AFGHAN WOMEN choose to kill themselves because their lives are so restricted, writes Alyssa Rubin in today’s New York Times, examining the case of one mother of six children who attempts suicide after being scolded by a relative. Rubin, who does not compare the female suicide rate in Afghanistan with that in America, writes:

It is shameful here to admit to troubles at home, and mental illness often goes undiagnosed or untreated. Ms. Zada, the hospital staff said, probably suffered from depression. The choices for Afghan women are extraordinarily restricted: Their family is their fate. There is little chance for education, little choice about whom a woman marries, no choice at all about her role in her own house. Her primary job is to serve her husband’s family. Outside that world, she is an outcast.

Imagine the New York Times giving the same amount of prominent play on the front page to the story of an American woman who has killed herself after having an abortion, a woman for whom “family is her fate” in an entirely different sense, and you may begin to grasp the subtext here. It is interesting how the writer turns what is an act of horrendous violence by women into an act of violence by men:

“Violence in the lives of Afghanistan’s women comes from everywhere: from her father or brother, from her husband, from her father-in-law, from her mother-in-law and sister-in-law,” said Dr. Shafiqa Eanin, a plastic surgeon at the burn hospital, which usually has at least 10 female self-immolation cases at any one time.”

Women in Afghanistan, it seems, have no part in their own happiness, are not themselves capable of cruelty of any kind and live under the regime of men who bear them open contempt. Life is no doubt hard for many women in Afghanistan. There are extreme difficulties involved with adolescent marriage, with the Muslim worldview and life in extended families, and it is always sad when someone chooses to end her life. But it is worth comparing this appraisal of the powerlessness of Afghan women with James Kalb’s recent description of life in rural Afghanistan.

Like so much of feminist propaganda, this article is based on the assumption that women who do not make money are too stupid to affect any of the conditions in their world. Sometimes I think feminists live in a big plastic bubble that hangs above the earth. How else to explain their blithering ignorance about the mass of real women except that they only see them from some artifically-imposed distance?

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