What Afghan women are experiencing today is not merely a set of restrictions or discriminatory laws but the product of a structure that systematically feminizes guilt. This essay is an attempt to understand that logic within the Afghan context, a place where women are deprived not only of rights, but of the very possibility of being innocent.
Across systems of power, women are positioned not as agents, but as those who must answer. It is as if they are already accused and their only role is to explain, justify, and apologize. In these systems, guilt and shame are imposed on women’s bodies and lives not as individual moral failures, but as a persistent structural function. The issue is neither women’s behaviour nor their personal choices; the issue is a mechanism that, in order to sustain itself, requires a fixed site for the accumulation of blame. Within this logic, women become the vessel where guilt begins.
Such a structure rests on a prevailing assumption: the gendering of guilt. The logic behind the gendering of guilt is based on the insight that guilt, though ostensibly framed as a universal moral concept, is, in practice, systematically concentrated onto women’s bodies and lives. The structure pushes its crises, fears, and failures onto “women” in order to evade accountability. In this process, men are removed from the position of accusation, while women are rendered perpetual victims.
In this logic, guilt is not the consequence of women’s actions but rather the consequence of being women. Men are preemptively absolved; women are preemptively accused. This essay seeks to analyze precisely this presupposition about women in relation to guilt.
In Afghanistan, guilt is never distributed randomly. For its own survival, the ruling structure requires a permanent site of sacrifice, somewhere onto which fear, failure, frustration, moral crisis, and even political collapse can be offloaded. This burden must be placed where the least possibility of resistance exists. But why is this burden almost always placed on women’s bodies?
A woman is not regarded as a person but as a position, a ready-made site for attaching blame. This logic begins with women themselves. In particular, the female body is always a problem: either too visible or too hidden; either tempting or dangerous. If violence occurs, the first questions are directed at her body: What was she wearing? Why was she there? Why did she come home late? Why did she laugh? Why didn’t she stay silent?
This so-called logic extends beyond the body and reaches the voice. A woman’s voice is either too loud, too provocative, or inappropriate. If she speaks, she is accused; if she stays silent, she is blamed. If she protests, she is shameless; if she endures, she “wanted it.” Even her walking, her laughter, her gaze, her writing, even her breathing can become moral issues.
In this equation, the male body is neutral while the female body is the site of accusation. This logic is clearly visible in everyday examples in Afghan society. A girl whose nude image is leaked loses her life, but the boy who leaked it has merely “made a mistake.” A woman who enters a relationship is said to have brought shame; the man in the very same relationship has done something “natural.” If a man and woman commit the same mistake, the man gradually disappears from the scene, but the woman is punished and suppressed for years—in her family, workplace, community, and collective memory.
Why is it that when wrongdoing is “feminized,” it becomes a dead end, but when it is “masculinized,” it becomes an experience?
In Afghanistan, the structure personalizes guilt to protect itself. It claims, “This woman was immoral, not this law; this woman was bad, not this culture; this woman wasn’t properly raised, not this system.” Using this manoeuvre ensures that the structure always remains pure while the woman is perpetually stained.
To maintain its superficial balance, the anti-woman structure feminizes guilt and masculinizes innocence. With this logic, a woman — long before she makes any choice — is already a potential bearer of fault, while a man is absolved of all wrongdoing, again in advance.
Feminized guilt is an instrument of control, not a measure of morality. For this reason, any attempt at “reform” that does not challenge the structure itself simply reproduces the same anti-woman order. This structure in Afghanistan is interested neither in reforming behaviour nor in delivering justice; its purpose is to preserve hierarchy.
Women live a strange paradox: they are placed at the centre of these systems but are deprived of power. They are at the centre of politics, because their bodies are the site through which political control is exercised. They are at the centre of morality, because moral collapse is projected onto them. They are at the centre of society, because collective honour is tied to them. This centrality is neither privilege nor respect but rather a more complex form of control and erasure.
The structure makes men repairable and women destructible. A man can err, experiment, destroy, and rebuild. But a woman collapses from a single mistake, a single rumour, a single image, a single sentence. This inequality is not accidental; it is engineered.
The most dangerous stage is when this structure becomes internalized to a point when Afghan women begin to fear their own loud voice, feel guilty for writing boldly, and feel shame when speaking about sex, the body, anger, or desire. Or when they assume they are mistaken, excessive, extreme, or “out of place.” That is the moment the structure has won and when external repression is no longer necessary because women have begun to censor themselves.
Because guilt has been imposed on us, we often fail to recognize that we have committed no wrongdoing. We do not see the structure because it has become so normalized that it is like air. We do not hear it, because it blends with the voices of morality, tradition, and social expediency. But as long as women remain in the position of guilt, no order can ever truly be just.
Liberation is not merely the freedom of women; it is the exposure of a structure that cannot survive without sacrificing them. Until women in Afghanistan are no longer positioned as the locus of guilt, no system will ever be genuinely just. Liberation is not simply freeing women but is also rejecting the system that depends on their victimization to sustain itself.
Sabawoun Beyabani is an Afghan writer and women’s rights activist who lives in Brazil.
