Excellent reportage by Elisabeth Bumiller in the NYT.
Some Afghan women are so conditioned to fear outside males that it limits the ability of the US military to provide to their medical needs.
The killer (literally) quote:
Corporal Gardner, a helicopter mechanic who was working with the female Marines from Pendleton but had not trained with them, found herself as the lone woman dealing with five ailing Afghan women. There was no female interpreter or medical officer — there are chronic shortages of both — and the Afghans refused to leave their compound or let the male interpreter and medical officer come to them. Corporal Gardner devised a cumbersome solution. “Some of these women would rather die than be touched by a male,” she said. “So we’ll diagnose by proxy.”
The quote misleads a bit: the women have been conditioned into accepting this restriction. The people who would rather see them die before being touched by a male doctor are their husbands and fathers and brothers and sons.
Such is the level of gender control: their health is sacrificed to the honor of their males.
It does get any more backward than this: my pride before your pain.