Misplaced Assumptions

This post by Susie Madrak sort of rocked me back on my heels this morning. Sadly, it seems that once again I'm proven correct: the PC left is just as blinkered and judgmental as the rabid right. It also demonstrates that "Save the children!" goes straight to the lizard brain, bypassing all higher cognitive functions.

Madrak's headline gives a good idea of the thrust of her post. (And frankly, I expected something more intelligent from Madrak.)

In Afghanistan, We're Looking The Other Way As Police, Tribal Leaders Commit Child Rape

After a brief nod to this article, which introduces the "abduction and rape of teenage boys"" mantra in passing as part of a broader group of abuses by the national police, Madrak focuses on this highly inhlammatory article by Joel Brinkley. The gist of the "scandal" is this:

Western forces fighting in southern Afghanistan had a problem. Too often, soldiers on patrol passed an older man walking hand-in-hand with a pretty young boy. Their behavior suggested he was not the boy's father. Then, British soldiers found that young Afghan men were actually trying to "touch and fondle them," military investigator AnnaMaria Cardinalli told me. "The soldiers didn't understand."

All of this was so disconcerting that the Defense Department hired Cardinalli, a social scientist, to examine this mystery. Her report, "Pashtun Sexuality," startled not even one Afghan. But Western forces were shocked - and repulsed.

For centuries, Afghan men have taken boys, roughly 9 to 15 years old, as lovers. Some research suggests that half the Pashtun tribal members in Kandahar and other southern towns are bacha baz, the term for an older man with a boy lover. Literally it means "boy player." The men like to boast about it.

"Having a boy has become a custom for us," Enayatullah, a 42-year-old in Baghlan province, told a Reuters reporter. "Whoever wants to show off should have a boy."

Madrak's framing gives it away:

So our troops are fighting and dying for child rapists in a warped fundamentalist theocracy. And we're protecting them? This is too much for my mind to comprehend. . . .

Don't look for any sort of rational discussion here. What we have is the lizard brain in full control, fueled by the assumption of cultural superiority.

The commenters, with one exception, are no better. The one exception at least had the wit to ask

So what I'm wondering is: what happens to the boys? Obviously they don't die from these relationships. Are they ostracized, or do they have a separate place in the society as they grow up, or do they just take on the other role when they themselves are men?

Now, I don't normally expect a lot from the comments on blogs (except here, of course, where the commenters are perspicacious and well-spoken, or if not, entertaining in their ineptitude), but the comments at that post are spectacularly ill-informed and injudicious.

However, to the substance. My own comment brought up the fact that we are dealing with another culture with its own standards and mores. (And I have to confess that I am basically dismissing both articles that Madrak cites -- the first made a passing reference to the "abduction and rape of teenage boys" as part of the list of abuses perpetrated on the civilian population for no reason that I can detect other than a deliberate attempt at titillation --the article is basically about political corruption and the drug trade -- the second is so horribly slanted and smugly superior that I can't credit any conclusion the author draws.) Brinkley's article cites it as a centuries-old tradition; it may, in fact, be far older. The best-known example of similar relationships is, of course, among the ancient Greeks, but there is evidence of similar practices among the ancient Albanians and Irish (the hero Cuchulainn took a male lover, and it's good to remember that in spite of his prowess as a warrior, at that point he was still a boy), and possibly even the Vedic Indians, to the extent that some researchers have posited that such relationships were a pan-Indo-European cultural institution.

And nowhere in either of the articles, or in Madrak's post, is there any investigation of the attitudes of the Afghanis, other than to note that they are accepting of this practice. I would assume so -- traditions that do not meet with acceptance never have the chance to become traditions. One aspect that is notably missing is any revelation of the actual forms of the practice and the degree to which the boys have autonomy. (This is something I touched on my my review of the anime series Loveless: the automatic labeling of this phenomenon as "child rape" is, aside from being inflammatory and prejudicial, a means of avoiding any real examination. And it's worth noting that Japan, at least in pre-Meiji times, is another one of those cultures in which it was common practice for a man to take a younger man or youth as a lover.) There is also the question of what constitutes a "child" in this sense. The age of consent varies widely throughout the world -- as low as 13 or 14 years -- but does someone want to try to convince me that a thirteen-year-old is somehow more capable of what one commenter called "enlightened consent" than a twelve-year-old? By what criteria? And quite honestly, when dealing with other cultures with different traditions, and particularly different attitudes toward sexuality, that kind of question, founded on a concept that is solely the fruit of Euro-American legal practice, becomes pretty much irrelevant.

There is also the question of the quality of the relationship, which Madrak and most of her readers automatically assume is exploitive and/or abusive, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. That's merely assertion, and of no value. I would not be at all surprised to find out that the boys involved are the recipients of gifts and that there is a degree of affection involved, even if the participants are not willing to call it "love" -- that's much more likely than the image called up by characterizing them as "rape."

I did find a link to the study by AnnaMaria Cardinalli, "Pashtun Sexuality", noted in Brinkley's article. The document itself is somewhat problematic, particularly in its somewhat loaded terminology and the conflation of circumstances that are objectively classifiable as "rape" with those that may not be. There is a strong cultural bias (and more than a little underlying homophobia, but the study was, after all, done for the U.S. military, which, true to form, selected a woman to do a study among Islamic men) that is quite blatantly obvious throughout, leading me to question the study's value for any purpose other than propaganda. There's also the not-so-deeply-buried homophobia in Madrak's characterization of this whole thing as a "toxic stew." And, interestingly enough, in the child abuse column, no one brings up the question of the age at which Afghani women are considered ready for marriage, leaving the whole issue in the realm of that favorite scare mantra of the far right: Teh Gays are going to steal your sons!

Yes, I'm disappointed in the articles, the blog post, and the comments, but not for the obvious reasons: I'm sadly disappointed in the intellectual flabbiness and assumption of superiority displayed by almost all concerned, not to mention the complete insensitivity to the cultural traditions of other peoples.

Does this practice need to be stopped? Based on the evidence presented to date, who knows?

Note: read the follow-up to this here.