Iran’s Sexual Rebellion, or Real Men Come From Above

When I was sixteen I decided to read the Bible. I’d been made to go to church every weekend with my parents and had to that point accepted their belief in god, heaven, and placating him through good behavior. I didn’t have any more reason to disbelieve it than I did the claim we’d be eating potatoes for dinner. As a child it seemed like a great bargain to trade a minute of daily prayer and sexual abstinence for eternal life. As I grew older religion become more and more of an inconvenience in my welling lust to wander and experiment–to further open the cracked door between childhood and adulthood and roleplay in the floppy slacks of my uppers. By the time I was sixteen the pre-requisites for admittance into paradise had gone from inconvenient to incoherent. Caffeine was a sin along with ear rings, lips stick, and watching television on the sabbath. While I hadn’t yet discovered explicit text damning of masturbation, I had a sense that it too would need penance.

It took me a nearly a year to read the Bible in entirety, but two big ideas formed in me during that time. Religion is hopelessly arbitrary and it’s utterly invented. When I discovered the mandate against shellfish I thought I had discovered a fantastic loophole. My mother had forbidden all pork products in our house but, as the offspring of a Northsea fisherman, she had a more forgiving taste for creatures that lurked in the ocean that weren’t covered in scales. This wasn’t quite proof against religion but a first crack, anyway.

Then come the insane ledgers of names and dates that comprise Numbers and Deuteronomy, the pages of precise measurements to use when building a proper temple, the entirely unexplained (and repeated) requirements that women not speak in a temple and keep their hair covered even while a man with covered head would be considered a sin. A big finish involving levitation, the exiled cryptograms of John the Baptist, and a boiling fantasy of cross-bred animals seemed completely off-putting. I couldn’t yet say what I believed in but I knew scaly beasts with seven heads were a long-shot even as metaphor.

Realizing religion is invented isn’t a great–or difficult–accomplishment, but it does open the door onto a much bigger series of questions about life, purpose, and whether or not levitation is possible through natural means (old dreams die hard). In trying to answer these questions the importance of sexual desire tends to run off the leash and through the empty spaces religion leaves behind. Sex has in it every bit as much irrationality as religion, bending us into ridiculous poses and postures.

Iran is one of the most officially religious countries in the world. It’s a place easy to shrink into a dull and lifeless theocracy, whose character and history are bound in the opaque riddles of thousand year-old religious ideals. Iran is written about in news stories and editorials as an anthropomorphized super-collective of unscrupulous theocrats whose religious backbone defines the population and their politics. Given that most of the daily influx of stories about Iran are politically oriented, and often alarming in their implications, it’s easy to imagine a country as an opponent of the West in practice and philosophy.

In a 2008 book Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s Sexual Revolution Pardis Mahdavi documents seven years of research in Tehran where she claims to have discovered political resistance through sexual rebellion. As headscarves and manto’s become skimpier and urban youngsters defy the morality police to attend boozy sex parties the credibility of the religious government imposing its wisdom through social constraint is being undermined.

Many in the West watched these brave people stand against an armed government hoping for political change in 2009, but the threads of dissent seem in some ways apolitical. Hashemi Rasfanjani, the former president who opposed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a 2005 runoff election, had supported some of the more severe social restrictions in earlier regimes, including a law that prescribed slashing a woman’s lips with razors for wearing lipstick. During the election Rasfanjani had reversed his social stances and encouraged young people to demonstrate for him, even distributing promotional CD’s with excerpts of his speeches set to disco music. In Mahdavi’s account, many of the young and disaffected people volunteered for Rasfanjani, not out of conviction to his policies but rather as an excuse to get out of the house, to gather and socialize in public without fear of harassment.

Iranian youth culture and dissent is, in Mahdavi’s description, more interested in the social than the political. Her subjects spend their evenings in cafes, parks, restaurants, and house parties. What goes on will be familiar to anyone who’s ventured beyond their own front door in the West. Men chase after women, women luxuriate in the thrill of being desired, character judgements are made based on fashion, alcohol is consumed en masse, and a perpetually mutating backdrop of music fills the scenery with zeitgeist. As many of these same young people filled city streets in 2009 shouting “Death to the dictator,” in reference to Ayatollah Khameni, it cannot be that the stakes were primarily political.

Like most religions, the Shi’ism that has defined the Iranian political state for the last 30 years heavily favors men and is, not coincidentally, near paralyzed on the subject of sex. By religious mandate, women are forced to cover both their hair and body in public, their court testimony is given half the weight of a man’s, they cannot marry at any age without consent of their fathers, and are sometimes subject to the death penalty for adultery. In 2004 a young woman was hung because her grandfather thought she had lost her virginity and turned her into the police. While he later came to regret her death and his role in it, the sanctification of chaste women is common.

You’ll also find explicit precedent for these limitations in Christianity and Judaism. Ironically, it’s the Bible that presents explicit instructions for women to cover themselves in public though there is no such verse in the Qur’an. Though Westerners scoff at these comparisons, we’re not yet 100 hundred years removed from an era where women weren’t allowed to vote or own property independently in America.

America was conceived as a secular country, and explicitly declared so by John Adams and Congress in 1797, “not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” Yet it has never had a moment of rest from its own believers who insist religious conviction is inherently political. Thus, while the early years of the country were as bacchanalian as they were entrepreneurial, the particular bent of male-centric religious anxiety has nested in laws restricting everything from oral sex to public blasphemy. Untill 2003 it was still technically illegal to have anal sex, gay or straight, in 14 states in America. We haven’t freed ourselves from the germ of religious piety, but rather the culture seems to have moved on to bigger questions, ones which religion is no better suited to answer than Paul McCartney.

If the sun will eventually burn out, if the Andromeda Galaxy will inevitably collide with our own, if evolution will likely make us unrecognizable to ourselves by the time we have to reckon with those possibilities–what can the purpose of living be? Did we come into existence here only to disappear again a few million years later? Were The Beatles wrong when they said love is all we needed? Was it really love, and also a plan B that includes interstellar travel to find a new home?

It’s said that there are no atheists in foxholes, but it’s also true that in case of heart failure most people would prefer a defibrillator to a prayer circle. If a religion can control the most private and natural instincts a person has it can control anything. The Iranian Revolution was a victory of many different groups, communists, socialist, bazaar merchants, and the clerics disgusted with the shah’s Western excess. It was a trick of time and momentum that created that made it possible for the clerics to wind up on top of this coalition. The war against Iraq made the unifying powers of faith especially useful but almost immediately following, cracks in the celrical overreach began to show. In the last decade the growth of those social cracks has accelerated.

Mahdavi identifies her experience in Tehran during the last decade as a reasonable analog to the sexual revolution in the 1960′s. “As we saw back then, activism in the sexual revolution led many to the civil rights type movements that followed,” she told me. “We are witnessing the same in Iran with the Green Movement.” It’s a tempting analogy, but the past never perfectly repeats itself–it only seems to.

I’ve never been to Iran. I write all of these generalized arguments from some gut level response to the dispatches, stories, and confessions that have survived the translation into American. These are ominous times in the world, we report on one another with a fearful skepticism of governments. The world is on the verge of an open arms race in the middle east, spurred by Iran’s nuclear activity. The Iranian foreign minister was just fired while on mission abroad. His replacement is a nuclear expert. Meanwhile, Reza Aslan alleges the recent murder of Iranian nuclear scientists is the covert work of US and Israeli intelligence forces.

And still, the young and unforgiven gather in closed rooms to drink imported alcohol, listen to music loud enough to become a physical sensation, and, hopefully, fuck someone new. We do the same things here and there. We identify ourselves with our clothes and consumption choices–it gets us no closer to an answer here than it does there. Mahdavi opens with a description of artiste bazi, the practice of driving artistically, often at great speed and with maximum verve. We have laws against this kind of stuff in America. We have stop lights, lanes, traffic cops, surveillance cameras in intersections, helicopter controlled radar zones, and holiday check points to sniff out the drunk driver. Iran is one of the deadliest places in the world to drive a car, but it’s also one where driving is not simply functional. It’s a self-contained sensation that can be innately personal and maximally dangerous.

In America our interest in these fearful pleasures has been tamed, bartered to a system of incremental prosperity, stability, and metered hedonism. We can have gay sex, but not gay marriage. We can have Jagermeister but not marijuana. Alcohol is big business but public drunkenness is criminal. We can have a car in every garage, but every driver must agree to the same restrictions. These are negotiated freedoms, not natural ones–they are always conditional. We are secular and yet swayed by our own clerics. It wasn’t until 1864 that the religious turned “In god we trust” into a national motto. We have yet to find a better way to swear in a president than with a bible. Even Barack Obama forced the nation to listen to an evangelical entrepreneur preach at his inauguration.

Mohammad-Javad Larijani, Iran’s Human Rights Council leader, bristled in a recent interview when Iran was described as a theocracy. It’s not that the term is necessarily inaccurate, but rather that the term has become a form of political condescension. It’s the kind of condescension that can only come from a society of male-oriented authority condescending another of its not-so-distant kind. Jafaa is another word in Farsi that has no real analog in English, the special kind of wrong-doing that you can only do to someone who loves you. Religion is the preeminent excuse for being cruel in the name of love, but politics is not very far behind. And beneath both figureheads is a self-replicating knot of people finding new reasons to get drunk and fuck in the dark. On both levels it’s the men on top of the women. They don’t seem to know how they wound up there and they often appear violently afraid someone will ask.

*Images via Hamed Saber and sinabeet