Thursday, May 24, 2007

Reading Lolita in Tehran

I finally finished Reading Lolita in Tehran, a Christmas gift from two years ago. (Yes, I feel the appropriate level of shame for having taken so long to get to it.) What can I say other than that you should read it? I was encouraged that these women would be brave enough to meet to discuss some of the great Western literature (e.g., Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, etc.) that their government had seen fit to ban. At the same time, I was immensely saddened by the glimpses into a fundamentalist regime hellbent on controlling every aspect of their lives. It goes beyond covering their bodies and their hair. (It is explained this is done for their own protection - apparently the mere sight of a strand of a woman's hair can incite a man to a sexual frenzy that he will not or cannot control.) The same regime outlaws fingernail polish, regulates who women can be seen with in public, and conducts "virginity tests" to ensure women suspected of wrongdoing, even in the face of zero evidence to suggest otherwise, are honorable and good. There is a movie quote that came to mind that I find quite fitting even though the line is from a comedy and the book shows the brutal oppression of women. It's from The Ref and is spoken by the matriarch of the family as she addresses the burglar (played by Denis Leary):
"I've survived worse than you. World wars, old age, marriage and weak men like you. Men who don't have the guts to survive in the real world. Men who are just scared little boys intimidating everyone with their aggressiveness because they're afraid the world will find out how small their penises are."

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