iranian women are under conservatorship
we must stand with them
Two months into the powerful grassroots women-led protest movement over the killing of Mahsa Amini in Iran, human rights groups are reporting that 50 children have been executed and activists are warning that many more protestors who have been arrested, could meet a similar faith.
As Iranian organizers are calling on international leaders and foreign governments to act, it’s worth reiterating just how dismal the situation is for women in Iran. Teenage girls are leading this revolution because they don’t have much to lose. In fact, they have almost nothing.
Not unlike Britney, the 44 million women of Iran are living under conservatorship. The mandatory hijab, is just the tip of the iceberg. Iranian women are held captive by men. They cannot travel. A woman can’t access a passport to leave the country unless her husband grants her permission. Women don’t have the right to marry or the right to get divorced, the former must be approved by her father or brother, and the latter by an Islamic court. Given that the state considers women mentally unfit to make the most basic decisions about their own movements, body, relationships and finances, they face horrifying levels of physical brutality by men and the state, illustrated by Mahsa Amini’s sudden death, while in morality police custody.
But while women and girls are infantilized, they are also simultaneously adultified. On the one hand, grown adult women are treated like children and have male guardians, but on the other, the age of criminal responsibility is 15-years-old for boys, while it’s inexplicably only 9-years-old for girls. That means that a girl is held responsible before the law, six years before a boy will ever be, and that she can be executed or forced into marriage with an older man before she enters the 4th grade.
The parallels with abortion bans in the US are obvious. How can a 10-year-old girl be old enough to become a mother, but be too young to choose what clothes she wears to school? Patriarchy lives in the impossible contradictions and expectations imposed on women and girls to conform to a system that swears to be rooted in masculine logic, but that really just boils down to a pathetic fear of female power.
But the gender apartheid in Iran is not just leveraged with big brute force against women, it’s also in the denying of small pleasures to women. According to Human Rights Watch, Iran is the only country that still bans women from attending sports games. Last year, the government also censored a woman from enjoying a pizza and a man serving her tea on television. Keeping women scared is one thing, but keeping them unhappy is just as cruel and calculated as a political strategy from a predatory government that needs women to be divorced from their own selfhood. It’s harder to fight for your life when you you think you don’t have anything to live for.
But thankfully, state-fabricated female apathy is no longer a winning strategy in Iran, and even here in the US, where the midterm election proved that an anti-woman agenda will cost you. If you think the regime in Iran and the fascist takeover of the Republican party in the United States have nothing in common, try and guess which country has a propaganda network that just instructed women to get married so that that they vote against their own basic human rights and interests.
American and Iranian elites alike, bank on the idea that women will be tacit in their own oppression. Depressing women in the present is an insurance policy to keep them subservient in the future. The reverse is also true: weaponizing female misery also works. Just ask the US government in the 1960s about convincing women that domestic servitude sparks joy to keep them aligned with the goals of the state and consumer capitalism.
But based on the political uprisings unfolding from Iran to the US, feminists are jubilantly reclaiming their right to life on their own terms. The road to freedom will be arduous and long, but when we stand in solidarity with each other, across genders and continents, radical happiness will win.