It’s nice to see that feminism is finally making sensibly clad strides in the Taliban-contested areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
For too long women have been denied the right to compete on equal terms with men. But all that is set to change, as several stories emerging in the past few weeks have shown.
Some will see this trend as the lickspittle bowing of the knee to Western imperialism, or token gestures without real effect, but those of us with a keen sense of justice will applaud the Taliban for making strides towards a more equable society.
Probably most heartwarming of the stories was the news that an eight-year-old girl had been given the privilege to blow herself up in central Afghanistan.
Now, I know what you’re going to say. “That’s not feminism, Chris! That’s child labour! They should be allowed to use only grown women as suicide bombers.”
Pah. I spit on your Western sensibilities.
If this eight-year-old hadn’t been given an opportunity to prove herself, where would she be?
In school? I don’t think so, buddy boy. And, anyway, it’s not as though they don’t use older girls, too. A week before, a bomb was strapped to a nine-year-old schoolgirl in Pakistan and she was sent off to a police checkpoint to be fruitful and multiply into several body parts.
Pakistan and Afghanistan, in fact, are examples to the rest of the world when it comes to human rights.
In a world in which homosexuals are often treated rudely, both the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban have frequently used cross-dressers to mount suicide attacks, proving that it’s still possible for a man to be a (briefly) useful member of society even if he likes to dress up in frilly underwear and a burqa.
Of course, it’s not all a success story for what the liberals like to call “sexual rights”.
The Pakistani Taliban attacked a police station by sending in a suicide-bombing married couple, which is downright discriminatory in a society in which men aren’t even allowed to marry.
We look forward to the day when gay couples can also go out in a blaze of glory, although I suspect there’ll be some bureaucratic confusion when they eventually get their 72 virgins.
(If competing translations are correct, and I’m sure our readers will help us out with this one, it’ll be even more confusing when martyrs are presented with “white raisins” of “crystal clarity”. Google it.)
It is slow progress, I admit, this long explosion to freedom. But we’re getting there, fellow feminists. Soon we expect the Taliban to allow women the compulsory privilege of wearing beards.
Chris Roper is the editor of M&G Online. Follow him on Twitter @chrisroperza