Burqas and Porn

There is a gender issues time bomb awaiting this country. Young men live in a society where contact with women and recognition of their equality is limited but they also have access to and a fondness for hardcore porn. If the history folders of web browsers at internet cafes are anything to go by many have progressed from bollywood fantasies to explicit and graphic depictions of highly sexed women. Indian porn (no I will not give you the link) is as popular as seeing white westerners making the beast with two backs. "Western women like it in the…", Abdullah (not his real name) says pointing at his rear. Once he realised I wasn't a Taliban spy, he showed me a clip on his phone of a horse mounting a rotund blond woman.

The system of restricted interaction between the sexes may have worked functionally to maintain a society (ignoring the analysis that our westen liberal eyes would put on the situation and leaving for another day the surprising prevalance of bachabas, or young boy buggery), but the combination of the idea of pure and distant women and the images of silicone porn stars is going to cause problems. How can the burqa'd madonna and the w.w.whore co-exist?

Men are building up unrealistic images of women which are not tempered by dialogue or interaction. Tradition and the sense that foreigners live by a different set of rules will do a bit to reduce the impact of porn on the young Afghan mind but as we know exposure breeds familiarity to the point where the ideals presented by the media are subconsciously accepted, slick editing or not. Coke anyone? Brown water and sugar.

This is particularly true of an illiterate population which stabs memorised patterns into internet keyboards. The ease with which beliefs can be transmitted when unchallenged by personal discovery and learning facilitates the extremist terrorist's indoctrination of young men. They have no other way of forming ideas about the west, westerners or even their own government. Those porn fans have no conversations with women that could present alternate models to their hardcore indulgences.

One theory about crime is that lifestyles depicted by the media are unachievable by the masses and out of frustration at the dissonance between expectation and reality people are driven to illicit measures to try to secure for themselves what they see on TV.

What happens when there is a discrepancy between the assimilated ideal of female behaviour and the reality? If in economy the gap gives rise to crime and illegality, the same could happen in the sphere of male female relationships. There could be an increase in the use of, and associated abuse and trafficking of, prostitutes; domestic violence already endemic according to the UN could rise further.


(this is a little taste of an article I'm working on.) The internet cafe I am posting this from has extendible privacy dividers.