As an equal-opportunity catastrophe, the revolution had generously confused the sexuality of secular middle- to upper-middle-class Iranian women as well. These girls married for love and professed to oppose the rigid morals propagated by the regime, but found themselves as conflicted as their highly traditional peers in the realm where sexuality, self, and future intersected. Should they try to carve away the influence of tradition and family on their life choices, as Fatimeh was gingerly attempting? Should they look for relationships with men who thought every part of them, including the unconventional, tentative parts, was fantastic? Could they afford to be honest about their sexuality (like the fact that they had some), or should they be guarded, and play to the still-traditional expectations of Iranian men (who liked the farce of believing they were the first—to make you breathless, to make out, to go to bed).
Relationships that were considered successful, that led to weddings and emigration and babies, so often required a total shrouding of a woman’s real life and desires. Everyone knew this, because they had watched girlfriends go through lovers, get bored of not being taken seriously, hit upon a suitable prospect, and fake their pasts and camouflage their needs and tastes in order to get married.
Becoming this mercenary—prepared to meet, marry, and live under pretense of being someone you were not—took a while. It took the failure of the relationships where you tried to be yourself, tried to communicate your expectations and passions (hoping they would be adored and encouraged), and watched it all fall apart.
A young distant relative of mine, Mira, grappled with these considerations at the tender age of twenty-two. We weren’t very close, but every couple of months I would drop by for dinner, sometimes staying the night so Mira and I could watch videos and raid her mother’s stash of French chocolates. “So what’d we get this week?” I asked her. In Tehran, where Western movies were officially banned, everyone had a filmi, a video guy, who schlepped a trunkload of new films around to his clients’ homes as a sort of mobile video store.
Mira didn’t answer, but she slipped a tape into the VCR, and dimmed the lights. She looked at me with an expectant, abashed smile. I need your help with something, she said, winding her thick, ash-streaked hair into a loose knot. Her skin was like porcelain, and glowed without all the layers of foundation and blush she coated it with during the day. If I had skin like hers, I would wear nothing but lip gloss, ever. But her morning ritual before the mirror took an hour and a half.
When summer rolled around, Iranian girls groomed themselves with a seriousness of purpose I had never before witnessed, even in California, a place dedicated to the worship and pursuit of external beauty. Often, a particular feature was singled out for obsessive attention. Tattooed eyebrows, collagen-plumped lips. For the daughter of my waxing woman, it was the fingernails. She grew them out an inch long and painted them a different technicolor every single day. Sometimes she affixed nail jems, sometimes alternating colors on the tips, for particular effect. When finished, she would blast Mary J. Blige and “Nastaran,” that year’s Persian pop hit, on the stereo in the living room, and dance around alone, waving her hands in the air to the beat, to dry the lacquer. Exhausted, she would splay her fingers for me to inspect that day’s creation—the fruits of an hour’s labor—which she would wipe off the next day with acetone, priming her canvas anew. I suppose teenagers the world over were preoccupied with beauty—the aesthetics of being not quite a girl, not quite a woman—but in Tehran the attention seemed extreme.
Mira liked to remind me that because of the country’s demographics, each year one million Iranian women were unable to find a husband. She repeated this figure, or possibly urban legend, with a grave solemnity and tragic expression.
Mira was distressed over my beauty regimen. Since I was neither looking for a husband nor habituated to overcompensating for the veil with too much makeup, I usually went about with what I called a natural look and Mira called self-neglect. Mira’s adolescence had corresponded with the years just before the election of Khatami. This had given her a politically weighted relationship to the products of Revlon that continued to this day, when it really wasn’t that big a deal anymore.
“You really need to do something with yourself,” she told me with a disapproving glance, as though I had a mustache and I walked about in a mumu. “Men are turned on by makeup.”
Applied properly, she informed me, makeup is meant to mimic how women look when they are aroused—smoldering eyes, flushed cheeks, swollen lips. I was older and supposed to know these things. They were included in the skills of husband acquisition, which also included: knowing how to make a proper béchamel sauce, being coiffed to gleaming perfection at all times, even when stepping outside in the morning for milk, and smiling pleasantly and disguising any hint of a personality.
The objective of this skill-set was to nab an Iranian software designer from Palo Alto who had flown to Tehran for wife shopping. If I had packaged myself properly, maybe he would pick me. Perfect hair! Perfect sauce! And I would be rescued and taken back to America, to shop at Pottery Barn and get depressed with all the other imported wives (or at least the ones who didn’t ask for their divorces on the tarmac).
Deep down, many friends and relatives suspected something was wrong with me. Clearly I had been unable to find either a job or a husband in the West, and that’s why I had come to Iran, to toil day and night before a laptop hanging out with clerics. They offered sympathy and helpful advice, like how to pour tea more gracefully and rim my eyes with kohl.
Usually, because she loved me and thought it her duty, Mira was the one giving me lessons, in cosmetics and cuisine, but that night, I was supposed to have the answers, to whatever it was in the VCR.
She hit the play button, and a fuzzy image of two very white, very naked people appeared on the screen. I’m not prudish, but neither have I seen much porn in my life. I definitely haven’t seen German porn from the seventies, which is what this appeared to be. I rose and shut the door to the kitchen nervously. If someone were to walk in, there was little doubt who would be held responsible for such a session. Certainly not innocent, supposedly virginal Mira.
She expertly fast-forwarded to the next scene. Clearly, this was not her first screening. A towering man, Viking-like, was busily plying his fingers between the parted legs of a frizzy-haired woman.
“Why does he keep doing that?”
I cracked open a pistachio, from the bowl on the table, and studied the shell, encrusted with salt and lemon juice. “He’s, uh, pleasuring her.”
“But why there? Like that?”
“That’s where her, uh . . . that’s a very sensitive spot.” What was it with young Iranians? How could they be so obsessed with sex, yet know so little about it? Or maybe she was being disingenuous, pretending not to know because she was too shy to straight out say she wanted to talk about sex.
I switched off the video and asked for the real story. I refused to believe she didn’t know about her own sex organs, though I suppose it was a slim possibility. As it turned out, her boyfriend had given her a “sex kit” to educate herself with, which included the video and a few lewd magazines. Because their sexual encounters were limited, she explained, he didn’t want to waste their time in erotic tutorial. Since Mira was a virgin, and I knew they both lived with family, I asked when and where this knowledge was being put to use. Sometimes we go to the park behind the house at night, or if his parents are out, we’ll go to his place, she said. He sounds seedy, I said disapprovingly. I want to please him, she sniffed. Seedy boyfriend preferred the sort of sex that allowed her to remain, technically, a virgin. “Is that a problem?” she asked.
Where to begin? Should I pull up a gynecological site on the Internet, and explain vaginal mechanics? Should I bother asking whether they use condoms, although I was certain they didn’t? Do I point out that she is supposed to enjoy sex, too? If Mira started telling her seedy boyfriend what she wanted in bed, he might well consider her loose, acting
like a jendeh, a whore. Progress in gender relations circa Tehran 2001 meant that men were now willing to marry women who slept with them during the dating phase. But that didn’t mean they would marry the ones who had acted like they liked it.
I didn’t know what Mira should do. As a starry-eyed romantic, full of passion and dreams of walking into the sunset with her lover, she had to balance her fantasies against her matrimonial prospects. She had to find someone who could accept the many sides of her—the red wine-drinking devotee of flamenco, the bourgeois housewife-to-be with a talent for sauces. On the other hand, as she well knew, Tehran was not exactly littered with suitable guys. Mira had not attended college, had a declining opium addict for a father, and could not afford to let her twenties march by as she worked out what sort of mate would complete her personality and make her an adult and not just a wife.
“Why don’t you just go out to dinner more? Are you even friends?”
She rolled her eyes, shooting me one of those exasperated, like, when are you going to get how it is here looks. Curled up in her lilac flannel pajamas, her long lashes sweeping up and down, liberated from all those too-heavy coats of mascara, she looked so innocent.
We sat there silent for a while, occasionally reaching for a square of chocolate. I needed to say something. So I tried to explain that like many men, her boyfriend was intimidated by how much he wanted sex and that it was easier for him to vulgarize intimacy than admit that she (a mere girl/woman) controlled the supply of the most powerful physical experience of his existence. It was kind of an academic point, the stuff you absorb during women’s studies classes, and I lost her halfway through.
What an accelerated, demeaning, furtive initiation into sexuality. Their evenings should be spent at clubs, dancing; their afternoons in cafés, ankles lazily interlaced. Of course now they could hold hands in public if they really wanted to. Lots of middle-class couples, who had nowhere else to go, did this freely. But it wasn’t nice, being affectionate like that with an eye to your back.
Of all the Islamic Republic’s casualties, among the most lethal for young people was the deterioration of platonic friendship between young men and women. As far back as I could remember, the lives of my parents, my aunts, and my uncles, had been full of friends of the opposite sex, who were simply friends, nothing more, often not even recycled former flames. Though highly traditional spheres of Iranian society had socialized along gender lines—with men and women in separate rooms, or separate sides of the room, at parties—platonic interaction and friendship had been ordinary among secular middle-class and upper-class Iranians. The revolution reversed this. It threw up obstacles everywhere to casual coexistence between the sexes: segregated elementary schools and university classes, segregated buses, segregated restaurant lines, segregated passport offices.
Separated most of the hours of the day, young people became mysteries to each other, familiar but alien. It became easier for girls to spend time with their girlfriends, guys with their guy friends. Being together involved sneaking away, into the dark corners of public parks, into the woods in the Alborz Mountains, into each other’s empty houses.
I wanted better for Mira. I wanted to see her pretty face radiant with the silly crushes of early womanhood, her weeks filled with candlelit dinners, unmolested strolls through the park behind her house. My adolescence in the decadent, satanic West seemed bubble-gum innocent in comparison to hers—footsy under a blanket at a winter football game, slow dancing at the prom, sleepovers where we drank beer, giggled over Monty Python, and fell asleep in a pile, like puppies, in someone’s living room.
The next day the seedy boyfriend would collect Mira, covered in a dark veil and roopoosh (still mandated by lots of offices) from work. Maybe they would go out to dinner, but maybe they wouldn’t because you can only get in the mood to do this about half the time, when you know there are eyes always watching you. Probably they would go to the home of friends, and then wait for an evening his parents would be out.
It wasn’t always, or at least exclusively, as bad as that. An imaginative couple, with some creativity and luck, could create a sparkly courtship out of these circumstances. Sometimes, all the challenges infused drama and romance into a new relationship. Existing as a couple in the Islamic Republic meant facing the petty, the bizarre, and the sorrowful on a regular basis. You had to trust faster than usual, and situations, rather than your own readiness, determined when you would be vulnerable. Islamic Republic coupledom was almost like being in the military together—you got worn down, built yourself back up, and found yourself bonded to the person who had been right next to you the whole time.
In the West, with online matchmaking services, twenty-four-hour restaurants, and the birth-control patch, dating was fast and easy. There was no struggle (worse than not being able to get a dinner reservation) that might elevate a third date from boring to extraordinary. Since romance thrives on mystery and delayed gratification, I had imagined the Islamic Republic would be conducive to excellent love affairs. I thought nothing could be more romantic than love in a time of struggle.
But like most of the conceptions I bore with me to Iran, it ended up being totally wrong. Confronting hardship together didn’t magically turn your relationship, or your life for that matter, into Casablanca. Struggle, it turned out, is about as romantic as leprosy. It makes you emotionally absent. It gives you the most compelling, lofty reasons ever to avoid dealing with your emotional problems (you’re too busy with The Struggle, of course). It makes you live exclusively in the present. It makes emotions besides hate a luxury. Because in the end, life in the shadow of struggle is really just life in the shadows.
The next day Reza, my security-obsessed, mobile-dissecting friend, was coming over for tea. The hour before he was meant to arrive, I reviewed the newspapers and munched on a handful of chocolate-covered espresso beans, because you could rely on Reza to have you embroiled in intricate discussion within five minutes of entry. Just once I wished we could have a frivolous discussion.
That day, I of course had to tell him about Mira, and we ended up debating whether the Islamic Republic had made it difficult for young people to fall in love. He said yes, because the mercenary survival skills young people had been forced to develop prevented them from making lasting attachments; because love involved the suspension of selfishness, and the anarchic culture of the regime had made selfishness paramount. I argued that the net effect was neutral, because the mercenary effect was balanced by the incubator effect the Islamic Republic had on relationships. After the twentieth night with nothing to do outside (you can’t go to house parties every single night), fiddling with a broken cable box and sipping nasty homemade vodka, you find out quickly whether you actually like each other. The vast stretches of empty time accelerate a realization that might take three months to reach in a Western city, if you were constantly distracted by gallery openings and movies, new restaurants and weekend getaways.
That’s how it was with me and Dariush, I told him. Our relationship played itself out in warp speed. We went from attraction to inseparability to power struggle to all-out warfare in something like four months. Do you think that’s efficient or awful? I asked.
“I have no comment,” he sniffed. “How many times did I tell you not to consort with a child?” Reza had not approved. He had considered it unbefitting for me to have been involved with Dariush, the spoiled, cloistered son of fallen aristocrats. He didn’t understand how I could have wasted my time with someone so trifling.
Rather than rehashing the extended cat fight that had been my relationship with Dariush, I wanted Reza to explain to me what the deal was with Mira’s orgasm business. So tell me, I said, tell me why Iranian men are such conflicted sexists. They want a sexually assertive woman in bed, but since they don’t respect women like that, and women know that, they can’t get women to behave that way with them. And so everyone acts out a farce. The woman pretends it’s her first time, that she doesn’t usually do this, that she
was too drunk or high to know what she was doing. She quells her instincts and suppresses her sensuality, so she doesn’t lose her dignity—her only status currency in this kind of society.
He interrupted. You blame this on Iranian men being Eastern. But this attitude toward sex is actually more Western than anything else, he said, nodding at an old copy of Vogue, featuring a bikini-clad model, on the table. The West treats women as objects, but through the filter of consumerism. The underlying attitude is still materialist.
“Yeah, but at least in the West women get to have orgasms.” He couldn’t top that.
Iran was not high on any list of top international vacation spots. You would not open up Condé Nast Traveler and find breathless recommendations to sip tea at Isfahan’s fabled Shah Abbas Hotel or watch the dusk linger over a beach on the Caspian. Shunned by tourists who still imagined it a dark, dangerous place overrun by terrorists, most of the country’s scenic attractions—including its magnificent ski slopes—were usually empty. This was bad for the economy, but great for Iranians who skied. During the winter, it made Iranian ski resorts one of the few places in the world with excellent runs and short lift lines. The slopes at Shemshak were only an hour and a half away from Tehran, and up at the top of the mountain, if you managed to ignore the fact that you had arrived via the “women’s lift,” you could forget you were in Iran altogether.
The figure-obscuring bulk of a ski suit satisfied the dress code requirement, and a wool cap, with hair tucked beneath, stood in for the veil. So on any given winter day, men and women skied down the slopes looking and acting as though they were in Colorado or Switzerland. Altitude and social freedom were proportionally related in Iran. The higher you climbed up a mountain, the safer it was to let your scarf fall around your shoulders, to lean over and kiss your boyfriend, to turn up the Western music in your boombox. The freedom that reigned at these heights made outdoor activities immensely popular with otherwise urban types. It was what made hiking in the Alborz Mountains, just outside Tehran, the thing to do on any given weekend. It was why I, who usually went skiing for what came after (cute après-ski clothes, Irish coffee), was always eager to ski in Iran, for its own sake.
Lipstick Jihad Page 23
