that’s a good point! i was just assuming implicitly that i’d be of the elite. have to think more on the issue, but i’ll retract my earlier assertion.

Most people, in general, don’t get many opportunities for self-actualization. While the large majority of people that do get to live comfortably are male, that doesn’t mean being male is a sufficient condition for being fulfilled. While girls may be sequestered and abused, a fair amount of young-men are straight up shot or maimed for minor slights as well. This is a fundamentally dysfunctional society for everyone involved. This is the trouble with trying to draw lines around whole genders rather than individuals is that it tends to make people lean towards this sort of ecological fallacy.

i’m not meaning this with any offense, but are you not cognizant of the distinction between physical/literal cleanliness and spiritual/ritual cleanliness? i’m not a big fan of mumbo-jumbo obviously, but it seems from what i’ve seen and read south asians, like religious jews and muslims, have strong concepts of non-literal cleanliness. even the roma in europe do so. they consider non-roman “unclean,” even though in a plain reading that would be ludicrous judging how they present themselves in public in european cities.

back to the issue of girls and boys in afghanistan, i lean toward saheli’s assessment. if i had to pick, i’d rather be a boy than a girl in afghanistan. a boy may have a risk of being raped by an older man, especially if he’s poor, but what do you call a girl who is “married” off to a 35 year old man when she’s 12? a girl has less opportunity toward self-actualization in afghanistan than a boy. so i guess that’s how i come down, though it’s obviously colored by the fact that i’m a nerd and it seems that intellectual opportunities for afghan women are constrained.

Wow, that link shed light on some pretty disgusting behavior in Afghanistan. I heard of such stuff in afghanistan , but didn’t realize it was THAT prevalent.

I love how they rationalize stuff to justify contradictions in their edicts. Homosexuality is bad, but sleeping with boys is not the same because they do not love them??? So by that logic if a gay guy went to a male hooker, that is not a sin by their own standards? And women are not clean because they menstruate, but it is ok to bang a boy in the area where they defecate??? Amazing logic by these neanderthals.

Are you conflating all homosexuality with pederasty?

There is, mercifully, no indication whatsoever of pederasty in the kamasutra and no documented rampancy in Ancient India. Criminals of this variety obviously existed in every society, but institutional rampancy and societal acceptance are a whole other matter.

Vatsyayana did mention same gender practices, as well as the existence of “the third gender”, under the Auparishtaka section, but there is no mention of anything approaching bacha baz, let alone any celebration of it. In fact, the entire purpose of his treatise was to prepare a young man for traditional married life, including the courting of a wife, appreciation of the act of love, and proper conduct during marriage.

However, pederasty was a widespread institution in medieval Japan, ancient Greece, and Persia (which was the likely origin point for its practice in Afghanistan).

As for the Pashtuns, it’s so mainstream as to utterly shock NATO forces into commissioning a Pentagon study: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/08/28/INF21F2Q9H.DTL . It was something that soldiers found reprehensible but were powerless to stop.

Institutional exploitation and trafficking of minors is astoundingly horrible–there is no greater crime than the robbing of innocence. It need not be viewed from the prism of cultural relativism, but rather as something that humanity as a whole must come together and bring to an end.

Prevention of girls education must come to an end as well. It is unfortunate that parents must go to such lengths in Afghanistan to ensure some semblance of opportunity for their daughters.

However, as per the mother of the cute kid, who was also dressed as a boy in her youth, the self-confidence gained from these years likely had a part to play in her efforts to expand the confines of her life, i.e. run for political office.

There is a–perhaps naive–part of me that wants to believe a cultural norm like institutionalized pederasty/pedophilia is fucked up enough that it couldn’t have developed independently in multiple places.

I mean, there are a lot of really awful things I can rationalize as having been necessary under some conditions are some point in time. Even dehumanizing misogyny I can kind of see as being a consequence of living in a cruel deathworld where bandits lurk outside every settlement and population death rates require high fertility to continue the society. I don’t like it, but I can see how decent people might be able to rationalize their way into thinking it’s something that must be done. But screwing children? Seriously? WTF!?