I'm a 42 years old woman who was born and raised in Iran and am actively trying to escape this hell like country. I should say you and many other people who talk about iran have no idea what is the real life in my society.No, i don't want to be offensive or anything but many of your assumptions about my country is completely wrong.
First: voting in iran is actually a theater and there's no such thing as democracy.Any truly educated person knows that.
Second: many of young women in Iran go to university because they have no other options, not because they love to go to university and majority of these women go to a private(in name only) university that is completely controlled by government.
Third: so many many women are killed every single year by their fathers and husbands and brothers. Just because they don't want have strict hijab or want to have a boyfriend and majority of them are not punished especially the fathers.because in Islam children are father's property and he can kill his child and will not punished.
Unfortunately my english language is not as good as i want it to be to write more about my country.
I hope you don't think that i'm a rude person but please if you want to write about immodesty in your society you don't need to praise a country like mine or a brutal and dictator government like Islamic republic.
We don't have free press and free media that so many people in west take for granted and news about anything including honor killing is heavily censored.
I provide you some links.
The first one is about honor killing situation in iran:
Her father was sentenced to 9 years!!!!! in prison.I'm sure you never call it punishment.our government executes people for possessing drugs. 9 years for beheading your 14 years old daughter!!!??? I'm sure half of this 9 years he will be granted probation. When it comes to punishing men for killing their female relatives our government suddenly acts like Scandinavian countries.
The case of this child was exception, because 99.99 of this type of killings is never reported in the news.
It's painful to say that, but under Islam and Islamic culture people specialy women have been reduced to mere animals.
You asked me to provide incidents that a woman was killed by her father who had not been punished and i provided that.you didn't say that it should be about hijab. read your question again.
Haven't you heard of Mahsa Amini? It's strange that your article is about hijab in Iran but you never mention her and situation about her. again these cases are EXCEPTIONS and so many women are killed every single day in the home of their fathers and husbands in silence because of hijab or many other things.
I rarely comment for articles like yours but i couldn't resist this one, because it was so insulting to me and so many women living in iran who don't want to be treated as nothing more than animal.
In final note i should say, i follow you and so many people here in substack to be intellectually challenged not to intellectually insulted and lectured about how good of a life i have under Islamic government.
I don't know about Europe, but the honour killings in Canada almost always happen in Arab-muslim families. I.e. broadly in the same cultural milieu as the one that favours the hijab.
You're kind of reinforcing Maryam's point here, not contradicting it.
Yes but Simon your article does make it sound like women in Iran are not as oppressed as people think. And honor killings are indeed part and parcel of the same oppressive mindset that forces women to wear hijabs. Both are the result of fiercely traditionalist attitudes that want to keep women pure and faithful--and underscore their unease with too much female freedom.
Women in Iran are not as oppressed as people think.
Many people think that girls do not go to school in Iran - which is false.
Many people think that women are “thrown off buildings” for not wearing the hijab - which is false.
You can say that honor killings are “part of the same mindset” as the hijab law, but I think that’s a copout. If that’s the issue, then Western critics should stop talking about the hijab law and they should talk more about honor killings.
Also, you say that honor killings are driven by the want to keep women pure and faithful, but that doesn’t seem to be true all of the time. In the two examples of honor killings which Maryam gave, the issue was that the girl was going to marry someone from a rival tribe.
If an American man said “no daughter of mine will date a negro” and then killed his daughter for dating a negro, I think it would be quite misleading to say “this came from the mindset that women ought to be pure and faithful.” It seems that tribal animus was the bigger issue.
I think you could’ve avoided ALOT of these “but women overall are oppressed in Iran!” arguments if you had just stated somewhere in the article that “yes, Iran obviously has more of a problem with violence against women, and women are treated worse than they should be at least by the Iran culture which the government allows”.
Because your point is a salient one, but gets muddled by women who don’t know how to think critically shifting the goal posts to talk about women being overall still oppressed.
Unless you don’t think women are unjustly more oppressed in Iran, in which case I’d be curious to hear your arguments.
I don't know what has happened, I can see your question in my notifications but it doesn't appear in the comment section, so I replied to your previous comment. Abortion is legal up to 16 weeks of pregnancy, based on the belief that a soul doesn't enter the body until the fourth month, or in cases of fetal disability or danger to the mother. Different government officials have announced estimates of between 100,000 and 500,000 legal and illegal abortions annually.
All sex-related material on the internet is heavily filtered, forcing people to use VPNs to access it. This makes it nearly impossible to obtain reliable data on the negative consequences which are evident throughout society. Unofficial estimates suggest that there are nearly 300,000 prostitutes in Iran, and the actual number is likely much higher.
My objection to your article isn't rooted in feminism or any other ideology. As a lifelong resident of Iran, it took me nearly two decades to fully understand my own culture, religion, and country. It's unrealistic to expect foreign observers to truly grasp the complexities of the situation.
Unlike Western societies, where constant societal analysis is commonplace, many non-Western societies avoid self-examination. When a society refuses to confront its own issues, data and statistics become irrelevant. While I am a traditionalist regarding sexual matters, I would choose a society with visible sexual ills over one with hidden problems any day.
If only the justice system got it right before Honor killings, and appropriately punished women for not dressing the way their society dictates, maybe then they would learn the appropriate way to behave.
It’s great that you share your perspective on this issue as someone who lives so close to this, in a way people here rarely get to see. A couple things you, as an Iranian, may not know:
1. Voting in the US and most other Western countries is also theater. Most political decisions are made by large, unelected government organizations, such as the Department of State, or Food and Drug Administration. Politicians make their decisions primarily based on “lobbying”, where companies or private organizations will pay a person to “represent” their interests to the politician, usually with implied access to money or services.
2. In the US and Europe, university or trade school attendance is basically mandatory. There are no sustainable jobs to the vast majority of Americans and often Europeans outside of these options, and those who skip university or the trades are usually stuck in extreme poverty or homelessness.
3. Sexual violence is obviously not a big problem here, but you may not be aware of the other kinds of problems. For example, in most cities there are large subsections that you cannot enter because they are full of drug addicts or homeless persons who will violently attack, rob, rape, and/or kill persons who enter alone. Cities do very little about this. If you are middle or upper class, you can usually safely avoid this, but many lower income persons are trapped in these areas, and must deal with constant violence and drug use.
If you don’t feel safe in Iran you should leave, but you should think carefully about how much the picture of life in the US or Europe truly resembles reality, and what you have been shown. Americans like to talk about prosperity and freedom but in many parts of the US and Europe it is actually violent, dirty, and difficult to scrape by. It is very easy for new immigrants with no support network to end up stuck in these places.
To the first point: government organizations that are "unelected" are still elected transitively - someone who *is* elected appoints the staff of those organizations, or appoints someone in a chain of appointments who eventually does. Under Iran's system, the supreme leader exercises authority over every electoral roster and appointment (directly or transitively), including that of his own successor. But to all your points: these are obviously tenuous comparisons to draw between the U.S. and Iran with major differences of degree.
The experience of my country is a testimony that banning pornography,....not only doesn't make a society more pious, but makes people more eager to experience those banned activities.
Nowdays some young people in Iran ( including women) drink alcohol as casually as apple juice.
Vaginaplasty surgery has become a growing industry for ob/gyn doctors du to normalization of pornography among men.
Cheating on one's spouse
now is far more widespread than 50 years ago.
The age of prostitution has fallen to as low as 14-15 years old. Nowdays iranian women are big rivals of russian, ukrainian ..... women for prostitution in golf countries.
There is zero out of wedlock child in Iran,not because iranian women are more pious than their western counterparts, but because the parents of these young woman(even the religious parents)will provide abortion pill for their daughter.
Religious individuals in Iran are happy with current situation as long as the " outlook of society" apears Islamic. Because of this fact, there is so much focus on hijab in Iran not that they are concerned with morality in the society.
The only difference between a western society and an Islamic one is that the sexual ills in the former are on the surface and they are under the surface for the latter.
No, i didn't mean that at all. All I'm saying is that my society is not more sexually pure than a western society like United States because of its laws. That's it.
I read so much stuff here by some writers who are advocates of banning pornography. I read them interestingly and I 'm eager to know what is their solution, specialy when it comes to logistics of it.
I believe that sexual degeneracy is wrong and should be disallowed.
But i'm not talking about my own preferences towards this issue. I'm talking about practicality of it in society as a whole and sacrificing dignity of individuals specialy women in the process. Women are treated like animals in my country for the sake of having a " society free of sexual sin " and it has had the exact OPPOSITE effect on the country.
Hi Simon. I'm unfamiliar with your work or your persona generally, but was this entirely serious? Iran is one of my interests, and this was so misinformed that I'm tempted to write a whole piece about it. I think it's important to show why this extreme form of conservatism is wrong, but if you're already showing that through next-level trolling, then disregard.
That's an important clarification (though I wasn't oblivious to it) and worth taking into account when I write about this. Still there are definitely some conservative assumptions about rule-breaking and gender norms underlying this piece. If I had to summarize my objections, they are that his reasoning is poor, he is wrong about Iran specifically, and even if none of that was true, the conservative-informed approach here is backward. Stay tuned!
Sure, I'm interested in what you have to say about this. I think myself as a conservative, though admittedly lack the lexical knowledge than many of the writers here, so think about my responses keeping that in mind.
And one more. Geography is also important. The natives in the Amazonas are not underdressed because they are lewder than the others, but at least partially because it's always humid there, while I can see a reasoning for the niqab even, that it is to protect the face(that is also one of the most important asset for a woman) from the harmful tropical sunshine.
"Ambivalent on mandatory hair coverings" - really? Or are you just ambivalent on mandatory hair coverings for one sex?
If for both sexes, that sounds like a weird and cool society I'd want to check out. If for just one sex, it sounds like a stupidly oppressive society that I'd also want to check out.
Maybe, but the details of the Mahsa Amini case are murky. Also, I don’t think that one instance of police brutality would change the fact that the vast majority of offenders get minor punishments.
I’m not dismissing the treatment of Amini, but a lot of people in the West seem to think that Iranian girls can’t go to school and get executed on the spot for not wearing the hijab - and that’s just not true.
>Women's breasts are sexual in nature, men's are not. Hair is very different.<
This is entirely subjective and open to cultural interpretation. Obviously, many in Iran would disagree with your assertion that hair is very different!
Helpful post. Even if I may not agree with every single word and might say some things differently, this is still a good post. Thanks.
When I was 20, I did a quarter-long field study in the Chilean Andes with a dozen students from the University of California, mostly UCSC students. We were looking for endangered deer. We hiked days into the mountains carrying all of our own food and gear. Upon coming to a watering hole we would swim. At first the nude thing was a novelty. One girl, Sarah was really hot and it was great glancing in her direction as she sunbathed, pussy facing toward me, breasts toward the Sun. After about the third session of skinny dipping the novelty wore off. I kept my shorts on and so did about half of the other students.
Even in the wilderness, even among mostly environmental studies students, complete nudity just isn’t as appealing as just wearing a bathing suit.
On this same trip, during a group meeting, I skampered away and down into a little canyon to refill my water bottles in the creek. I was down there refilling by myself and looked up to see Sarah following my tracks down. When she got right up to me she squatted down just like me, lifted her shirt, pulled one breast out and started washing her nipple ring. It was an interesting experience. Then she washed the other. She was beautiful and I was honored by the display, but outwardly it was just a matter of fact washing. Chit chatting as she washed. In general it was a pleasant experience.
Was she trying to send me a signal? Was this some sort of alpha male, alpha female thing? I don’t think this was just about washing her nipple rings. She did this right in front of me. There was some deep tribal reason for it. Maybe it was her attempt to form an alliance or partnership with me. I don’t know. I didn’t take the offer. She was really hot, and generally a very nice person, but she wasn’t my type. This was not a public display of nudity. This was a powerful invitation that figuratively said, “How about we make a deal? How about we form an alliance, even if just a secret one?”
Seems arbitrary to me. I agree that making women wear burkas is too far. I also think nudism is too far. But on the broad spectrum between those two extremes, it seems to me like just a matter of opinion.
Well yes it's opinion, but my (and, I read, your) opinion is against.
I do think it's cool that there are other cultures in the world, so I don't think the US needs to be doing any "cultural imperialism" to force them away from it. That said, if someone were to ask my opinion, I'd tell them that in my opinion it seems like a dumb law, and breaking it seems reasonable to me.
You can't compare your culture to theirs, and that's what you're doing. The United States is naturally more liberal and they are naturally more conservative. You can't enforce liberal culture in a conservative cultural environment.
I mostly disagree, but I'll say that you're correct to say that the West's public decency laws need not be a standard for the world. A lot of leftists have trouble acknowledging that Current Year Western Elite Morality is just an arbitrary stop on the road of cultural drift and not necessarily a universal standard, and this is just one dimension of that.
The real problem is that, at least from what I can tell, Iran's public decency laws are controversial *within Iran*. I don't think controversial is a good thing for public decency laws to be.
Legislating morality (in which I would include public decency) generally only benefits the public good when you have a supermajority of support, such that the laws are basically uncontroversial and only serve to keep total weirdos from operating as spoilers for the rest of society. Public decency laws in most places are generally this way, for good reason.
Even if the intent of a morality-imposing law is basically good (and from the standpoint of its supporters, when isn't it?), once it's heavily opposed by a large minority or outright majority of the population, the juice generally isn't worth the squeeze. Bludgeoning those who disagree with you into submission has costs, it makes your entire society less pleasant. Better to work on persuading your opponents, rather than compelling them into submission.
Now, we could make the case for compelling our opponents to submit over a sufficiently important matter of morality, even when it's deeply controversial. But in that case, strict public decency laws seem like an odd hill to die on. Which, again, is why there aren't many examples of this happening in history, and why these laws are generally set at a level that is uncontroversial.
there are better and worse cultures and practices. there are better and worse, more and less oppressive, decency laws. there is nothing wrong with criticizing a culture with stupid, oppressive, superstitiously (religious) motivated decency laws, especially when those laws exist for the express purpose of subjugating one sex (the origin and motivation of these laws is not hidden and easy to show). covering ones sex organs and sex-specific “secondary sexual characteristics” such as breasts in women is reasonable and desirable because 1) viewing them on others illicit innate, instinctive, involuntary, nearly universal, visceral and psychological responses (these can be measured). and 2) most people do this without compulsion for their own physical and psychological comfort, so it is rarely, and if so minimally, oppressive. compulsory covering of sex organs and sex-specific secondary sexual characteristics is moral. compulsory hijab is immoral.
i edited my comment some before seeing this but still managed to neglect buttocks. i think given that sex organs and excretory orifices are so closely related in proximity and nearly universal sense of privacy that buttocks would be included. normal people dont like seeing other peoples buttholes outside of sexual contexts.
Buttocks are by definition sexondary-sexual characteristics: physical differences that primarily emerges during puberty and which are not essential for reproduction. Every human on Earth can easily spot the difference between a male ass and a female ass by virtue of the female ass being wider relative to the waist. The ones who say they can't spot this difference are either blind or lying.
Also Iran is a warm country it’s fucking insane to demand people to wear heavy clothes in 40 degree just because a small minority of religious fanatics put public indecency laws in the constitution and veto every repeal law on it or don’t even allow the election of candidates who oppose that. Also the very fact that those rules only are applicable for women is unfair
This is extremely gross and shameful of you to write, but it's hardly like I expect better of you Simon, and you've already been torn apart by the comments section thoroughly enough to where they hardly need my help.
Breaking unjust laws is always justified. It's the definition of civil disobedience, to draw attention to the monstrousness of the system. Appeal to legalism on such questions, and for a regime that axiomatically regards all laws as illegitimate at that, is the last refuge of the hateful and the retarded.
It's not about the precise dress code, it's about why it's enforced. In the West, nudity is nominally regulated for the protection of children. Practically it's regulated because it makes people uncomfortable. This is starkly different from Iran and other Islamic countries, where it's explicitly regulated for religious reasons.
You're the one retarded enough to simp for China to own the libs. I at least offered an actual point in which the compare favorably to another awful dictatorship.
This is true to an extent but I think there's an arms race dynamic here.
No one wants to be the girl who is MOST buttoned up. So once a few women start dressing more provocatively, the rest follow, even if they would prefer a more modest norm to be enforced.
Women are price takers, modesty is just one of the prices society sets.
A sign of a sick society is when people start to see women as price makers.
You know I was reading Out of the Silent Planet the other day and I note that C.S. Lewis considered the Warrior and Intellectual* species highly patriarchal (and obviously superior) and the urban modern species matriarchal (and obviously inferior).
*Truly intellectual, obviously he wrote a whole book about fake intellectuals (That Hideous Strength).
The difference is that public decency laws in the West are not based on Abrahamic fiction. There is nothing indecent about the female form. It is glorious. Any man who wants to cover it up is either crazy or a homosexual.
Are you stupid? Do you think she was merely protesting the hijab, or the religious police state that allows morality police to arrest and murder young women for Islamic morality laws?
Well the Iranian police are not allowed to murder young women for violations of Islamic morality law. I know there are a tiny number of cases of people dying in custody and the Western media seizes on them, but the facts on those cases are murky and it certainly is not a common practice. You seem to think that Iranian police grab women off the street and kill them if they're not wearing a hijab - and that's just not true.
I'm a 42 years old woman who was born and raised in Iran and am actively trying to escape this hell like country. I should say you and many other people who talk about iran have no idea what is the real life in my society.No, i don't want to be offensive or anything but many of your assumptions about my country is completely wrong.
First: voting in iran is actually a theater and there's no such thing as democracy.Any truly educated person knows that.
Second: many of young women in Iran go to university because they have no other options, not because they love to go to university and majority of these women go to a private(in name only) university that is completely controlled by government.
Third: so many many women are killed every single year by their fathers and husbands and brothers. Just because they don't want have strict hijab or want to have a boyfriend and majority of them are not punished especially the fathers.because in Islam children are father's property and he can kill his child and will not punished.
Unfortunately my english language is not as good as i want it to be to write more about my country.
I hope you don't think that i'm a rude person but please if you want to write about immodesty in your society you don't need to praise a country like mine or a brutal and dictator government like Islamic republic.
Maryam, do you have any specific examples of women killed by their fathers or husbands. who were not punished by the justice system?
We don't have free press and free media that so many people in west take for granted and news about anything including honor killing is heavily censored.
I provide you some links.
The first one is about honor killing situation in iran:
https://www.iranintl.com/en/202408284891
This link is about 14 years old girl who was beheaded by her father in her bed, because she had a boyfriend.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Romina_Ashrafi
Her father was sentenced to 9 years!!!!! in prison.I'm sure you never call it punishment.our government executes people for possessing drugs. 9 years for beheading your 14 years old daughter!!!??? I'm sure half of this 9 years he will be granted probation. When it comes to punishing men for killing their female relatives our government suddenly acts like Scandinavian countries.
The case of this child was exception, because 99.99 of this type of killings is never reported in the news.
It's painful to say that, but under Islam and Islamic culture people specialy women have been reduced to mere animals.
These are terrible incidents but they're not about the hijab. These murders were about whether the girl should marry a man from a rival tribe.
This article isn't about tribal attitudes in Iran nor is it about Iranian society in general. It's specifically about the hijab law.
You asked me to provide incidents that a woman was killed by her father who had not been punished and i provided that.you didn't say that it should be about hijab. read your question again.
Haven't you heard of Mahsa Amini? It's strange that your article is about hijab in Iran but you never mention her and situation about her. again these cases are EXCEPTIONS and so many women are killed every single day in the home of their fathers and husbands in silence because of hijab or many other things.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Mahsa_Amini
I rarely comment for articles like yours but i couldn't resist this one, because it was so insulting to me and so many women living in iran who don't want to be treated as nothing more than animal.
In final note i should say, i follow you and so many people here in substack to be intellectually challenged not to intellectually insulted and lectured about how good of a life i have under Islamic government.
Thnk you.
Honor killings isn’t an Iranian thing. They take place in Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan. Even in Europe and Canada.
I’m sorry you don’t like the very capable Iranian leadership, but this the killings you’re talking about have nothing to do with the regime.
I don't know about Europe, but the honour killings in Canada almost always happen in Arab-muslim families. I.e. broadly in the same cultural milieu as the one that favours the hijab.
You're kind of reinforcing Maryam's point here, not contradicting it.
Yes but Simon your article does make it sound like women in Iran are not as oppressed as people think. And honor killings are indeed part and parcel of the same oppressive mindset that forces women to wear hijabs. Both are the result of fiercely traditionalist attitudes that want to keep women pure and faithful--and underscore their unease with too much female freedom.
Women in Iran are not as oppressed as people think.
Many people think that girls do not go to school in Iran - which is false.
Many people think that women are “thrown off buildings” for not wearing the hijab - which is false.
You can say that honor killings are “part of the same mindset” as the hijab law, but I think that’s a copout. If that’s the issue, then Western critics should stop talking about the hijab law and they should talk more about honor killings.
Also, you say that honor killings are driven by the want to keep women pure and faithful, but that doesn’t seem to be true all of the time. In the two examples of honor killings which Maryam gave, the issue was that the girl was going to marry someone from a rival tribe.
If an American man said “no daughter of mine will date a negro” and then killed his daughter for dating a negro, I think it would be quite misleading to say “this came from the mindset that women ought to be pure and faithful.” It seems that tribal animus was the bigger issue.
I think you could’ve avoided ALOT of these “but women overall are oppressed in Iran!” arguments if you had just stated somewhere in the article that “yes, Iran obviously has more of a problem with violence against women, and women are treated worse than they should be at least by the Iran culture which the government allows”.
Because your point is a salient one, but gets muddled by women who don’t know how to think critically shifting the goal posts to talk about women being overall still oppressed.
Unless you don’t think women are unjustly more oppressed in Iran, in which case I’d be curious to hear your arguments.
You're absolutely insane pal.
I don't know what has happened, I can see your question in my notifications but it doesn't appear in the comment section, so I replied to your previous comment. Abortion is legal up to 16 weeks of pregnancy, based on the belief that a soul doesn't enter the body until the fourth month, or in cases of fetal disability or danger to the mother. Different government officials have announced estimates of between 100,000 and 500,000 legal and illegal abortions annually.
All sex-related material on the internet is heavily filtered, forcing people to use VPNs to access it. This makes it nearly impossible to obtain reliable data on the negative consequences which are evident throughout society. Unofficial estimates suggest that there are nearly 300,000 prostitutes in Iran, and the actual number is likely much higher.
My objection to your article isn't rooted in feminism or any other ideology. As a lifelong resident of Iran, it took me nearly two decades to fully understand my own culture, religion, and country. It's unrealistic to expect foreign observers to truly grasp the complexities of the situation.
Unlike Western societies, where constant societal analysis is commonplace, many non-Western societies avoid self-examination. When a society refuses to confront its own issues, data and statistics become irrelevant. While I am a traditionalist regarding sexual matters, I would choose a society with visible sexual ills over one with hidden problems any day.
If only the justice system got it right before Honor killings, and appropriately punished women for not dressing the way their society dictates, maybe then they would learn the appropriate way to behave.
You obviously didn't read what happened in those killings.
It’s great that you share your perspective on this issue as someone who lives so close to this, in a way people here rarely get to see. A couple things you, as an Iranian, may not know:
1. Voting in the US and most other Western countries is also theater. Most political decisions are made by large, unelected government organizations, such as the Department of State, or Food and Drug Administration. Politicians make their decisions primarily based on “lobbying”, where companies or private organizations will pay a person to “represent” their interests to the politician, usually with implied access to money or services.
2. In the US and Europe, university or trade school attendance is basically mandatory. There are no sustainable jobs to the vast majority of Americans and often Europeans outside of these options, and those who skip university or the trades are usually stuck in extreme poverty or homelessness.
3. Sexual violence is obviously not a big problem here, but you may not be aware of the other kinds of problems. For example, in most cities there are large subsections that you cannot enter because they are full of drug addicts or homeless persons who will violently attack, rob, rape, and/or kill persons who enter alone. Cities do very little about this. If you are middle or upper class, you can usually safely avoid this, but many lower income persons are trapped in these areas, and must deal with constant violence and drug use.
If you don’t feel safe in Iran you should leave, but you should think carefully about how much the picture of life in the US or Europe truly resembles reality, and what you have been shown. Americans like to talk about prosperity and freedom but in many parts of the US and Europe it is actually violent, dirty, and difficult to scrape by. It is very easy for new immigrants with no support network to end up stuck in these places.
To the first point: government organizations that are "unelected" are still elected transitively - someone who *is* elected appoints the staff of those organizations, or appoints someone in a chain of appointments who eventually does. Under Iran's system, the supreme leader exercises authority over every electoral roster and appointment (directly or transitively), including that of his own successor. But to all your points: these are obviously tenuous comparisons to draw between the U.S. and Iran with major differences of degree.
“Voting is theater and there is no such thing as democracy”?! Oh wow, just like in US, UK, Germany and France!
Well said Marayam.
Do you believe that pornography, prostitution, and adultery should be illegal?
The experience of my country is a testimony that banning pornography,....not only doesn't make a society more pious, but makes people more eager to experience those banned activities.
Nowdays some young people in Iran ( including women) drink alcohol as casually as apple juice.
Vaginaplasty surgery has become a growing industry for ob/gyn doctors du to normalization of pornography among men.
Cheating on one's spouse
now is far more widespread than 50 years ago.
The age of prostitution has fallen to as low as 14-15 years old. Nowdays iranian women are big rivals of russian, ukrainian ..... women for prostitution in golf countries.
There is zero out of wedlock child in Iran,not because iranian women are more pious than their western counterparts, but because the parents of these young woman(even the religious parents)will provide abortion pill for their daughter.
Religious individuals in Iran are happy with current situation as long as the " outlook of society" apears Islamic. Because of this fact, there is so much focus on hijab in Iran not that they are concerned with morality in the society.
The only difference between a western society and an Islamic one is that the sexual ills in the former are on the surface and they are under the surface for the latter.
This seems like a really long winded way of saying that you think sexual degeneracy and licentiousness should be permitted. Not good!
No, i didn't mean that at all. All I'm saying is that my society is not more sexually pure than a western society like United States because of its laws. That's it.
I read so much stuff here by some writers who are advocates of banning pornography. I read them interestingly and I 'm eager to know what is their solution, specialy when it comes to logistics of it.
I believe that sexual degeneracy is wrong and should be disallowed.
But i'm not talking about my own preferences towards this issue. I'm talking about practicality of it in society as a whole and sacrificing dignity of individuals specialy women in the process. Women are treated like animals in my country for the sake of having a " society free of sexual sin " and it has had the exact OPPOSITE effect on the country.
Hi Simon. I'm unfamiliar with your work or your persona generally, but was this entirely serious? Iran is one of my interests, and this was so misinformed that I'm tempted to write a whole piece about it. I think it's important to show why this extreme form of conservatism is wrong, but if you're already showing that through next-level trolling, then disregard.
I'd love to hear which specific parts you thought were inaccurate.
I just published my response.
This was about culture, not conservatism. Take it as the Peta ad with which animal would you eat.
You might think it's wrong or even idiotic, but that's their culture and I don't think that the West has anything left to offer in that regard.
If they want to change it, they will figure it out in due time. Shifts in culture still take some time.
That's an important clarification (though I wasn't oblivious to it) and worth taking into account when I write about this. Still there are definitely some conservative assumptions about rule-breaking and gender norms underlying this piece. If I had to summarize my objections, they are that his reasoning is poor, he is wrong about Iran specifically, and even if none of that was true, the conservative-informed approach here is backward. Stay tuned!
Sure, I'm interested in what you have to say about this. I think myself as a conservative, though admittedly lack the lexical knowledge than many of the writers here, so think about my responses keeping that in mind.
And one more. Geography is also important. The natives in the Amazonas are not underdressed because they are lewder than the others, but at least partially because it's always humid there, while I can see a reasoning for the niqab even, that it is to protect the face(that is also one of the most important asset for a woman) from the harmful tropical sunshine.
Do they have OnlyFans in Iran? I figure they probably don't have OnlyFans.
I'm ambivalent on mandatory hair coverings, but if mandatory hair coverings are the price you pay for a culture that doesn't have OnlyFans, well...
Pornography is totally illegal in Iran. https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/jx2g1o/world_map_of_pornography_laws_green_generally/
Wow, didn't see that one coming. I can't believe I was able to guess this would likely be the case.
Marrying four women at a time, each at nine years old, is totally fine!
How well does that work? How do they enforce it?
"Ambivalent on mandatory hair coverings" - really? Or are you just ambivalent on mandatory hair coverings for one sex?
If for both sexes, that sounds like a weird and cool society I'd want to check out. If for just one sex, it sounds like a stupidly oppressive society that I'd also want to check out.
Is it also stupid and oppressive that women have to cover their breasts and men don't?
Women's breasts are sexual in nature, men's are not. Hair is very different.
Also, the enforcement of these morality laws is a lot less benign than you posit. Mahsa Amini didn't just get fined.
Maybe, but the details of the Mahsa Amini case are murky. Also, I don’t think that one instance of police brutality would change the fact that the vast majority of offenders get minor punishments.
I’m not dismissing the treatment of Amini, but a lot of people in the West seem to think that Iranian girls can’t go to school and get executed on the spot for not wearing the hijab - and that’s just not true.
>Women's breasts are sexual in nature, men's are not. Hair is very different.<
This is entirely subjective and open to cultural interpretation. Obviously, many in Iran would disagree with your assertion that hair is very different!
They do have child and polygynous marriage! But I assume you and Simon consider that a plus.
Insane woman drops her clothes in public. Gets arrested.
Good! Let’s hope she gets the psychiatric help she clearly needs.
Helpful post. Even if I may not agree with every single word and might say some things differently, this is still a good post. Thanks.
When I was 20, I did a quarter-long field study in the Chilean Andes with a dozen students from the University of California, mostly UCSC students. We were looking for endangered deer. We hiked days into the mountains carrying all of our own food and gear. Upon coming to a watering hole we would swim. At first the nude thing was a novelty. One girl, Sarah was really hot and it was great glancing in her direction as she sunbathed, pussy facing toward me, breasts toward the Sun. After about the third session of skinny dipping the novelty wore off. I kept my shorts on and so did about half of the other students.
Even in the wilderness, even among mostly environmental studies students, complete nudity just isn’t as appealing as just wearing a bathing suit.
On this same trip, during a group meeting, I skampered away and down into a little canyon to refill my water bottles in the creek. I was down there refilling by myself and looked up to see Sarah following my tracks down. When she got right up to me she squatted down just like me, lifted her shirt, pulled one breast out and started washing her nipple ring. It was an interesting experience. Then she washed the other. She was beautiful and I was honored by the display, but outwardly it was just a matter of fact washing. Chit chatting as she washed. In general it was a pleasant experience.
Was she trying to send me a signal? Was this some sort of alpha male, alpha female thing? I don’t think this was just about washing her nipple rings. She did this right in front of me. There was some deep tribal reason for it. Maybe it was her attempt to form an alliance or partnership with me. I don’t know. I didn’t take the offer. She was really hot, and generally a very nice person, but she wasn’t my type. This was not a public display of nudity. This was a powerful invitation that figuratively said, “How about we make a deal? How about we form an alliance, even if just a secret one?”
Having to wear a hair covering outside at all times sounds pretty annoying to me. Maybe not "oppression", but I'd be quite annoyed if I had to.
I'm in favor of breaking dumb laws, democratic or not, so I also support the people in Iran who are doing so.
What do you think about nudists who think that clothes are annoying?
I agree that's too far, but the fact that a line exists somewhere doesn't mean that the place where Iran puts the line should be respected.
Seems arbitrary to me. I agree that making women wear burkas is too far. I also think nudism is too far. But on the broad spectrum between those two extremes, it seems to me like just a matter of opinion.
Well yes it's opinion, but my (and, I read, your) opinion is against.
I do think it's cool that there are other cultures in the world, so I don't think the US needs to be doing any "cultural imperialism" to force them away from it. That said, if someone were to ask my opinion, I'd tell them that in my opinion it seems like a dumb law, and breaking it seems reasonable to me.
You can't compare your culture to theirs, and that's what you're doing. The United States is naturally more liberal and they are naturally more conservative. You can't enforce liberal culture in a conservative cultural environment.
Now we're getting into the "all cultures are equal" nonsense.
Would they be OK with it if pedophiles photographed their nude children? Serious question, BTW.
The annoying part is that government officials will beat you with a stick when you take it off
I mostly disagree, but I'll say that you're correct to say that the West's public decency laws need not be a standard for the world. A lot of leftists have trouble acknowledging that Current Year Western Elite Morality is just an arbitrary stop on the road of cultural drift and not necessarily a universal standard, and this is just one dimension of that.
The real problem is that, at least from what I can tell, Iran's public decency laws are controversial *within Iran*. I don't think controversial is a good thing for public decency laws to be.
Legislating morality (in which I would include public decency) generally only benefits the public good when you have a supermajority of support, such that the laws are basically uncontroversial and only serve to keep total weirdos from operating as spoilers for the rest of society. Public decency laws in most places are generally this way, for good reason.
Even if the intent of a morality-imposing law is basically good (and from the standpoint of its supporters, when isn't it?), once it's heavily opposed by a large minority or outright majority of the population, the juice generally isn't worth the squeeze. Bludgeoning those who disagree with you into submission has costs, it makes your entire society less pleasant. Better to work on persuading your opponents, rather than compelling them into submission.
Now, we could make the case for compelling our opponents to submit over a sufficiently important matter of morality, even when it's deeply controversial. But in that case, strict public decency laws seem like an odd hill to die on. Which, again, is why there aren't many examples of this happening in history, and why these laws are generally set at a level that is uncontroversial.
there are better and worse cultures and practices. there are better and worse, more and less oppressive, decency laws. there is nothing wrong with criticizing a culture with stupid, oppressive, superstitiously (religious) motivated decency laws, especially when those laws exist for the express purpose of subjugating one sex (the origin and motivation of these laws is not hidden and easy to show). covering ones sex organs and sex-specific “secondary sexual characteristics” such as breasts in women is reasonable and desirable because 1) viewing them on others illicit innate, instinctive, involuntary, nearly universal, visceral and psychological responses (these can be measured). and 2) most people do this without compulsion for their own physical and psychological comfort, so it is rarely, and if so minimally, oppressive. compulsory covering of sex organs and sex-specific secondary sexual characteristics is moral. compulsory hijab is immoral.
Buttocks are not secondary sexual characteristics, but we generally require people to cover their buttocks in public.
i edited my comment some before seeing this but still managed to neglect buttocks. i think given that sex organs and excretory orifices are so closely related in proximity and nearly universal sense of privacy that buttocks would be included. normal people dont like seeing other peoples buttholes outside of sexual contexts.
Buttocks are by definition sexondary-sexual characteristics: physical differences that primarily emerges during puberty and which are not essential for reproduction. Every human on Earth can easily spot the difference between a male ass and a female ass by virtue of the female ass being wider relative to the waist. The ones who say they can't spot this difference are either blind or lying.
Imperialism is still imperialism regardless of how you dress it up
Also Iran is a warm country it’s fucking insane to demand people to wear heavy clothes in 40 degree just because a small minority of religious fanatics put public indecency laws in the constitution and veto every repeal law on it or don’t even allow the election of candidates who oppose that. Also the very fact that those rules only are applicable for women is unfair
This is extremely gross and shameful of you to write, but it's hardly like I expect better of you Simon, and you've already been torn apart by the comments section thoroughly enough to where they hardly need my help.
Breaking unjust laws is always justified. It's the definition of civil disobedience, to draw attention to the monstrousness of the system. Appeal to legalism on such questions, and for a regime that axiomatically regards all laws as illegitimate at that, is the last refuge of the hateful and the retarded.
It's not about the precise dress code, it's about why it's enforced. In the West, nudity is nominally regulated for the protection of children. Practically it's regulated because it makes people uncomfortable. This is starkly different from Iran and other Islamic countries, where it's explicitly regulated for religious reasons.
I’m not sure there’s a real difference between those two things.
You are defending Sharia law, religious authority, not norms developed over time with the consent of peoples living in a democracy.
Bad take.
did you know that women can vote AND run for office in china?
They can also have sex outside of marriage without risking a lashing sentence!
why did you think I want to hear about your sexual fetish?
You're the one retarded enough to simp for China to own the libs. I at least offered an actual point in which the compare favorably to another awful dictatorship.
Women will wear the minimum amount of clothing the society they are in allows them to say they are not a slut.
This is true to an extent but I think there's an arms race dynamic here.
No one wants to be the girl who is MOST buttoned up. So once a few women start dressing more provocatively, the rest follow, even if they would prefer a more modest norm to be enforced.
Women are price takers, modesty is just one of the prices society sets.
A sign of a sick society is when people start to see women as price makers.
You know I was reading Out of the Silent Planet the other day and I note that C.S. Lewis considered the Warrior and Intellectual* species highly patriarchal (and obviously superior) and the urban modern species matriarchal (and obviously inferior).
*Truly intellectual, obviously he wrote a whole book about fake intellectuals (That Hideous Strength).
The difference is that public decency laws in the West are not based on Abrahamic fiction. There is nothing indecent about the female form. It is glorious. Any man who wants to cover it up is either crazy or a homosexual.
Are you stupid? Do you think she was merely protesting the hijab, or the religious police state that allows morality police to arrest and murder young women for Islamic morality laws?
Well the Iranian police are not allowed to murder young women for violations of Islamic morality law. I know there are a tiny number of cases of people dying in custody and the Western media seizes on them, but the facts on those cases are murky and it certainly is not a common practice. You seem to think that Iranian police grab women off the street and kill them if they're not wearing a hijab - and that's just not true.