When Men Are Victims

The plight of women in war shouldn't blind us to the sufferings of men

One widely noted result of the terrorist attack on America and the war in Afghanistan has been an intensified focus on the predicament of Afghan women under the terrorist-harboring Taliban regime. President Bush has repeatedly included the mistreatment of women in his catalogue of the Taliban's crimes.

The attention to this problem is welcome—but occasionally, one must wonder if there is any sympathy to spare for the Taliban's other victims.

The other day, The New York Times published a story about a family of Afghan refugees now living in Uzbekistan. Before they fled Afghanistan three years ago, 14 members of the family were rounded up and summarily executed by the Taliban. Those who were killed, young and old, had one thing in common: They were men.

This pattern of the selective murder of men is hardly new. It was common during the past decade's conflict in the Balkans, where thousands of men ended up in mass graves and where refugee communities often consisted solely of women and children whose husbands and fathers were dead or missing.

Afghan men who don't have the bad luck to belong to the wrong ethnic, religious, or political group have fared better than the women—at least they are not virtual prisoners in their homes—but that's not saying much.

While a woman can be beaten if her face accidentally shows from under her head-to-toe covering, a man can be beaten if his beard isn't long enough. While a woman who commits adultery faces execution, the same fate awaits her male lover. While girls are denied schooling, boys get an "education" intended to turn them into future martyrs for jihad. And while women are forbidden to go to work, men are often forced to go to war.

This is not to say that, as some men's movement activists have tried to argue in Internet mailings, women under the Taliban haven't been any more oppressed than men. Surely it matters that under the radical Islamic regime, only men are regarded as full-fledged members of the community and women are effectively barred from public space.

However, concern with the women's tragic plight should not blind us to the suffering of men. And from some of the rhetoric and media coverage, one might conclude that women are the only ones who are victimized.

Some advocates for women do, in fact, seem to be either blind or indifferent to bad things that happen to men. Sadly, there is nothing new about this.

During the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, when reports of widespread rapes of Bosnian women by Serbs generated much outrage, Progressive magazine columnist Susan Douglas charged that the West was reluctant to intervene in the crisis because the violence was directed "only" at women. Her charges weren't taken seriously. (Numerous reports of savagery targeting men must have escaped her attention.)

Around the same time, writing in Newsweek about rape as a weapon of war, feminist author Susan Brownmiller, author of "Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape," suggested that male war victims were asking for it: "Balkan men have proved eager to fight and die for their particular subdivision of Slavic ethnicity."

Yet many of those men were conscripted against their will, some of them after trying to flee the country and being forcibly repatriated while women and children were allowed to leave.

This gender-based myopia leads to some bizarre claims. A recent article in The Village Voice about feminist attitudes toward the war in Afghanistan asserted that "more women than men die as a result of most wars."

There is no question that women in many parts of the world are egregiously oppressed. But in most of those countries, life for most men is hardly a bed of roses, either. War, in particular, is one scourge of humanity whose burden has a lways been borne primarily by men. If the wartime suffering of women is often more visible, it is, ironically, because more of the women are alive. Thus, 70 percent of Afghanistan's refugees are women.

Paradoxically, the ostensibly feminist focus on women's victimization resembles nothing so much as the traditionalist, paternalistic assumption that women and children deserve special protection from harm.

Let us, by all means, show concern for the women of Afghanistan. But we should also care about what happen to these women's fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons. The women themselves surely do.