Unsex me here

I am fascinated by this article which I read the other morning. From reading it I learned that it is extremely common in Afghanistan for parents to dress their little girls as boys. They do this for any number of reasons - to increase social status, to have another family member who can work, to have help running errands. It is extremely interesting, educational, and comes with pictures! Everybody should read it.

In Afghanistan it is shameful and neighbors pity you if you have only daughters. It is also thought that women can control what gender their baby is going to be - thus putting the mothers in danger of abuse after giving birth to girls. It seems also that the women who have a history of dressing as boys in their youth are the women who are able to make large career steps. For instance, a female member of Parliament dressed as a boy until it was time for her to marry. She and her husband had their third daughter do the same. They asked her, "Do you want to bicycle and swim and do all the things boys do? Do you want to be like Daddy?" The little girl did not hesitate to say "Yes!"

I feel like I should be outright disgusted and outraged by the cross-dressing phenomen which seems to have swept Afghanistan, but I find it amazing. The origin of the tradition makes complete sense to me, but it is so far outside my world experience that I would never even think of it happening. My impression of women cross-dressing out of desperation is that it happens in fictional stories which deal with how "backwards" things were a long time ago. Think Mulan or the Shakespearean heroines Viola in The Twelfth Night or Rosalind in As You Like It. It would never occur to me that a woman today would have to dress as a man to acheive anything...gender is not something I consider when I contemplate my own successes or failures.