Why We Fight Patriarchy

Look at Afghanistan, then look in the mirror

Photo by Haim Charbit on Unsplash

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The term “patriarchy” does not mean that all men are evil. It describes a system in which those holding power, historically and often overwhelmingly by men, create or maintain laws and institutions that restrict the rights, autonomy, and opportunities of women.

The issue is not maleness itself.

The issue is what happens when power becomes concentrated, unchecked, and convinced that one group deserves fewer rights than another.

We do not have to look far to see how quickly twisted thinking can turn against half of the population — women.

We do not have to go back in history. We are talking about the present.

The twenty-first century.

All you have to do is look to the beautiful country of Afghanistan, where millions of women are being stripped of rights that many people assume are impossible to lose.

To understand how Afghanistan reached this point, we have to realize it did not happen overnight; it was a deliberate, violent reversal of history. In the 1960s and 70s, Afghanistan was a progressive constitutional monarchy where women’s equality was protected by law.

Women voted, wore contemporary clothes, attended universities, and worked as doctors, judges, and government ministers. But this era of independence was shattered when the country became a geopolitical chessboard during the Soviet invasion of 1979.

Decades of proxy warfare and destabilization weaponized the region, creating a power vacuum filled by extreme fundamentalist factions.

When the Taliban first seized power in 1996, they immediately locked women in their homes. Though a twenty-year democratic interlude from 2001 to 2021 temporarily restored women’s rights to education and careers, the structural cage of patriarchy was simply waiting in the wings.

Following the Western military withdrawal in August 2021, the Taliban swept back into power and immediately began a systematic, piece-by-piece erasure of women’s autonomy.

Over four and a half years, they issued more than 250 edicts — and more than 157 of those are weaponized directly against women’s rights, banning high schools, universities, employment, and eventually making it a crime for a woman to speak aloud in public.

This calculated degradation culminated in the Taliban’s January 2026 penal code, which explicitly codifies domestic violence as acceptable household “discipline” as long as it does not result in broken bones or open wounds.

Under this law, a husband faces a maximum of just fifteen days in prison** **if he breaks his wife’s bones.

To understand the true depravity of the Taliban’s judicial mindset, one only has to look at how their own legal framework prioritizes the lives of beasts over women: the very same penal code mandates a five-month prison sentence for the crime of organizing an animal fight.

Think about what that means.

The legal system punishes the organization of an animal fight approximately ten times more severely than it punishes a husband for breaking his wife’s bones.

If this does not make you understand why millions of women continue to fight patriarchy, I do not know what will.

Furthermore, the law traps women completely by imposing a three-month prison sentence on any wife who leaves her marital home to seek refuge with her parents or relatives.

The descent into brutality reached a new depth in May 2026 with Decree №18, which removed the minimum legal age for marriage and instead tied eligibility to the onset of puberty.

Under this framework, girls as young as eight or nine can be legally married. The decree also provides that a young girl’s silence may be treated as consent to the marriage — a provision that has been widely condemned by human rights organizations as fundamentally incompatible with a child’s ability to give meaningful consent.

The reality of this law is beyond sickening.

If you look around at any children’s park, these are babies — not women to be wedded. Today, we have more laws, background checks, and signing agreements when adopting a puppy than this system requires to hand a little girl over to a grown man.

Under this twisted framework, a young child’s silence is legally counted as her “consent”. It is a system that strips children of their childhoods and legalizes violence against them before they are even old enough to understand what is being stolen.

Silence as consent.

Turn around and look at any child who is eight or nine years old. Really look at them.

We know that children react to fear in different ways. Some cry. Some scream. Some freeze. Most become completely silent.

Think about what that really means.

A frightened, terrified little girl who cannot possibly understand the lifelong consequences of marriage and intimacy is expected to communicate refusal in a situation where she may be terrified, intimidated, or overwhelmed by adults who hold all the power.

Compliance driven by fear is not consent — it is the definition of child sexual exploitation. And that has been legalized. It is the complete abandonment of a child’s right to be protected.

This is not tradition. It is not culture. It is not a religion of faith. It is the weaponization of religion to justify the legal sanctioning of the sexual exploitation of children. If this does not make you sick to your stomach, I have no idea what will. This happened in just four and a half years.

Think about that for a moment. Let that really sink in. Not centuries. Not generations. Not even decades. Not even one decade.

Just four and a half years. Most of us are still paying off our car loans within that exact same timeframe.

A society that once educated female doctors, judges, and university students transformed into one where women can be punished simply for attempting to escape legalized abuse and where a terrified little girl can be punished severely simply for trying to run back into the safety of her parents’ arms.

That speed should not merely concern us. It should terrify us.

This is not a small, isolated group of people. We are talking about an entire nation of roughly 45 million people living under this reality.

To put that into perspective, approximately 22.3 million women and girls are living under Taliban rule. That is a female population larger than the entire state of New York, or greater than the populations of London, Paris, and Tokyo combined.

With a median age of just 17, the overwhelming majority of these 22 million are girls, teenagers, and young women. They have been stripped of many of the most basic rights that define a free human being: the right to an education, to many forms of employment, to move freely, to participate fully in public life, and, in many cases, even to raise their voices in public. An entire generation is being denied the freedom to shape its own future.

If you think this is a tragedy confined to one distant country, think again.

Afghanistan is not just a humanitarian catastrophe; it is a warning.

This terrifyingly rapid collapse serves as a stark, universal warning that forces a chilling comparison to the ongoing erosion of reproductive rights in the United States.

The political systems of Afghanistan and the United States are profoundly different. Afghanistan’s changes came through an extremist regime that seized power by force. The United States operates through constitutional institutions and democratic processes.

But both remind us of the same historical lesson: rights that people assume are permanent can, under the right political conditions, be narrowed, restricted, or removed.

When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned *Roe v. Wade*, it shattered a fifty-year-old constitutional guarantee overnight. It proved that a right a woman’s grandmother fought for, and that her mother might have taken for granted, could be dissolved by the stroke of a pen.

Worse still, the regression has deepened to a darker degree.

Today, several U.S. states have seen lawmakers introduce bills that seek to classify abortion as homicide. In states like South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Texas, these proposed “prenatal equal protection” laws mean that a woman seeking an abortion, or even a woman who suffers a natural miscarriage but is suspected of inducing it, could legally be charged with murder and face the death penalty.

It forces women into a nightmare where a deeply personal medical tragedy must be defended in a court of law to avoid legal consequences.

But the threat of twisted thinking doesn’t just come from militant coups or right-wing judicial rollbacks; it comes from any group that tries to distort definitions to protect abusers and exploit the vulnerable.

This exploitation of vulnerable populations doesn’t just happen at the state level; it trickles down into the very vocabulary of advocacy.

We saw a chilling example of this a few years ago when fringe advocate groups attempted to rebrand pedophilia under the clinical-sounding acronym “MAPs” (Minor-Attracted Persons), trying to Trojan-horse a horrific crime into the conversation around sexual orientations and identities.

Though forcefully condemned and rejected by global child protection agencies, the attempt itself was a terrifying reminder of how language can be weaponized to normalize violence.

Whether it is an extremist regime declaring that a wife’s trauma is just “discipline,” a court deciding a woman’s womb belongs to the state, or fringe actors trying to linguistically engineer protection for predators, the strategy is identical.

They alter the definitions of words to legalize violence, control, and domination. This is why the uproar against patriarchy is a historical necessity. This is not a fight against men. It is a fight — a deeply righteous one — against systems of domination that deny people their basic human rights.

It is a fight against the belief that one group has the right to control the freedom, dignity, or autonomy of another.

If we allow those in power to distort the boundaries of basic human decency, no one can guarantee what the world will look like in fifty years.

I have to say it again: it took just four and a half years for Afghan women to be reduced to a reality for which I can barely find the words.

In many parts of the world, animal welfare laws provide greater legal protection than Afghan women currently receive under Taliban rule.

That should horrify every one of us.

Faith and religion are not the problem — it’s when they get weaponized that the lives of innocents get flipped upside down.

We fight because if we stop, the cage is always waiting to be locked again, and it can simply happen with a single stroke of a pen.

We fight because, throughout history, women have been burned alive, denied basic freedoms, and too often blamed for the violence committed against them. We are constantly questioned, criticized, and judged for the actions of those who harm us.

Under the right conditions, with powerful men and twisted ideas about human rights, history has repeatedly shown how quickly women can be stripped of their rights, dignity, and autonomy.

In Afghanistan today, the restrictions imposed on women are so severe that the comparison to livestock no longer feels like hyperbole.

A cow can still roam and moo freely in public. Many Afghan women cannot even raise their voices in public without risking punishment. That is not a measure of women’s worth. It is a measure of how profoundly a society can dehumanize half of its population.

Basic human rights do not belong to one gender alone. They belong to every human being. Last I checked, women are half of the human race.

This is not women versus men. It is humanity versus tyranny. And if we believe it could never happen to us, what exactly gives us that certainty?

Ask an Afghan woman living in the 1970s whether she ever imagined her daughters or granddaughters would one day be forbidden from pursuing an education, working, speaking freely in public, or making decisions about their own lives.

History is filled with people who believed their freedoms were permanent — until they weren’t.

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