“Dear American misogynists: Afghan women are not oppressed for you”
“The marginalization of women in Afghanistan is also propped up as a tool through which Americans can rationalize the unjust status quo at home. These men, and sometimes women, tell me about how disappointed they are in American feminists who are “complaining about cat-calls while Afghan women are being butchered by backwards Afghan men.”
This is a response to those who pretend to sympathize with Afghan- and by extension Muslim and Middle Eastern- women while attacking women’s rights activists in their own backyard…
Afghan women are singing, writing, running businesses, getting degrees, teaching, learning, managing non-profit organizations, organizing protests and finding thousands of new ways to tell their stories- despite Daesh and the Taliban threatening them on a daily basis. That resilience and struggle does not a victim make…
assuming that gender-based violence is somehow inherent or pathological in Afghan men, and not a problem in the U.S., is racist”
I really enjoyed this essay
Related: “The Fetish of Staring at Iran’s Women”; “WHITE MEN TALKING ABOUT THE NIQAB: A BRIEF HISTORY”; “Hijab gives Muslim women the chance to practice feminism in their own way”; “Shit White Feminists Need To Stop Doing”
