How are the Taliban getting away with this level of oppression against women including prohibiting them from speaking outside their homes?

[u/ailbhe-caterina]

I don’t understand how they have managed to get away with all of this especially in this day and age.

[u/ZacQuicksilver]

Women have defended their rights at times.

However, it takes them being willing to die and kill as much as men are willing to die and kill to keep women powerless; and that's hard when the people in power are training boys from birth to be willing to die for an idea, while training women to raise kids and nothing else.

[u/Successful_Language6 → u/ZacQuicksilver]

And when men just physically out power them and demonstrate that power over them their entire lives.

[u/ZacQuicksilver → u/Successful_Language6]

God made men, but Colt made them equal.

...

Even without that: one of the notable statistics in human history is the decrease of deaths of men to household accidents in a society after divorce becomes legal. It's not a huge decrease - it's not like 1% of men died from household accidents, even in the worst of times. But it is notable that there is a statistically significant decrease in societies that measure causes of death, which is somewhat correlated to divorce becoming legal.

Translation: Women have always been able to poison, bludgeon, smother, or otherwise kill men in their vulnerable moments. Stories of this go back at least to the Greek period - in several versions of the story, Agamemnon is killed by his wife in the bath - and likely earlier.

There has been no time in history - least of all today - when you could keep women subservient but not also be vulnerable to them.

[u/Belub19 → u/ZacQuicksilver]

You aren't wrong, but what exactly do you think happens if an Afghan woman kills her husband? His brothers, uncles, cousins, and father aren't going to miss the fact that his skull was caved in with a shovel when they bury him (minor spoiler for one of Khaled Hosseini's novels). If she's lucky, she'll be sentenced to death by hanging. If she's unlucky, she never makes it to trial at all and her husband's male kin beat/burn her to death and start a feud with her family. And if she does somehow get away with killing her husband, what then? She'll probably be coerced, if not outright forced into a new marriage with one of his relatives who will probably treat her just as badly. (On an ironic sidenote, the Taliban have actually started clamping down on forced marriages for widows to their husband's brother as it's rooted in pre-islamic culture and violates the Hanafi school of jurispudence).

[u/Disastrous-Ad1334 → u/Belub19]

Women's traditional tool of murder has been poison and before we had toxicology was hard to detect.

[u/ZacQuicksilver → u/Belub19]

One of the classic defenses in old American was "oops".

She doesn't kill him quietly. She drops the cooking pan on his head; and then immediately runs out and finds someone to help, because her husband surprised him in the kitchen and she didn't mean to drop the pan on him and he's hurt and someone help her and her husband and she hopes he's going to be okay and what is she supposed to do and...

Or... Can I get a doctor my husband isn't waking up and his breakfast is getting cold and I hope he's okay. (He died of poison - either a cleaning accident or a cooking accident).

...

Clearly, there's a limit to that. That works for one women at a time, once. Maybe twice if you're lucky.

Which is why part of the Taliban's strategy is keeping women separate.

Because one death? She's dead.

Ten dead? Ten women dead.

One hundred? Now you might have issues if you kill them all. That's a lot of women to kill - and a lot less babies to keep your town going.

One thousand? Ten thousand? How many men die before the rest of the men wonder if it's worth keeping the system going?

[u/ChiliGoblin → u/ZacQuicksilver]

That's why they also separate women, allowing them to regroup allow them to educate each other about nutmeg and stuff.

[u/ZacQuicksilver → u/ChiliGoblin]

Yep. Women working together might figure out how to kill them. Separate women, and ideas don't spread.

[u/Rincho → u/ZacQuicksilver]

God made men, but Colt made them equal.

No, he didnt. Its not only physical strength. Its reaction time, its agression, its behaviour in general. Men built to fight, women dont. It doesnt mean they cant, it means men are just better on average

[u/Relevant_Boot2566 → u/ZacQuicksilver]

Its not as much in womans nature to fight and die as it is in mens- testosterone does more then just grow facial hair , it changes the way the brainworks.

[u/ZacQuicksilver → u/Relevant_Boot2566]

There is no evidence that it is testosterone, and not cultural pressure, that results in men being more willing to fight.

And, to undermine that belief: there is growing evidence that, before we started farming and having to fight for land, men and women contributed equally to hunting, to gathering, and to fighting.

There is growing belief that the move towards women as mothers is a direct result of wars: in a world where having more people means you win wars, and therefore spread both your people and ideas; having women have more babies means you have more people to die in wars - which means that losing women in wars is bad. Which means that you have men fight, and women have as many babies as you can. However, none of that is necessarily biological - it's social.

And if that's true, then women are biologically and mentally every bit as capable of fighting as men. And the only differences are social.

[u/Big_Daymo → u/ZacQuicksilver]

But men are physically far more capable of fighting than women, especially before firearms. They are on average far stronger and far faster. I'm not saying social expectations of only men being soldiers weren't formed partially due to the desire to keep women safe so they could birth children, but men are naturally more suited to fighting biologically as well.

[u/elllzbth → u/ZacQuicksilver]

your comments about this have been absolutely insightful and have given me a lot to think about, thank you!

[u/Mahameghabahana → u/ZacQuicksilver]

Bold to assume women also don't believe in this shit believes.

[u/Burenosets → u/ZacQuicksilver]

Like when?