Meandering around the Iran-drenched internet, the thing that stands out is who it is that’s leading the insurgency.
Unusual suspects though they are, Iranian women have seeded a revolution.
Surprisingly, I’m not talking about Neda Agha-Sultan, the protester whose slaughter was captured on video and posted online.
The most meaningful image of the entire uprising, Neda’s murder is little more than a figment of, if not the movement, then the meta-movement. This movement-within-a-movement is a Western frolic, a comfortably vicarious show of courage.
At a time when America is fooling around with populism as a concept, Iranians – Iranian women, no less – are leading a citizen’s coup d’etat.
The footage of Neda’s fate thrills viewers. It’s a snuff film. Pulp fiction. Visceral for sure, but really just a convenient current event with which to prove you’re with-it enough to have been forwarded the video link.
These are the women the “free world” diminishes with their piteous adjectives and intransitive verbs: Oppressed, subservient, repressed, subjugated, suppressed, subdued.
Sure many of them dress ultra-modestly, but they, to borrow the American colloquial, live out loud.
Iranian women have been for decades among the most active, engaged people anywhere, but you’d never know it from the way the world refers to them.
There’s the women-led One Million Signatures Campaign, for example, and the female-founded Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation, not to mention the various street rallies, strikes, and uprisings organized by Iranian women.
We in the West, crouched in precarious freedom, never hear that Iranian women are accomplished. That would hardly square with the prevailing narrative. The fact is that Iranian women rock their own world, curious and determined despite their culture.
Indeed, it’s precisely the illusion of subservience that permits these women to be so engaged. If there’s a label to attach to them, it’s not subservient or subjugated or subdued, it’s subversive.
Women in Iran defy the expectations of their dictators.
Some of these women wear blue jeans, like Neda. Some of them cover their bodies but not their faces. Some cover their faces. Some cover their faces but highlight their eyes provocatively with black kohl. Whatever their dress, these women understand what the U.S. never has: Looks deceive.
Sure Iranian women look oppressed. But it’s possible that they’re at least as liberated as American women.
After all, we in the West lack the luxury of understanding that a burqa covers the mouth but not the eyes. Iranian women may not have the freedom of speech, but in a world where seeing is believing and actions speak louder than words, they speak freely.
In Iran, Iranian women are denied power. In America, Iranian women are denied agency. Our pity – our baseless certainty that they need protection, can’t create a harbor of their own – makes us complicit in their captivity.
