ChocolateHead #sexist reddit.com

A 14-year-old Afghan mother washing her new baby
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I'm gonna play devil's advocate and defend Afghan culture. Here come the downvotes.

14 years old is not the same there as it here. Their whole whole conception of what it means to be an adult and a child are completely different than ours. They don't have arbitrary lines defining when it's ok to vote (18), to drive (16), to drink (21), etc... because they don't have any of those things. They also don't have mandatory public school or college like we do, so they don't see a 14 year old as a "child" like we do. A 12 year old girl probably has all the same responsibilities in a household as an adult woman would have because she has nothing else to do. Now, I'm not defending sex with pre-pubescent girls, but if you want to understand what they're thinking, you have to understand their surroundings.

This can't be blamed completely on Islam. This type of thing is also partly (in my opinion, mostly) due to living in a tribal culture with no real law, institutions, media, education, etc... If you go to any backwards tribal culture you will see things that horrify you. I personally think the stuff that goes on in China is much more horrifying than this.

It's common to hear Westerners say things like that men over there "hate" women, "oppress" women, etc... You can disagree with how men treat women over there, but in their mind they think they are protecting and loving women. Now, once again, you can disagree with what they're doing, but ascribing it to evil motivations is wrong in my opinion.

I may be wrong, but this type of thing isn't common. I think this only happens in the most rural, uneducated, tribal areas. Educated city dwellers don't live like this, so it's not right to stereotype their entire region based on stuff like this.

Here's my most controversial defense: women are ready to have sex when they hit puberty. They're gonna do it no matter what. The American way is to have sex with people your own age clandestinely, oftentimes without your parents knowing or approving, and teenage pregnancy and disease is rampant here. At least there when they hit puberty they enter into a "loving" (you can obviously judge for yourself how loving those marriages are) relationship with a committed partner with approval from their friends and family. Girls in America get dumped a million times before they are 25, have sex with multiple partners, suffer emotional damage and self-esteem issues, etc... I'm not saying the way they do it is better, but it does have some positives that we overlook because we are so confident our way is better.

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