It Aint Just a River in Egypt, Sister

A Pentagon study finds that “severe segregation” of the sexes contributes to “unusually common” homosexual behavior among Afghanistan’s Pushtun men. Ironically, Afghanistan is also one of the world’s most homophobic places, and as a result, the Pashtuns are “in almost complete denial” about their own proclivities. The Taliban, for example, are almost as well known for their frequent homosexuality as they are for their brutal killing of homosexuals.

I’ve long suspected that societies — predominantly Islamic societies — that retard the development of attraction between the sexes have a higher incidence of homosexuality than more open societies. Others seem to have made more educated guesses to the same effect:

Justin Richardson, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, says such thinking is backward–it is precisely the extreme restrictions on sexual relations with women that lead to greater prevalence of the behavior.

“In some Muslim societies where the prohibition against premarital heterosexual intercourse is extremely high–higher than that against sex between men–you will find men having sex with other males not because they find them most attractive of all but because they find them most attractive of the limited options available to them,” Richardson says.

In other words, sex between men can be seen as the flip side of the segregation of women. And perhaps because the ethnic Pushtuns who dominate Kandahar are the most religiously conservative of Afghanistan’s major ethnic groups, they have, by most accounts, a higher incidence of homosexual relations. [L.A. Times]

Yet those same societies would never tolerate the formation of monogamous homosexual relationships. Put in that context, the availability of recruits for suicide bombing missions seems almost understandable.

This isn’t the sort of social engineering Americans should undertake, of course. To be clear, I’m not advocating “curing” or “treating” homosexuality; I’m advocating the gradual opening of Afghan society in a way that lifts its artificial and unhealthy repression of romantic and sexual relationships, relationships that are a large part of what makes life worth living. Stories like this illustrate importance, over the long term, of introducing Afghanistan to global culture, for all its obvious faults. I wonder how different a place Afghanistan would be ten years from now if today’s teenagers could watch podcasts of Hannah Montana and iCarly.