Lipstick Jihad

In her gripping memoir of "growing up Iranian in America and American in Iran," Azadeh Moaveni illuminates one of the broadest political truths: Falseness in sexual life leads to falseness everywhere, the denial of truths of the individual body leads to corruption of the body politic.

This isn't to say that strictness in sexual matters is unilaterally hypocritical, or that sexually conservative cultures corrupt. The rules of traditional societies, including those of traditional Islam, generally work for those particular societies. In the course of my three trips to Afghanistan, and four weeks spent living in an Afghan Uzbek family compound in a provincial city, I met a lot of relatively happy, satisfied people living under rules I'd personally find intolerable: no social mixing of unrelated men and women; arranged marriages, typically between first cousins; and social life pretty much limited to extended family. To be sure, there are Afghans who somatize rather than complaining or acting out their discontent; they live in a pre-Freudian culture so, OK, they're entitled to some hysteria. But most people seem to find the rules wise, fair, and essential to the continuation of a deeply satisfying, meaningful way of life.

The problems begin once a culture reaches a point of modernization where judgments can be passed on its sexual rules, seen as arbitrary, and hypocrisy regarding sex has a corrosive effect on all institutions. This is one way of looking at the recent scandals regarding pedophile priests, or the nastiness of Saudi society. And it is key to the failure of Iran's Islamic Revolution.

Moaveni was born in 1976 in Palo Alto and raised in Northern California. Her parents sprang from the upper echelons of Iranian society, but from the liberal segment who initially greeted the 1979 revolution with hope for social justice. Her mother, whom she called "Maman," was a former campus radical at once fiercely proud of her Persian heritage and so enamored of Western culture that she dragged the young Azadeh to the opera, even when she could only afford standing room. Maman and her husband split when their daughter was just a few months old, and Moaveni developed a keen eye for the fault lines in people and societies. And there were many fault lines to see by the time Moaveni moved to Tehran in 2000 to work for Time magazine.

The hypocrisy of two decades of turning back to the eighth century had become too much to bear even for the mullahs. The 24-year-old Moaveni found that the typical one-hour interview with a cleric began with his averting his gaze in the manner prescribed by Islam to religious men in the presence of unrelated women, and ended with his flirting with her and asking for her mobile number. The measures intended by Islamic tradition to desexualize the relations of men and women only inflamed desire. "Iranians were preoccupied with sex in the manner of dieters constantly thinking about food." Moaveni might have added that dieters constantly think about certain forbidden foods because they used to eat them. If they didn't know what they tasted like, they wouldn't desire them.

Chaste dress can uphold chaste behavior only when it's all that people have ever known. It's hard to go back to the chador when, like Moaveni and her contemporaries, you remember your mother wearing miniskirts. Hijab is sometimes defended by Islamic feminists for allowing women to appear first and foremost as human beings rather than sexual objects, and in Afghanistan it might actually work that way. But in Tehran, Moaveni found that "the constant exposure to covered flesh ... brought to mind, well, flesh." Because young people were prohibited from the kind of casual coed socializing their parents had known studying together, skiing together, and hanging out in groups, when they did have the chance to meet, the result was "amplified decadence," with upper-class high school girls defiantly wearing skin-tight dresses and 5-inch heels at forbidden "mixed" parties. These teenagers lack both the innocence the mullahs thought to ensure, and which they might enjoy in a place like Afghanistan, as well as the opportunities to explore sexual desires they would have in many developed nations.