It’s not easy being female in Pashtun society but it’s not much easier being male. Men and women are strictly segregated–burqas predated the Taliban by centuries–which means the only females a male is supposed to see in his lifetime are his mother, sisters (if he has any) and wife (if he has one). The result is noteworthy–deprived of contact with women, a large number of Pashtun men have sex with each other.
This open secret was obvious to the foreign journalists who reported from Afghanistan and Pakistan after 9/11, but none of us got around to writing about it; there was a war to cover. Now, however, Maura Reynolds of The Los Angeles Times has written the first serious story on the subject, and it’s intriguing. Excerpts from her piece–
It might seem odd to a Westerner that such a sexually repressive society is marked by heightened homosexual activity. But Justin Richardson, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, says such thinking is backward–it is precisely the extreme restrictions on sexual relations with women that lead to greater prevalence of the behavior.
“In some Muslim societies where the prohibition against premarital heterosexual intercourse is extremely high–higher than that against sex between men–you will find men having sex with other males not because they find them most attractive of all but because they find them most attractive of the limited options available to them,” Richardson says.
Richardson…says it would be wrong to call Afghan men homosexual, since their decision to have sex with men is not a reflection of what Westerners call gender identity. Instead, he compares them to prison inmates: They have sex with men primarily because they find themselves in a situation where men are more available as sex partners than are women. “It is something they do,” he notes, “not something they are.”
