Confessions of a NY Times Addict

I know I am supposed to deal with part B from my last blog post, but I would like to interrupt to share some thoughts on two cool NY Times Articles:


The NY Times recently had an article about Afghani girls who dress like and assume the roles of men: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/world/asia/21gender.html

This article reminds me of one I read a few years back about women dressing as men in Albania,* but there they remain men for life. In both countries, is is the power discrepancy between the male and female gender (with gender being diffrenciated from sex) that causes women to assume the male role: In Afghanistan, sports, going out in public, and earning a living (which is often dependent on being in public), are all right reserved for men, leading families in need of more income, with a shortage of boys, to transform the female-sexed children into male-gendered ones. Aditionnally, in the words of Zahra, who does not wish to transition back to womanhood: They scream at them (girls) on the streets. When I see that, I don’t want to be a girl. When I am a boy, they don’t speak to me like that.” In Albania as well, it was the power imbalance between genders that led to this gender-switching, and it was often done to make up for a lack of males in the family. As Pashe Keki, a former woman who became patriarch after her father's murder left her family short of men explains, "Back then, it was better to be a man because before a woman and an animal were considered the same thing, Now, Albanian women have equal rights with men, and are even more powerful. I think today it would be fun to be a woman.”

A major difference between the Albanian and Afghani customs is sex: The Albanian women remain virgins, single men, trading in their sexuality for their freedom. As such, they do not acquire complete masculinity - the right to sexually acquire a woman's body. Afghani women, on the other hand, are transitioned back to women when the time comes for them to become sexually active, at which point they are married off. In Albania however, the custom is dying off now that women have more equality and don't feel the need to adopt the male gender in order to acquire power. The Albanian tradition reminds me a bit of that of Artemis: becoming a virgin (ie giving up feminine sexuality) in order to do traditionally "male" actions that are imbued with power - like hunt.

As a feminist, reading this articles underscores how much there is to be done to right gender imbalance across the globe, so women do not have to become men in order to have freedom, but this task must be accompanied by cultural sensitivity, and must not mean imposing gender - women should still have the right to adopt the male gender if they choose to do so.

* http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/25/world/europe/25virgins.html