There Are No Real Virgins in Tehran

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This is part two of a dialogue between Egyptian writer Nawal El Saadawi, and Iranian author Janet Afary. El Saadawi is famous in the Arab world for her outspokenness, particularly on the issue of women’s rights. (Double X interviews her here.) Afary is a professor of religious studies and feminist studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara and the author of Sexual Politics in Modern Iran, the book being discussed in this dialogue. Read part one here.

Dear Nawal,

I am thrilled to be having this dialogue with you. I read your “Hidden Face of Eve” and other works in English in the 1980s when I came to the United States from Iran to study. I have also used your writings in my courses on women and gender in the Middle East.

Egypt and Iran do indeed have a great deal in common. Both nations have experienced a century-old struggle for democracy (the latest stage of which was the massive protests against voting fraud we’ve just witnessed). Both have had strong secular and leftist political parties, and both have a long history of feminist activity. You were wondering if what we are observing in Iran in recent years is really a sexual revolution. I think it is certainly headed that way when we look at the distance women have traversed.

A century ago Iranian women of all social classes, religions, and ethnicities entered strictly arranged marriages around the age of puberty. Both of my grandmothers were married at 13, and neither had seen her husband before marriage. Also, while monogamy was the norm among the poorer sectors, most Muslim men took additional wives once their income increased. By 1979, a lot had changed. Courting and a long engagement were more common, at least among urban, educated middle class women.

Today dating is even more common despite continued parental objections and state prohibitions. In an Iranian feminist publication, I saw an interview with an assistant principal in one of the lower middle class schools of south Tehran. The principal said that while young girls of her own generation skipped school to go to parks and cinemas with boys, her students go to their boyfriends’ houses or their own houses. And yes, they sometimes have sex. In some cases, fathers assist sons, and mothers quietly help daughters. When a veiled mother was brought into the principal’s office and told about her daughter’s secret dating, she confessed that to protect her daughter from her father’s wrath and the morality police on the streets, “on occasion I tell her to bring her friend home with her and I go into the kitchen giving them some privacy.”

Among the more cosmopolitan middle classes, virginity is no longer crucial. Greater access to cars has meant greater privacy, allowing more women to become sexually active before marriage. Many women from the more pious middle classes have premarital sex and then a hymen repair operation before getting married. The popularity of the operation has resulted in numerous jokes that in Tehran, there are “no real virgins.”

Change is happening even in rural areas (now 20 percent of the country). Occasionally, engaged couples spend the night away from the village on one pretext or another, and the parents go along with it. Sometimes the couple exchange vows for a temporary marriage (an old Shi’i tradition that had become defunct by the 1970s) to avoid the appearance of impropriety. In Tehran and the big cities, young people might obtain a simple certificate of temporary marriage to avoid the morality police when they go to the Caspian Sea resort for summer vacation. They then annul the vow when they get home.