Justice

So. There was this widow in Afghanistan; she was 35, and pregnant. So, the Taliban decided the thing to do with her was first to imprison her for three days, then to whip her in public: to whip her two hundred times, in public, being pregnant and all, and a widow. And then to shoot her in the head. And then to dump her body somewhere.

Why? Well the Taliban said she’d committed adultery. The thing to do with a woman who has committed adultery is to whip her two hundred times in public, and then shoot her in the head.

The man, not so much. The man wasn’t punished. The man didn’t get so much as a tap on the hand with a pencil in private. Nothing bad happened to the man at all, while the woman was imprisoned for three days then whipped two hundred times in public and then shot in the head.

Why? Well, clearly, because men are the right kind of people, and women are the wrong kind. Clearly because men are of value and women are so much garbage. Clearly because women are so foul and disgusting and horrible that it is simply not possible to punish them harshly enough. Killing them isn’t enough – you have to flay them alive first in front of an audience, and even that isn’t really enough, but the arms get tired.

Bibi Sanubar was a widow, so she wasn’t even being unkind to her husband by having sex with a different man. It’s just that she had sex without the Taliban’s permission, and that she was a woman at the time.

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