Talking about the Taliban: culture versus politics – language: a feminist guide

Last week the Taliban in Afghanistan published a 114-page document setting out the latest official version of its laws on “vice and virtue”. Western news coverage focused particularly on Article 13, which according to press reports states that

if it is necessary for women to leave their homes, they must cover their faces and voices from men.

“A woman’s voice”, the reports explained, “is deemed intimate”: like the sight of her face, the sound of her voice is a “temptation” from which men must be protected. To that end, the new code requires women not only to be silent outside their homes (even praying or reciting scripture is forbidden), but also to speak quietly inside, to make sure they can’t be overheard by passing unrelated men. Singing and reading aloud are forbidden everywhere.    

Most of the reactions I saw were horrified, but some people took a different tack. On one hand, we had right-wing anti-feminist trolls accusing western feminists of being insufficiently outraged (allegedly because they fear they’ll be accused of racism if they criticize Muslims); on the other, I saw a few comments from progressive types (most of the ones I saw came from women, though I don’t know if they’d call themselves feminists) that actually did accuse the Taliban’s critics of cultural imperialism: “the west”, as one put it, “has no right to impose its values on other cultures”.  

I’m always taken aback when I see this argument presented as progressive, because actually it’s as reactionary AF. Not only does it treat “culture” as a monolith, uncontested and unchanging, in this case it also treats it as belonging to men. “Afghan culture” is assumed to be whatever the men of the Taliban say it is; what women think apparently doesn’t count. And it’s not as if we have no idea what women think. After the new vice law was announced, numerous women inside Afghanistan (as well as activists living in exile elsewhere) took to the internet to urge the world to condemn it. These women have made it abundantly clear that they reject the definition of Afghan culture which has been imposed on them–not by western colonialists but by the Taliban, and not just without women’s consent, but in defiance of their actual cultural traditions.

There is, for instance, a long tradition of Afghan women singing and reciting poetry. Those who are now protesting against the new law by uploading videos of themselves singing to X and TikTok and YouTube are not just defying the Taliban’s latest edict, but continuing a much older tradition of women using poetry and song to criticise the abuse of male authority (one example, collected in 2012 by Eliza Griswold, translates as You sold me to an old goat, father. May God destroy your home; I was your daughter). Listening to what these women are telling us, in their own words and by their own choice (despite the potential risks) is the opposite of “imposing our values” on them.

There are other reasons for feminists to criticize this kind of “culture talk”. As human rights activists long ago pointed out, governments and transnational organizations have frequently avoided taking action against states that deny basic rights to women by putting that issue in the box marked “culture”, as opposed to the box marked “politics”. We might not think much of the way other human rights abuses have been handled in practice, but at least they are seen as meriting a political response; the status of women, by contrast, is often treated as a “cultural matter” on which it would not be appropriate for outsiders to take a view. CEDAW, the 1979 UN Convention on Eliminating All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, allows member-states which ratify it to enter culture-specific “reservations”—that is, specify they will not be bound by particular clauses which they say are incompatible with their culture. This has allowed various countries to sign up to a non-discrimination treaty while continuing to discriminate in the very areas of law that affect women’s status most (e.g. marriage and divorce, inheritance, taxation and the passing on of nationality to children).

Culture talk is also used by antifeminist men like the trolls mentioned earlier to argue that women in the west have nothing to complain about: they should shut up and be grateful they live in a culture whose values in no way resemble the Taliban’s. But in fact those values are part of the western cultural tradition too, and their influence lingers on even now.   

The suppression of women’s speech is a case in point. It’s hard to think of any civilisation in recorded history which has not placed restrictions on when, where and to whom women may speak. Prohibitions on women speaking outside the home and/or to men other than close relatives have been common everywhere, and often they’ve been based on the same argument the Taliban uses: that the female voice is “intimate” (a euphemism for “sexual”), and like other intimate parts must be concealed to preserve its owner’s modesty.

The Greek philosopher Plutarch, for instance, maintained that a virtuous woman “should as modestly guard against exposing her voice to outsiders as she would guard against stripping off her clothes”. According to the poet and classicist Anne Carson, the idea that women had two mouths (the actual mouth and the vagina) was a commonplace of both Greek and Roman discourse: both orifices, she explains, “provide access to a hollow cavity which is guarded by lips that are best kept closed”.  

But this isn’t just ancient history. The same connection between verbal and sexual (in)continence was made by western authorities for most of the modern era. In Europe and North America from the 16^th century to the 20^th, advice to women on how they should behave continued to link silence with modesty (which also meant chastity), and there was still particular anxiety about women speaking to male strangers outside their homes.

In the early 19^th century that anxiety intensified as more women became active in social reform movements such as the campaign to abolish slavery: some of them, like their male counterparts, travelled around making speeches at political meetings. Even when their audiences were exclusively female these women’s presence on public platforms attracted criticism; but when they spoke to audiences that included men the disapproval was stronger, and had a clear sexual dimension. In Massachusetts in 1837, Congregationalist ministers issued a pastoral letter declaring that a woman who addressed a mixed-sex audience in public was not merely presumptuous but unchaste: like a prostitute or an adulteress she would “fall in shame and dishonor into the dust”.

Even as late as the 1980s—150 years after the Congregationalist ministers’ letter—conservative Christian men were still worrying that women’s voices would lead men into sin. At the height of the campaign for women to be ordained as priests in the Anglican church, Graham Leonard, the Anglican bishop of London, explained his opposition by saying that if he encountered a woman in the sanctuary (the space where priests conduct sacred verbal rituals like the consecration of the bread and wine at Mass) he would be “unbearably tempted to embrace her”.  

This wasn’t just a religious thing. In the 1970s, when the BBC made the momentous decision to let a woman (Angela Rippon) present the TV news, it did so in defiance of two arguments that had been around for decades. One was our old friend “women’s voices lack authority”, but the other was the idea that a female voice would “distract” men from the serious contemplation of current events. No prizes for guessing what “distract” meant in this context: when women’s voices are deemed “intimate”, “private”, “distracting” or “tempting”, these are euphemisms for male sexual arousal. (Angela Rippon would later reveal that one of her colleagues flashed her while she was on the air.) And since men apparently cannot control themselves, they must instead control the women they hold responsible.    

It’s true, of course, that at the level of institutional policy things have changed since the 1980s. Today female newsreaders are unremarkable, and the Church of England has not only women priests but women bishops (albeit some Anglicans still refuse to recognize them). Today there are very few platforms, religious or secular, from which women in western democracies cannot, in theory, speak. But in practice women’s speaking rights are still not equal to men’s: a lot of policing still goes on, and some of it is highly sexualized—like the graphic rape threats which are now routinely sent to women who participate actively in public debates (for politicians and journalists particularly this has become a predictable occupational hazard). Nor is it rare for women’s speech, both inside and (more especially) outside the home, to be policed by their male partners or family members. Restricting how and with whom a woman may communicate, and surveilling her to make sure she doesn’t interact with anyone “unapproved”, are classic coercive control tactics which thousands of men use every day.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that women on the receiving end of these tactics are in the same position as the women of Afghanistan: clearly they are not. They are not totally excluded from public life; they are not at risk of being thrown in jail if their voices are heard outside their homes; the law does not leave them with no protection at all from abusive men. The situation of women under the Taliban is dire, and no one should have any qualms about saying so.

But I still find it frustrating when the Taliban are presented as exceptional, not just in the lengths they’re prepared to go to in reducing women to faceless, voiceless non-persons (in that respect I agree they’re in a league of their own), but in the beliefs about women, men and sex that underlie their project. In some form or other those beliefs have existed, and still do exist, in cultures around the world. They are not confined to Islamic societies or non-western societies. And one reason I think it’s important to recognize that is because some of the westerners who have most to say about the misogyny of Other Cultures are not, in reality, feminist allies: control over women is part of their political agenda too.  

If you haven’t already guessed, I’m talking about the white nationalists of the far right in North America and Europe, who maintain that western culture is threatened by the presence of non-white and Muslim immigrants. One argument they’re fond of using is a quasi-feminist one—that immigration harms women’s rights by bringing in large numbers of men from cultures whose sexual attitudes are unenlightened and predatory. But if you look at the language they use it quickly becomes clear that what they’re really defending isn’t the supposed “western value” of sex equality, it’s the ownership rights of white men over white women.

Here’s an example of the kind of thing I mean, which I saw on X last week:

You are witnessing the biggest act of cuckoldry in history. An entire civilization giving away its land and women because the alternative is to be mean.

When you see women being discussed in the possessive—my woman, his woman, our women, their women, or in this case its (“an entire civilization’s”) women—you can be pretty sure you are dealing not with someone who subscribes to “the radical notion that women are people”, but with someone who thinks women are property. For white nationalists this goes beyond the commonplace idea that individual women belong to individual men; collectively women are the property of the nation or the race, an entity composed of men who share a common ancestry. Their big fear (expressed most dramatically in the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory) is that white women will either be taken by, or will give themselves to, men who don’t share that ancestry, and the result will be the destruction of the white race. That’s what this is about, and no one should confuse it with caring about women’s—or even just white women’s—rights.   

Nor should anyone think that the misogyny is incidental, just a means to a more important (racist) end. You can tell how fundamental it is by looking at the way the writer frames his complaint, using the metaphor of cuckoldry. White civilization is being compared to a husband whose wife cheats on him, leaving him emasculated and humiliated. The threat these men perceive isn’t just to their culture, or their racial privilege, but to their manhood.  

Cuckold is, or used to be, an archaic term. As an English student in the late 1970s I learned what it meant by reading texts that had been written several centuries earlier (Chaucer, Shakespeare, Restoration drama). If you’d asked me then what I thought the chances were of it ever returning to everyday use I’d have put them on a par with the chances that prithee or Zounds would be revived. Yet 40 years later it did return: by the mid-2010s the abbreviated form cuck had become the alt-right’s insult of choice for a beta-male, a weak and unmanly man. Often it was used as a political insult, meaning that the target was not sufficiently hardline to satisfy far-right extremists. But sexual inadequacy was also implied: for the kind of man who calls other men cucks, power and sexual prowess go together.  

But although cuck is a male-on-male insult, it’s also intimately connected to the misogynist belief that women have power over men by virtue of their ability to provoke desire, and that they use this sexual power to entrap, exploit and dominate men. One of the great truisms of the manosphere is that women are users and liars: they can’t be trusted not to cheat on you and saddle you with raising some other man’s child. Without cheating women there could be no cuckolded men. If white men don’t want to be cucks, they must take back control not only of their borders but also of the women inside them. In far right circles it’s not unusual to see the argument that this reassertion of male control will necessitate the removal of women’s civil rights. One X-user’s reply to the complaint quoted above observed that the rot had set in when “we gave women the vote”.  I don’t think he was joking.

If you spend time lurking in the manosphere you will also find men proposing, or fantasizing about, social policies which are even more reminiscent of the Taliban. MGTOWs (“Men Going Their Own Way”), whose aim is to free themselves from the weakening effects of women’s sexual allure, complain about women dressing “provocatively” and suggest that they should be prohibited from dressing in public in ways that arouse men against their will. Some incels (“involuntarily celibate” men) have argued that women should not be allowed to choose their own partners, but should be (re)distributed by the state, like tax credits, so that self-identified beta-males like themselves are not unjustly denied access to female sexual services.

And let’s not forget the form of religious fundamentalism which has most political influence in the west. Conservative Christians are also big on women dressing modestly, speaking softly, and submitting to the authority of their husbands. And in some places they haven’t just fantasized about curtailing women’s rights. In the US, for instance, they’ve recently been able to realize their long-held ambition of getting the Supreme Court to overturn the 1973 judgment in Roe v Wade which gave women the right to legal abortion. In half of the 50 states that right no longer exists. And the measures some states have proposed to stop women getting around the ban are not unlike the Taliban’s approach to enforcement—for instance, making it a crime to assist a woman who plans to terminate a pregnancy by driving her across state lines. (In Afghanistan drivers can be punished for transporting a woman who is not accompanied by a suitable male guardian.) Or forbidding hospitals to treat women unless and until they are at imminent risk of death. Again, I’m not saying all these things are exactly the same. But they are surely similar enough to give us pause when someone says that “our” culture, unlike “theirs”, respects the rights of women.

As a political movement which seeks to end the oppression of women—wherever it exists and whatever form it takes—feminism needs to start from the assumption that cultures are not monolithic or static, and that one way they can be changed (both for the better and for the worse) is through organized political action. Sex equality is not a “value” which some cultures have and others don’t: it is a political goal that has had to be fought for everywhere. In all societies there are political currents which pose a threat to women’s rights, and in all societies there are currents of resistance with the potential to make women’s lives better. The business of feminism is to oppose the former and support the latter.

So, don’t tell me that as a white western feminist it’s not my place to condemn the Taliban; but also don’t tell me that as a white western feminist I can only condemn the Taliban, and not the male supremacists in my own backyard. It’s perfectly possible—and in the current state of the world, I would say, necessary—to do both.