A view from Iran
It’s pelage season in Iran. The well-to-do of Tehran take time off and head to the segregated beaches of the north. Men armed with binoculars line up to hire speed boats to gawp at the women’s section from a distance. “The problem is,” says Arghavan, a 25-year-old graphic designer, who came to London four months go, “that you can’t get rid of segregation overnight. Can you imagine how those men would react without a curtain separating the genders?”
So, what do to?
“Well,” she says laughing, “you’d have to wipe the slate clean of a whole generation and start with a society which from the outset allowed men and women to share a beach just like here.”
She adds: “Relations between men and women can be normal, if only the state would leave them alone.”
Arghavan and her brother, she says, were recently stopped in the street and had to prove they were siblings. “If we couldn’t,” she says, “things could get much bigger.” A woman’s father, she said, would have to tell a court he was aware of who she was with. And if the father refused to do this?
“No father would refuse,” she says. “But if he did the girl could be stoned.”
I was recently cornered by a post-grad student in the US who said that actually, things are far better for women in Iran that we in the West were led to believe. “When was the last time you went back,” she said, implying that I did not know the reality on the ground. Are things really okay?
“It depends which family you’re visiting when you go there, their economic situation,” she says. “In [the wealthy] north of Tehran you might see lifestyles you won’t see the like of here in the West,” she says. “But venture out into poorer areas and the villages and meet a 25-year-old woman who was forced into marriage aged 15 and it’s a different story.”
