The Constitutional Pal

The Wander They Lust - Tourism as Complicity in Gender Apartheid

The thesis

When men arrive in Afghanistan under the pretext of travel, snapshots in hand, backpacks strapped, they settle into a landscape hollowed out by gender apartheid. They walk university halls where young women once studied, but now feel like ghost towns. They cycle past shuttered shops staffed by women, their wheeled passage marking the rhythm of male freedom. Their footsteps echo in streets silenced by bans on women’s work. As they meander through bazaars, they claim the space women built: spaces surrendered through coercion, not choice.

This isn’t innocent exploration. Every journey extends the erasure. These travellers occupy arenas where girls who should be learning algebra and chemistry are barred from classrooms. These tourists sip tea in cafes empty of female waitstaff. Their presence asserts a male default, an entitlement that thrives when women cannot. They don’t just ignore the bans, they become complicit by existing in that absence.

No guidebook cautions travelers to acknowledge this gendered void. Yet every unexamined selfie in a hall once teeming with outspoken students writes over women’s voices with a blank slate. The act of visiting, being seen in these spaces, cements a white-flag that women cannot return. Their wanderlust claims territory built by women; their footprints confirm permission for others to tread unhindered.

If we treat these journeys as neutral, we deny the reality of occupation. These men stake claim to a country where half the population is rendered invisible… rendered stateless in their own land. To step into that is not just travel. It is a continuation of the apartheid that bans girls from classrooms, offices, and futures. It is complicity worn with a tourist’s smile.

The tourists were here

They say it’s raw. They say it’s real. They call it offbeat. Unfiltered. Authentic. They walk through bombed-out mosques, sip green tea by lakebeds women have been banned from, call it adventure. They call it discovery. They call it peace.

What they don’t call it is what it is: occupation.

These men – almost always men – book tickets into silence. Their itineraries include the sites from which women have been erased. Their visas are stamped by a regime that beats women for breathing incorrectly. And yet they smile for selfies. They drape local scarves over Western limbs. They linger, they loaf, they luxuriate.

They bring back stories, but never of the women. They talk of security, safety, hospitality. They talk of "rawness," but not of repression. They zoom their lenses into markets, bazaars, mountain passes. But their vision conveniently blurs out every closed girls’ school, every outlawed female face, every home turned into a cage. The camera does not tilt toward the shadows.

Their presence does not feel disruptive because it’s designed not to. It fits into the vacuum precisely because women were swept out first. When you ban a girl from walking to a library, the road opens up for the wanderer’s feet. When a woman’s job is stripped away, the space she once occupied becomes real estate for spectacle. Travel blogs call it “untouched.” No. It’s not untouched. It’s been vacated.

Every travelogue is written in the past tense of the oppressed. The men are not tourists. They are inheritors of stolen presence.

There is no curiosity about where the women are. No pause. No note. No ache. The absence is too complete, too sterile. Like a museum display with no label. You see the shape of the erasure, but not the wound it left. And yet, the tourists walk right past it, guided, fed, driven, all by men, trained by the regime, certified in hospitality by apartheid.

The Taliban want this. They want the viral reels, the influencer drone shots, the press blurbs about peace. The travel agencies want this. Adventure sells. Danger sells. Even sanitized danger sells best. And the tourists… they want to believe they’re brave. They want to believe they’re supporting the people. Supporting who? The men who got to stay?

There is no conscious boycott. There is no pause of conscience. Only wanderlust, that word dripping with luxury, now used to walk over graves.

What happens when your freedom of movement becomes an accessory to someone else’s captivity? When your Instagram story blots out another woman’s entire existence? When your dollars go toward normalizing a regime that has declared war on the female half of its population?

The answer is this: nothing. The men go home. The Taliban get their revenue. The silence grows deeper.

Every journey made by these men is a testimony: not to bravery, but to entitlement. They enter where half the country cannot. They speak where half the country has been muted. They photograph landscapes stripped of half their people and call it beauty. It is not beauty. It is theatre.

Afghanistan is not an empty stage for the adventurer’s monologue. It is a prison with one half of the inmates missing from sight.

You cannot photograph around that.

The lust to wander and the cost to be still

Tourist exceptionalism is not just naĂŻve. It is ideological. It wears the mask of curiosity but operates like conquest. The assumption is simple: I can go anywhere. That phrase slips easily from the tongue of a man whose right to movement has never been contested. And in Afghanistan, that assumption becomes a performance, an exotic one-man show staged atop the erasure of women.

There is no violence more polite than the violence that hides behind a passport.

The male tourist arrives convinced he can cross borders. Not just physical ones, but ethical ones too. He packs neutrality with his sunscreen. He speaks of “locals” but never listens to the ones who cannot speak. He reads nothing into the fact that the only people he meets, guides, hoteliers, drivers, chefs, are all men. It does not register. It is not strange to him. He simply receives what the regime provides and takes it as the whole.

The absence of women in his journey does not trouble him. It flatters him. It makes space. It clears the background. He becomes the centre. And in this vacuum, even mediocrity becomes insight. He lands, he wanders, he gazes and the gaze is uninterrupted.

That’s what gender apartheid does. It edits women out so that men, local, foreign, wandering, ruling, can move through a flattened world where power never needs to be named. Where hierarchy feels like hospitality.

These men walk into landscapes sterilized of female life and call it serenity. But peace built on exclusion is not peace. It is a weapon dressed as stillness. It is quiet, yes. Because the women have been forcibly silenced.

The Western male tourist meets the Afghan male tour guide and together they form a transaction of mutual recognition. One performs rugged tolerance; the other performs local authenticity. They pose for photographs in front of the blown-out Buddhas and call it history. They call their encounter cross-cultural. But there is no bridge here… only a tunnel dug by erasure.

Women are not hidden. They are strategically disappeared. That is what makes it apartheid. And yet, the tourist’s memory card never captures this architecture of disappearance. He frames mountains and market stalls, but not the laws that close park gates to women. Not the signs that say women need a male guardian to cross districts. Not the bare classrooms. Not the locked clinics. Not the quiet suicides.

The lens cannot see what it refuses to recognize. And so the photographs are not images. They are absences, with color correction.

And what of the female tourists? The exceptional ones. The ones who make it in. Who dress as required, speak only when allowed, behave in precise compliance with the rules and then say the experience was "life-changing." Of course it was. For them, it was a play. A safe experiment. A temporary masquerade.

They can leave.

They can re-enter the world where their personhood is intact.

But the Afghan woman cannot take off her headscarf on a whim. She cannot leave the country. She cannot walk into her own national park. She cannot even pray aloud in the company of other women. Her life is not an immersive cultural experience. It is a structural sentence.

And when tourists speak of Afghanistan’s “normalcy,” what they mean is that the regime has succeeded in perfecting the illusion. A country of men, smiling, serving, standing by. A country without female chaos. A country purified of half its soul.

Tourist exceptionalism feeds on that illusion. It drinks from it, publicly. It swirls it around the mouth and calls it adventure. Meanwhile, gender apartheid watches silently from the wings. Delighted. This is what it wanted.

Not just to lock women indoors. Not just to mute them. But to ensure their absence feels natural to those who pass through.

This is not travel. This is quiet collusion. The wander they lust is not for landscape or language. It is for dominance without friction. It is the freedom to move in a world where someone else’s freedom has been entirely extracted. It is exploitation. Packaged. Marketed. And made into content.

The hospitality is your theatre and your tourism is the rehearsal for forgetting

There is a particular choreography to Afghan hospitality under Taliban rule. The script is tight. The cast is curated. The stage is cleaned of female actors.

The tourist arrives. He is met at the airport. He is assigned a smiling guide… almost always a man. He is driven in a van through valleys shaped by time and war. He is told, "Welcome to the real Afghanistan." He hears this line again and again, from hotel clerks, from shopkeepers, from security men holding Kalashnikovs like umbrellas. It becomes mantra. It becomes sedative.

Hospitality, in this context, is not generosity. It is spectacle. It is an elaborate, choreographed performance staged for foreign validation. The guest is welcomed; he is flattered, seduced, praised for coming, for being brave, for seeing with his own eyes. He becomes a minor celebrity. A witness, they say. A connector of cultures. But this is not culture. This is theatre in the ruins of personhood.

When you clear a room of women, the performance gets easier. There are no interruptions. No contradictions. No pain leaking into the guest's comfort. The Taliban understand this well. A tourist who sees suffering may speak of it. May write. May photograph. But a tourist who sees only hospitality becomes an unpaid publicist.

Even the awkward parts are staged. The security checks. The reminders to respect local customs. The smiles stiffened by rifles. These are not evidence of danger. They are set pieces. They produce the illusion of control. They keep the performance contained.

And the tourist, thinking himself perceptive, misses the script entirely.

He is offered kebabs on plates handed by boys who never made it to school. He tips the guide who hasn’t seen his sister in public in four years. He snaps a picture of a carpet merchant, not knowing the weaver behind the pattern hasn’t been allowed to work since 2021. He calls this connection.

The tourist thinks he has touched the real. But the real is what has been made invisible for his comfort. The real is sealed behind curtains and brick. The real is behind walls with no windows, because windows might allow women to look out, or worse, be seen.

The theatre works. It works because it confirms what the tourist wants to believe that beauty exists, that the people are warm, that the regime is manageable, that things might be improving. This is not information. This is performance art in service of propaganda.

Photojournalists play their part. Their captions purr with euphemisms. “A resilient nation.” “Life continues.” “Women adapt.” The Taliban love it. The tourism directorate reposts it. The images are clean, the stories softened. The women are silent. That silence is then translated into consent.

And always, at the centre of the frame, is the male traveler: serene, composed, morally unbothered. His feed grows. His likes rise. He becomes the story. The country flattens behind him.

The economic argument is always wheeled out last. A final act of justification. “But it helps the people.” As if economy is neutral. As if money is not political. As if tourism in a regime built on systematic erasure can ever be ethically clean.

Money moves. But women do not. That is the baseline. That is the deal.

Tourism creates jobs, yes. But only for men. Women are banned from earning. Women cannot work in hotels, in parks, in tourism departments. Every dollar handed to the smiling guide bypasses the woman who used to be a teacher. The woman who used to be a doctor. The woman who now sits indoors, criminalised for existing.

The Taliban use this revenue to fund the architecture of female disappearance: new morality checkpoints, new prisons for “immodesty,” new surveillance of homes where widows live without male guardians.

To say this is helping is to redefine harm.

Tourism props up an economy built on the backs of silenced women. It rewards a regime that punishes female breath. It gives legitimacy to a government that has declared war on half its people and won.

So the foundational question does not go away. It becomes louder.

What does it mean to move freely in a space where others are not allowed to exist?

It means you are not a traveler. You are a participant.

It means your freedom is someone else’s disappearance.

It means the space you think you are discovering has already been emptied for your arrival.

And it means that the hospitality you receive is not the culture of the people, it is the propaganda of the regime.

What your gaze refuses to see

A window is not just a frame. It is an aperture of being. It allows light in. It allows life to be observed, confirmed, registered. So the Taliban ban them.

Not all windows, no. Only the ones that face women. Only the ones that might let a woman look out from her kitchen. From her courtyard. From the corners of the house she is now sentenced to. The regime decided that even the image of a woman at a well, covered, anonymous, functional, was too provocative for public view.

They call this modesty. But it is surveillance. It is obsession.

It is a regime that interprets the ordinary act of being seen as a sexual threat. A woman gathering water is no longer a domestic scene, it becomes obscenity. Her silhouette, her motion, her mop held upright, all become criminal under a gaze too weak to contain its own projection.

This is not about lust. This is about control. Control so total it turns breath into danger. So total it must redesign architecture.

Windows are closed. Doors are locked. Women’s bodies are not allowed to exist outside the veil, and now, not even within view of it. That is the level of constraint that tourists enter. And yet, their cameras do not flinch.

They photograph mountains, minarets, bazaars. But their lenses refuse to see the one truth running through every frame: the women are gone.

The gaze sees everything except the women.
That is not accident. That is ideology.

When the regime removes women from classrooms, jobs, parks, and mosques, the camera follows the men instead. It documents the new normal. A world where male presence is uninterrupted. The gaze glides across landscapes cleansed of gender plurality. It does not record absence as loss. It records absence as scenery.

Travel content becomes testimony not just to the land’s beauty, but to the success of erasure. No amount of cinematic drone footage can compensate for the fact that half the population has been edited out.

And in this edit, safety becomes storyline.

The myth of safety is the lie of permission.
Safety for whom?
Safety for tourists is not safety for the women who live there.
The calm that tourists feel is the outcome of enforced stillness.

Tourism promoters call this stability. What they mean is: no one is protesting anymore. What they mean is: no one can protest anymore.

Influencers insist that "people are just living their lives." But who gets to live? Who gets to walk? Who gets to sit by the lake? The men do. The tourists do. The women are home, silent, invisible. Their lives are not part of the scenery because they are not allowed to be part of public space. That is the condition that permits tourism. That is the condition that makes it “safe.”

It is not safety. It is suppression. Disguised as peace. Packaged as adventure.

And around all of this is the decorum of the international community. The polite phrases. The brochures. The language drained of blood.

Diplomacy manufactures silence.
Every neutral sentence about “local customs” is a burial shroud.
Every mention of “cultural difference” is a trapdoor.
Every travel agency that refers to Afghanistan’s “complex present” is selling a script co-authored by perpetrators.

The activists call it gender apartheid. And yet, the response of international powerholders is as soft as the phrase is sharp. Countries still play cricket with the regime. Tour operators still sell “immersion.” Visa desks still stamp passports. Social media glows with hashtags. And the governments advise caution, but they do not cut ties. They do not say what needs to be said: you are funding the entrenchment of apartheid with your leisure.

This is not curiosity. This is collusion.
This is not a photo-op. This is a moral referendum.
This is not ethical tourism. This is a guided tour through the architecture of female annihilation.

The question remains:

What does it mean to move freely in a space where others are not allowed to exist?
It means you are standing on the scaffolding of someone else’s captivity.
It means your trip is a monument to their disappearance.
It means you have chosen to look and still, not see.

Let the next time you scroll through a video of a tourist sipping tea in Bamiyan, you ask:
Where are the women?
Where is the girl who used to sit in that school?
Where is the nurse who worked in that clinic?
Where is the laughter in that park?
Where is her window?
And why can’t she look out?

A factsheet to wrap it up – The architecture of disappearance

Country: Afghanistan
Women’s Empowerment Index: 0.173 [It shows that only women in Yemen with a score of 0.141 were less empowered than women in Afghanistan.]
Global Gender Parity Index: 0.237 [Only Yemen had a lower value at 0.141]

A. Domains of Discrimination

1. Endowments

2. Economic Participation

3. Justice & Civil Liberties

B. Institutionalized Misogyny

Policy Area Status for Women (2024)
Right to Education Denied
Right to Work Denied
Right to Vote Nullified under regime
Public Visibility Suppressed by law
Legal Recognition Erased from governance

[Source: Gender Index 2024: Afghanistan]

These are gaps, setbacks designed intentionally. These are deliberate acts of erasure.This is apartheid enforced by law, justified by ideology, and normalized through global silence and tourist indifference. This is not a cultural artifact. This is a human rights catastrophe. So the next time someone calls it “offbeat travel,” point them here. Because this is not an adventure. This is the map of a war waged on women’s existence.

Something to read:
1. Holiday in Afghanistan: Taliban wish you were here
2. Travel influencers say they are helping the people of Afghanistan. Not everybody is so sure - ABC News
3. Half the population, only half the story: Western tourism’s revival in Afghanistan – The Isis [The ending is good.]
4. Visit Afghanistan, land of culture, cricket and women closeted in their own homes | Catherine Bennett | The Guardian
5. Ignoring Warnings, a Growing Band of Tourists Venture to Afghanistan - The New York Times
6. Can the Taliban’s Tourism Campaign Pave the Way for Better Conditions for Women in Afghanistan?

#gender apartheid