The Effeminate Tyranny

During the fall of the tyrannical Taliban regime in 2002, photographer Thomas Dworak discovered a cache of portraits depicting Taliban men in curiously effeminate pictorials. Magnum Photo has produced a 7-minute audio slideshow on these fantastic images.



What I find fascinating about this phenomenon - besides an anecdote involving a particularly paedophilic warlord - is the relationship between the Taliban’s prohibition of female effeminacy and the apparent externalisation of male effeminacy.

Prior to the American intervention in Afghanistan, strict shariah laws based on a patriarchal religious dogma, virtually forbid any public display of effeminacy: women must cover up all flesh (including their faces), mothers are subjugated by their sons as wells as their husbands and public displays of affection are completely outlawed.

Logically, with such a strict doctrine enforcing the day-to-day practices of public life, femininity would then manifest itself in the private domain, away from the judging eyes of other men. Though, with the all-seeing eye of Allah ever-present and the most meagre of infractions punishable by death, what little privacy there is, is hijacked by dogmatic fear.

Thus Ironically, women are removed from the libidinal economy, burkha and all. Ironically, because in this context, the sexual suppression of women equates to their annihilation as an object of sexual desire, whereas, here in the West, we subjugate women for the very purpose of making them objects of desire. We objectify, the burkha annihilates.

Veiling the woman and making her a sexual non-entity transfers femininity to the man. Hence, men, who are superficially the only players in the Islamo-fascist libidinal economy, become the logical targets for any effeminate manifestations and objectifications.

The portraits act as playful marker of this transference, of a welcome affection amongst men. Their cheeks blushing, hand-in-hand, they flaunt guns and present flowers in front of radiant pastel pastoral backgrounds. They are reminiscent of the early age of technicolour: saturated hues and picturesque flowerbeds.

“It’s a very feminine culture,” Dworak says. “They’re very effeminate with their black eyeliner and their little guns and flowers and holding hands and everything.”

Though not all the photographs display incidents of pederasty, the slideshow outlines a particular tradition whereby an older man will adopt a young boy and become not just his lover, but also his guardian and teacher; a custom practiced by many a culture, from the ancient Greeks to the Persians to the Catholic Church to the Boy Scouts of America.

Of course, the Taliban outlawed homosexuality, as have various Christian dioceses. However, there is a particular sexual-idealization of the flesh of male youth in cults that demonise the female body. Think of the carvings of naked cherubs that adorn so many Renaissance alcoves. Could all the cherubs in the world account for the significantly large proportion of paedophilic male clergy?

I think, perhaps. After all, it is the Father who shows care, who will listen to your inner most feelings, navigate your sins and offer you forgiveness and salvation – all effeminate traits. I believe that some Christian-feminists even ordain the God of the New Testament as made in the image of woman, given her predisposition towards things like forgiveness and such. Or is that the plot to The Da Vinci Code?

However, this is not to suggest that effeminacy directly leads to homosexuality, which then leads to pederasty. But, that there is an integral place in the human condition for what Occidental thought refers to as femininity, and that femininity is not necessarily exclusive to the female sex.

The traits of femininity, such as care and love, are not so much the effects of a distorted cultural system, but are in fact ontologically prior to culture. They will manifest in all cultures and all gender structures.

On the other hand, paedophilia and pederasty are bastardisations of these traits, blurring and blending care and love into domination and control. It is culture that screws up, not human beings.

To paraphrase the phenomenologist Martin Heidegger, when you get down to it, human beings are essentially all about care.