Upon returning to power in 2021, the Taliban sharply restricted Afghan women’s access to public life and their individual liberty. This was far from a surprise, given the group’s track record when it previously governed Afghanistan from the mid-1990s until 2001 as well as in territory it controlled during the war against the U.S.-supported Afghan government. The situation today is so extreme that many in the international community have taken to calling it a case of “gender apartheid.”
While women bear the brunt of Afghanistan’s gender apartheid, the Taliban also recently introduced new regulations for Afghan men that include minimum beard lengths and restrictions on what they can wear. That underscores the fact that the Taliban’s policies aren’t just aimed at cloistering women. They are aimed at fundamentally rewriting what it means to be a “good man” as well. As a result, men who may have supported the Taliban’s restrictions when they only applied to women may now be surprised and dismayed to find that they struggle to live up to the Taliban’s ideal image of a man.
It is reductive to assume that all Afghan women are opposed to the Taliban, just as it is presumptive to assume that all men support the Taliban. Nevertheless, the Taliban’s policies of gender apartheid have negative implications for men as well. So, the fight against those policies must engage as allies men who will also be harmed under the group’s system of repressive and unrealistic gender expectations, along with women who are opposed to the Taliban’s agenda.