The conscious exclusion of women from public spheres in Iran is not limited to government laws, police pressures or the courts. And because the largest part of this discrimination does not appear to be newsworthy, it remains hidden from public purview, as does its impact.
I remember an incident back in 1998 when I worked for Zan (Woman) daily. Aside the many limitations that this and many other newspapers had from a political perspective, and were thus forced to operate in defined and undefined territory, journalists and reporters who worked at the publication had a major problem with which they had to deal on a daily basis. While it should be natural for a woman’s publication to print plenty photos and images of women, finding such photographs was a constant headache.
I remember that to get some photographs of women engaged in some sport or game, I used to go to Hijab sports club in Tehran with two photographers. We would ask women volleyball or basketball players with long sleeves to jump towards the net or the basket so that the photographers would use their talent to try and get the tent or the basket, the hands and the ball, in a single photo snapshot. In other situations when we wanted to have photographs of women soccer players, we rounded up some of our own journalist colleagues, asked them to put on their long gowns and went into the street. There we asked them to pose with a ball. Imagine soccer with a long gown and long pants! But this was not the end of our acrobatics.
More than that, the hijab of sportswomen who had been photographed as they jumped towards the net or the basket had to be perfected through Photoshop before they could be published. We would change the length of sleeves and other clothing to make them presentable. And don’t forget that in those days the atmosphere for the media was much better than today. Now, not only the press, but all kinds of images and photographs, and even drawings that somehow show women without the instructed hijab that are displayed in galleries or exhibitions are either removed or censored.
Conditions in our literature were not, and are not, any better. Many women parts are changed in form and then in identity even when they are talked abut. For example the word chest now replaces the word breast. Actually even that is now being replaced with some other words such as rib case that are more remote to the breast (takhte sine or ghafase sineh).
These changes have been repeated so many times that we have gradually come to accept that our ways should be segregated, our elevators should be segregated, our classrooms should be segregated, our work offices should be segregated, our parks should be segregated, etc. Things have changed so much that we even accept when our daughters are rejected by a university because they far from the homes of the students, while we forget the reasons behind these stories. Just as we have accepted women without hair, without a face, without a head, without a breast, etc. So we will probably accept the disappearance of women from the public spheres. So we were first denied our feminity and now we are denied our identity.
So where are we going? Do we even realize that by expelling us to the edge and rejecting her physical identity what destructive images we are creating that are times worse than facing the natural body of a person? Do we know that by creating this tall wall between the sexes we have created the basis for a revolt? Furthermore, this fictitious image of us that they expect us to accept, has distorted our identity. We have become alienated with our own bodies. Our needs have no place in the media. We are the bodies that others want to have, and that woman that others desire.
Yes, the story of all the pressures that the state imposes on women is related to the sick feminity-purging mentality and then to the woman purging mentality. A sick mentality which only uses the body, and not the mind, of half the members of the nation to make a human judgment over it. They forget that a woman’s body is not the whole picture of a woman. And even though a woman without a body is not a complete woman. Men, let us women be ourselves. Let us be women with this very body that we have. Let us be feminine.
