If you missed the latest happenings in Afghanistan (because of all that is happening in Ukraine, Gaza/Israel or in the US election) you might not have seen the brief announcement in the news last week: the Taliban is cracking down even more on women -saying that women should be completely covered in any public situation.
The reason given by the Orwellian Department of Vice and Virtue is that it is essential to avoid temptation and tempting others. The ‘others’ are presumably men, who are not blamed for their weakness, only women are held responsible.
The other part of the announcement was even more frightening: a woman's voice has been deemed ‘intimate’ by the department and so should not be heard singing, reciting or reading aloud in public.
Women’s faces and voices are being eliminated.
The extremity of these measures should not make us think it only a fundamentalist Islamic culture that wants to control women.
In the West, women’s bodies have been so objectified, we have discomfort around the natural process of breastfeeding in public. We judge women’s clothes, weight and bodies ferociously.
A woman’s body is equally worshipped and reviled, sexualised and criticised. It is virtuous mother vs immoral temptress.
Controls over women can often be couched in religious terms – women are tempters who lead men astray. Therefore they should dress modestly and behave demurely. That is certainly the case in Afghanistan, where a woman may never look directly at a man who is not her husband or a family member. But every age has ways of wrapping control in religious terms: purity culture in the States in the 90s put huge pressure on girls to stay sexually pure before marriage. It may have come from sound Christian teaching around sex outside marriage but it became focused on girls' behaviour and clothing, and a sense that girls tempted men into bad behaviour if they were not careful. Boys were excused from similar standards!
Whatever our society and whatever time, it is the female body has been discussed and restricted and blamed. What does that do to a woman's sense of herself, her confidence, her freedom to be who God wants her to be?
Dutch sociologist Mineke Schipper, who has written a book about the contradictory ways the female body has been viewed, says it is no surprise women feel insecure about their bodies when so much time is devoted to either worshipping the female form or despising it.
Women internalise these views: some feel defiant, proclaiming body positivity and sexual freedom. But much more common is a sense of shame. The Mental Health Foundation in the UK found that 40% of women felt anxious about their bodies and 35% said they felt depressed.
Cosmetic surgery throughout the prosperous nations of the world tells a story of women (it is mostly women who have surgery) who don’t like themselves, who are ashamed of their bodies. In 2023, 1.5 million procedures were carried out in the States.
God in the Bible does not blame women for being female or for being bearers of children. He created them and thought the whole idea was very good! He reaches out time and again to women who have been exploited or vilified by men.
I love the redemption that God brings for Hagar in the first book of the Old Testament. She is a slave girl in the household of Abraham and Sarah, forced into having sex with Abraham (and I note that Sarah is the instigator of this exploitation because of her shame about her childlessness). Hagar runs away into the wilderness and there she encounters God. The angel of the Lord takes an interest in her plight, consoles her and gives practical advice. Her fear and shame are taken away. Hagar responds, ”You are the God who sees me.”
Psalm 34 verse 5 says, ‘Those who look to God are radiant; their faces are never covered with shame’.
Societies may judge, confine, blame and shame women simply because of their sex, but God reveals their faces to be radiant.