Iran’s Sexual Revolution

The Iranian- born American anthropologist Pardis Mahdavi has, in her new book “Passionate Uprisings: Iran s Sexual Revolution’, done truly original and far-reaching research about public health and sex education in Iran. In most parts of her book, she steps aside and allows her material to order itself before the reader in all its richness. Many aspects of her research are relevant to the Islamic tradition outside of Iran as well, particularly in regard to sexual practices, sex education, marriage, homosexuality, and sexual morality in general.
Mahdavi’s research traces the wrenching transformation of a society that, thirty years ago, attempted to resolve its divisions and ambiguity by legally and ideologically committing itself to tradition over modernity, even at the price of denial and repression. Many today s Iranian youth, especially those from the urban middle and upper classes, are no longer willing to accept this bargain and even the older generation is beginning to allow itself to be moved by the young.
Mahdavi’s best and most groundbreaking material has to do with the public health implications of this rift between generations and between acknowledged and unacknowledged behaviors, as well as the society s slow and patchy but often ingenious educational response.
In a country where run-of-the-mill dating and fashion are illegal, extreme practices have emerged in the private spaces occupied particularly by well-off, heterosexual Tehrani youth. Mahdavi shows up at a party, thrown by a mullah s daughter whose parents are out of town, that turns out to be a giant orgy. Smaller parties, too, frequently become occasions for group sex. Young Iranians, born after the revolution, burrow tunnels under the walls the regime has erected to isolate them from the West. And no amount of repression has succeeded in smothering the seemingly trivial but inextinguishable human impulse toward beauty, the playfulness of fashion, or the electricity of sex.
Out on the heavily policed city streets, young people cruise for anonymous sex partners by passing notes into the windows of neighboring cars when they are stuck in traffic, or by driving to poor neighborhoods where nobody will recognize them as they scour the sidewalks for partners they hope never to see again. Adultery, for women, is punishable by stoning in Iran, but fully half of Mahdavi s married, female research subjects are unfaithful to their husbands; for many of them, picking up lovers is a regular form of recreation. And despite the legal requirement that women in Iran cover their hair and hide the curves of their bodies, fashion obsesses the women in Mahdavi s study. They apply layer after layer of makeup, and they find ways to make the hijab as sexy as the skimpy summer attire of Western women.
While this portrait of Iranian sexual experimentation may be shocking on its surface, it has grown familiar to most people who have visited Iran or followed its cultural developments in the past decade. Less well known, however, is that, for all their promiscuity and seeming sophistication, many of these young Iranians suffer from a lack of sexual education and resources that fits the official culture of pious abstinence rather than the actual one of looseness and risk. The birth control method of choice among Mahdavi s informants is withdrawal. Women who take the pill frequently lack the most basic information and take it only erratically, depriving themselves of almost all of its effect. Condoms are considered so filthy and embarrassing that even people who share florid details about their sex lives with Mahdavi blush at their mention, and no one wants to be seen requesting them at a pharmacy. AIDS, educated young Iranians tell Mahdavi, is transmitted through visits to the dentist or hairdresser, and other sexually transmitted diseases come only from a certain unsavory sort of woman.
While wealthy women can obtain abortions, illegal in most cases but common, thanks to poor contraception, from sympathetic doctors at vast expense, poorer women acquire on the black market pills or injections meant for animals. Mahdavi went to a back street where dealers sell these medications, just to see how easily they could be acquired. A dealer sold her a vial of pills without the least instruction on what to do with them. Physicians she interviewed told her that they see a great many women seriously injured or rendered infertile by self-administered abortions meant for animals.
Many young Iranians risk run-ins with the morality police in the name of partying and sex. Can we claim that their revolt against sexual restrictions is political? In a narrow sense, this claim is obviously true insofar as the Iranian regime mandates Islamic dress and abstinence until marriage.
Mahdavi documents well how young people reject Islamic sexual morality; feel they should have the right to associate with whomever they wish and to do what they please with their bodies, and who are willing to risk brief, but plenty unpleasant, run-ins with the morality police in the name of fashion, partying, dating and sex. Some of Mahdavi s subjects describe a night or two spent in a jail cell; others are whipped, and one couple is forced to marry. (Mahdavi doesn t say whether class differences among offenders figure in the ways the morality police mete out punishment.).
Does Mahdavi imagine that these young people, if granted a modicum of personal, sartorial and social freedom, would fight on for freedom of expression, freedom of religion, prison reform, representative government, an independent judiciary that respects the rights of the individual? But there is something tautological about this question, and Mahdavi does not draw out any deeper links between the political movements, like the one for secular democracy, roiling Iran and the changing sexual mores she observed.

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