and are merely passive victims. The cover article in the latest Time Magazine is entitled: "The Plight of Afghan Women: a Disturbing Picture." It presents among other things the story of a young woman maimed by the Taliban. But it does so by dehumanizing all Afghan women, making them sound so pathetic and powerless, that nothing about their lives or circumstances makes rational sense.
And this type of manipulative journalism is not just about the war in Afghanistan. I read these kinds of stories far too often, about oppressed women in the developing world. Such articles lack context or insight that will help the reader unravel the perfectly understandable motivation for these womens' actions or choices. Non-western females are either portrayed in our media as pathetic victims imprisoned in veils, child brides, or helpless tools of male terrorists. In this way we perpetuate the dehumanization of foreign women, refusing to hear their genuine stories. Do we approach the rest of the world this way because they might possibly teach us things about ourselves we'd rather not know? Sometimes I even wonder whether we, women in the West, are projecting our own insecurities and fears onto foreigners. Maybe their veils become a gauzy canvas for our own projections. How many women from developing countries have to struggle with deadbeat dads unwilling to pay child support, beauty standards that cause fatal anorexia, the sexual commodification of womens' bodies, pornographic standards of female presentation, and the possibility of death by plastic surgery? If we actually listened, we would find that the biggest item on the agendas of most non-western women is either that we stop invading their countries, or offer healthier balance of trade agreements so that they can feed their families.
Our American ethnocentrism knows no bounds. It is a pity that we do not use the extraordinary resources for news and information at our disposal to break out of the hermetically-sealed coffin we inhabit, when it comes to understanding other cultures. While the Taliban is surely as awful as they have been described, the financial and moral corruption of the Karzai regime is apparently unappealing to Afghan women as well.
How can I be so sure? There is no society, religion, or culture on earth so bizarre and different that it defies the parameters of human nature. If we don't understand what is truly at stake for Afghan women, it is simply because we'd rather not know. Has any media forum in America ever transcended its own western biases for the hour or two that it might take to establish an authentic dialogue with a group of ordinary Afghan women? I don't mean the carefully selected few that we reward for saying what we want for them to say. The Taliban wouldn't be doing as well as it is doing on the battlefield, if it did not have the support of its women. Isn't it time we remove our blinders, and find out why?