Taliban: NGOs employing women will be banned & building should not have windows that women can be seen

Not sure why my quote from the Guardian article produced a link to an Independent article, but hey ho.

Edit: Oh I see. Ignore this.

"Last week the Taliban government’s spokesman confirmed on X that, to men like himself, even a fully covered woman with, say, an erect mop, is a sexual stimulus too far. “Seeing women working in kitchens, in courtyards or collecting water from wells can lead to obscene acts.”"

It's obvious who needs to be locked up, and it isn't the women.

Thank you, how clearly she has put everyone to shame.

Here's Bennett's article

Visit Afghanistan, land of culture, cricket and women closeted in their own homes | Catherine Bennett | The Guardian

The Observer also has a good article on this today by Catherine Bennett. Apologies I can’t add link but hopefully someone else can. And I’ve written to the ECB on this.

Oliver Brown, the DT's chief sports writer, who has been campaigning against TWs in women's sport calls for a ban on playing the Afghan cricket team. Today's sports section. He really is a fighter on behalf of women's sports.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cricket/2025/01/03/england-cannot-be-cowards-cricketing-boycott-of-afghanistan/

A whole page feature damning the Taliban and its abhorrent regime. He comments that international community gave in to the Taliban's refusal last year to include women in the Qatar talks and says:

"English cricket can prove here it will not succumb to the same cowardice. It might be powerless to curb the Taliban's depredations in Afghanistan, but it can signal that their scarcely believable assaults on women's rights leave them friendless on the global stage.........The ECB needs to show, by preventing England for taking to the field in Lahore next month that the time for tolerating such grotesque abuses has passed."

Agreed, it happens in all hyper-masculine cultures. It’s a man problem not a religious problem.

@SuzieNine but the law and wider culture doesn't support it, and the laws that allow loopholes such as marriage at 16 with parental permission are under scrutiny, I things are getting better. I agree that it isn't the problem of a specific religion but of a misogynistic culture.

You can look to communities a lot closer to home in the U.K. where this happens - white Christian ones at that.

yeah i've just been told on twitter that calling for a boycott of Afghan cricket is "silly" and "virtue signalling"

This is what he said "No I don't stand with anyone who makes ridiculous, shallow and virtue signalling demands. As for standing with women, I have been a supporter of GC thinking for a while. I think I have also liked several of your tweets. Take your braindead sarcasm and stuff it."

so my resolution - insofar as i make them - is: gloves off. no more #BeKind. No pandering to "allys" i will plough my own furrow

"Janice Turner has published another piece on this today, calling for the boycott of the February England-Afghanistan cricket fixture"

By far the most influential cricket board for international cricket is the bcci. You'd need them to be on board for this to gain traction..

Janice Turner has published another piece on this today, calling for the boycott of the February England-Afghanistan cricket fixture. She suggests the Taliban love cricket and have posed for photographs with some of the team's stars. It certainly wouldn't change anything for Afghan women immediately, but it would be a start and, as others have said, would at least make it appear as if we don't condone these horrors. Link here, archive link below https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/cricketers-should-stand-up-to-talibans-gender-apartheid-j6x8wwnsq

https://archive.ph/m8LYy

You're right it's not just Afghanistan and Taliban rules.

Girls in some places in the Middle East are taken out of school as soon as they can read and write to "learn to be a housewife" married at the ages of 14/15 to older cousins who they've been engaged to from birth.

These girls are breeding machines and have no life whatsoever, they don't even realise it because it's all they understand, it's just their culture it's normal.
Human rights issues regarding women are worldwide and in remote areas laws can't be or just aren't enforced so these men get away with it.

Anyway, quibbling aside, I think we are probably in considerable agreement that merely invading a country is not sufficient to make it abandon the values one objects to in it.

One way or another the change has to come from within.

In what way was Germany "bombed into the stone age" in the First World War? Perhaps a confusion for the Second World War? In WWI most bomber planes weren't advanced enough for long-distance bombing on a large scale. German largely fought its war elsewhere and other countries had the pleasure of being turned into moonscapes.

The penalties of the Treaty of Versaille weren't sufficient to prevent Germany building a highly advanced industrial-military complex within a mere 20 years, so "bombed back to the stone age" is particularly inapt.

After WW1, Germany was overt about the fact it was building an empire, intended to compete with the British empire aka largest empire the world has ever known.

The leadership types got enough buy-in from the people buying bread with wheelbarrows of money to be able to mobilise an army, invade much of Europe, carry off The Wrong Sorts to concentration camps, and have enthusiastic volunteers dobbing in their neighbours to ensure everyone toed the line.

By "more of the same" I didn't mean they intended to be in the trenches being killed, but there were certainly enough people in favour of solving their own unhappiness by attacking other people, and other countries, to enable it.

So no, not identically the same, but certainly more of a medicine of a very similar kind to the one which had failed the previous time round. This is what I mean by the country not having changed this aspect of itself after WWI.

havent the new powers that be in Syria started indicating that's the way they want to go - opressing women?

This is the fear, of course. That Syria's release from a viscious, murderous, authoritarian dictator will be out of the frying pan, into the fire.

We're still at the "cautious hope" stage with that one.

Coming soon to a Syria near you

Germany didn't change after WW1 because then it didn't want to change, and in fact wanted even more of the same.

no. Germany was literally bled dry (bombed into the stone age) and they were on the bones of their arse as a country due to the overly harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

I'm sure plenty of them (leadership types) did think they should be top dog and wanted to provoke another massive war to prove that, but joe bloggs? they were buying bread with wheelbarrows full of money.

It's way more complicated than that of course as is Afghanistan. The west (ok the British Empire) had never won a war in the country and nobody ever will. That is not what I'm all about though. I want acknowledgement that in a democratic society, women's rights are worthwhile.

No, obviously the Taliban abusing women is personal. And the millions upon millions of missing women who have been murdered, aborted, starved everywhere.

I won't be engaging with you again on this thread. Read the name of the Board and the title of the thread.

@MrsTerryPratchett ,

‘It's personal to me, being female. And we're on the Feminism board. I get a little irked with men on here telling me what to think and feel.’

The holocaust is?! Because you are female?

Except I didn’t tell you what to think in the least.

I told you that I thought the Taliban’s actions merited intervention and I asked a polite hypothetical question to everyone.

You chose to respond to my post by attacking the premise behind it, either without reading it or reading it and choosing to disingenuously misinterpret it.

I then asked another polite hypothetical question re the siege of Sarajevo, which you also chose not to engage with.

Regardless of what board we are on, we are all allowed to state our opinions politely. I would have thought that my disgust to the point of wanting to militarily intervene on the basis of how the Taliban are treating females would at least resonate with you.

It's personal to me, being female. And we're on the Feminism board. I get a little irked with men on here telling me what to think and feel.

@MrsTerryPratchett ,

‘Germany kept invading countries until everyone chose a side. We didn't start a war to counteract the holocaust.’

Did you read my post, which contained a conditional clause and a hypothetical question? I am aware of when and why we entered the war.

‘The idea of a just war is always argued using the holocaust. It's the gotcha everyone loves. But that wasn't why the Second World War happened.’

It is a reductio ad extremum argument and one that is also personal to me, being Jewish.

But, if you prefer a more recent example, how about our intervention in the Bosnian genocide?

"Ultimately change will have to come from within . Not sure how this can best be supported though."

Yes, this.

Although I disagree with the idea that:
"40 years or more the west has radicalised the country and increased extremism and fundamentalism there"
because they were already very fundamentalist and the home of extremism.

The Russians only withdrew from Afghanistan 1989, so 36 years ago. It's not like Afghanistan was at peace until then.

This is silly. I think there's an enormous difference between the Taliban and the average western government in terms of misogyny.