Vice n virtue
Saeedullah Safi in the Irish Times on the demolition of women’s rights in Afghanistan:
“My voice is now a crime,” says Mariam, a teacher from Kabul province. Speaking over a shaky WhatsApp connection, Mariam (whose name has been changed for her safety) describes her life as a woman under new Taliban rules. “I am terrified to leave my house,” she says. “Not because I fear the violence in the streets, but because I fear my own voice might betray me.”
Last week, the Taliban’s supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, approved new “vice and virtue” laws, which include a total ban on women’s voices in public and further restrictions on their presence outside the home.
Because, you see, if a man hears a woman’s voice it makes him think about fucking, while if he doesn’t hear a woman’s voice he will be able to keep his thoughts fixed on The Prophet. Or cricket. Or something that’s not fucking.
Women are no longer allowed to work in most sectors, attend secondary school, or visit public parks. Following the new decrees, they are now also forbidden from showing their faces or being heard in public. The Taliban’s justification: women’s voices and faces are potential instruments of vice, leading men into temptation.
Because women’s voices make men think about fucking. What’s so hard to understand?
This silence is not just a metaphorical one. The Taliban have made it literal, with new rules that ban women from singing, reading aloud or even speaking in their own homes if their voices can be heard by men outside. The consequences for disobedience are severe – women who violate these rules can be detained and punished at the discretion of Taliban officials.
It has to be this way, because women make men think about fucking.
That’s one of the biggest problems with religion: they turn ordinary activities into sin. There’s nothing inherently wrong in sex, and it’s only because men want to control women that we think there’s anything wrong with sex outside of marriage. It’s a normal process; birds do it, bees do it, trees do it. We aren’t the only species where males try to control females, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to do that.
Religion has worked to control what and when you eat, where and when you have sex, and by the means of controlling these basic activities, they have managed to control humans for a long time. If you can control behaviors that are as natural as those, you can control almost anything.
I thank god every day that I slipped the chains, and no longer feel the need to believe in rigid dogma. Actually, I don’t thank god, of course…I thank my grandmother, who got me my first big-person bible at the age of ten. I’m sure she never imagined that reading her gift would lead me toward doubt.
Aka it’s because men want to make sure women don’t get pregnant by Other Men, saddling them (the men) with all the expenses and none of the passing on of the genes.
There is an excellent Swedish industrial/gothic music project, who despite some questionable ethics, has an outstanding song celebrating “ the Seven Deadly Sins”. Ordo Rosarius.
https://www.stlyrics.com/songs/o/ordorosariusequilibrio25088/watchingluciferwanderthroughthesweetdewof2046099.html
Certainty of paternity may be the ultimate material basis of the imperative for sexual control, but it does not account for religious taboos on non-procreative sexual acts. Possibly they are Gouldian spandrels emerging from cross firing of the supposed exchange instinct asserted to be disclosed by evolutionary psychologists’ study of Wason test experiments. Once humans have acquired the intellectual sophistication to recognise sexual pleasure as an inducement to reproduction, non-reproductive sex becomes a potential trgger for guilt/shame at cheating nature or Nature personified as a god. Religion as an institution then seizes on that guilt as a means of social control and incorporates it into a meme matrix. This appears still more plausible if you recall the prevalence of the cliched campaign trail barb “If he cheats on his wife, he’ll cheat on the country”.
IIRC it was Stephen Budiansky who attributed many religious impulses to a human instinct to bargain even if there is no counterparty with whom to strike a deal (fasting, human sacrifice, …) just as a beaver will attempt to build a dam in response to the mere sound of running water.
It was not always so.
Anahita Ratebzad, one of the first women elected to the Afghan parliament and deputy head of state from 1980 to 1986.
Remind me again who aided the rise of Islamists and the overthrow of Afghanistan’s secular government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anahita_Ratebzad
If only God had not made that primeval and unforced error of creating that damned talking snake and plonking it smack-bang in the Garden of Eden, where it could corrupt God’s prize creation and lead us all astray! All the wars, thefts, assaults, murders, Talibans, etc, etc, etc throughout history have been the result of that one disastrous decision by our omnipotent and omniscient Creator. But will He admit, or even ponder, His own diastrous role in it all? Not until every last star has fallen out of the sky; not until every last Talibanite has seen the error of his ways.
Here endeth the lesson.
[…] a comment by Alan Peakall on Vice n […]
Really interesting point about “a human instinct to bargain even if there is no counterparty with whom to strike a deal” – I catch myself doing that all the time. Not actual bargaining I suppose but bargaining-in-the-head – “if I ___ then maybe ___” and on it goes, until I notice and roll my eyes at myself.