Stolen Kisses: Iran's Sexual Revolutions

By Laura Secor, The Nation. Posted December 2, 2008.

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 cultural developments there in the past decade. Less well known 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 STDs 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.

On its face, Iranian state ideology conflicts with the requirements of public health, given the sea change in public attitudes toward sex. Yet there is good news in Mahdavi's study. Close to the ground, where it counts, Iranian doctors, parents, educators and even institutions are bending to the forces of change. For example, since 2000 the Islamic Republic has required Iranians who seek marriage licenses to attend state-administered classes on family planning. One that Mahdavi attended in Tehran's central business district sounds perfectly appalling. A chador-clad woman shrilly lectures a room of gum-snapping, nail-filing, indifferent young women, offering the following counsel: "You must always be ready for your husband's sexual needs. If perchance he is watching a football game on television, you should be resting to prepare yourself, or else preparing your bed for the evening. If you should feel overcome by fatigue yourself, make sure always to ask your husband, 'Is there anything else you need from me?' or 'Would you like to have me later?' before retiring."

But then Mahdavi attends another such class, this time in the city's north, in the upscale shopping district near the Tajrish bazaar. This class covers disease transmission, contraception, fertility, mental health, marital relations and even female sexual pleasure. The teachers wear the less forbidding hijab -- head scarf and fitted thigh-length coat -- common among their students, and the women attending these classes, Mahdavi reports, confide freely to the teachers about their relationships and their sex lives. Here, and in her chapter about the older generation's response to the sexual revolution, Mahdavi shows us a society beginning to shake off its denial and rigidity out of the sheer necessity of serving the burgeoning needs of its young -- a generation of adults who have either grown sympathetic to young people's yearnings or, like Mrs. Erami, recognize that they risk greater losses than they can bear.

Something major is happening -- a generational shift, a process of social change on which Islamic law has only limited effect. But how deeply does it penetrate Iranian society, divided as Iranians are by geography and class? And how political is this movement in a country where politics is a live wire?

Mahdavi cannot be everywhere at once, and her study does not purport to explain the sexual behavior of everyone in Iran. Rather, it focuses on upper-middle-class, heterosexual Tehrani youth. This is a subculture worth studying -- Tehran is a city of 14 million and a trendsetter for smaller Iranian cities -- but Mahdavi is also aware of the study's limitations. Most significant, it excludes the social base of the ruling regime, which is rural Iran, where village life is the norm and values may be changing but where they remain, by all accounts, more traditional than in the bigger cities. Although she includes a few lower-class urban young people in Passionate Uprisings, we don't get to know them as well as we do the better-off informants. These omissions become significant mainly because Mahdavi makes big claims for her Tehrani revelers: their actions are not only political, in her view, but revolutionary; they are intended, finally, to bring about regime change.

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Laura Secor is a 2008-09 fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, at the New York Public Library.

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