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For many Iranian youth, leading double lives has become the norm but so has risky behavior.
My Turn
by Tina Solmazi
I started out wondering about my family, wondering why I felt so divided, wondering why my views have always been so tangled and why my thoughts so unclear. What began to unravel was much larger than just my wandering thoughts. It was the battle between my abstract ideas versus entirely concrete problems. Through the eyes of my little life and my little sentimental heart, I sit here in my comfortable chair and think about the uncomfortable place where I am from. The place I have been trying to grapple with and understand for so long.
When I was young I would ask my mother to tell me stories about her days growing up in Iran. She would tell me about running through gardens with her cousins and the neighborhood children, getting into trouble and learning sweet lessons, eating sweet persimmons and sweet pomegranates. Sweet stories and even sweeter memories. But now, as I enter adulthood, there is only a bitter taste left in my mouth.
From my mother’s gentle nostalgic tone to the sharp tone of news anchormen not being able to pronounce the name of my country, using news lingo and political mumbo jumbo that I know they don’t even fully comprehend. Today the stories I hear from Iran are about Weapons of Mass Destruction, living under the tyranny of the Islamic regime, and Ahmadinejad and Khomeini’s outlandish doctrines. Every day on the news there is a headline about some new disaster in the Middle East; about some new asshole mullah that has some new asshole point of view. Only after all this time I have learned that it is the things that Iran doesn’t speak about that are the most dangerous….
Iranians are living in a society that sits beneath a stagnant pool of secrets and what it conceals lingers around and sticks to you, like clothing charged by static electricity clinging to your body. They don’t ignore the static because they are ignorant, but because they are hurt and in denial. They ignore for the sake of their own sanity and reputation. The genius rulers of Iran claim that their intentions are to make Iran a place that is pure in form, where one cannot be corrupted by the indulgence of sex and the polluted minds of westerners. So they have restricted society from everything and anything that is deemed pleasurable, in any way, shape, or form.
In a society where innocent love and frolicking around in parks, holding hands and feeling dreamy is prohibited and is punishable under the law, the youth of Iran have found more innovative and disturbing ways of exercising their basic human rights. Today the youth of Iran jump straight into forbidden sexual relations for there are no allowances for anything in-between. Having irresponsible sex right and left as a mini personal protest to their repressive society. The mullahs whose policies work so well that their uneducated citizens are now throwing orgy parties in their honor. In direct relation to their new rebellion, Iran now has one of the fastest rising rates of STDs per capita, a climbing AIDS rate, one of the highest rates of
sex-related murders in the world, a vast underground transsexual and gay community, a rapidly rising use of hard drugs, over 84,000 prostitutes roaming the streets, and perhaps has the highest number of self-induced abortions yearly yet to date, although this reality is not well-documented. And to add to the long list of failures Iran’s leaders are enduring, there are morals being compromised: The newest plastic surgery craze in Iran is revirginization, which is to sew up a woman’s hymen to make it seem like she is a virgin again for the sake of her future husband. What brilliant ethics these mullahs have bestowed upon the youth.
To go from a thriving country, swarming with tourists and sticky-fingered happy children to sewing up your hymen in fear that you will not bleed on your eventual wedding night is beyond me. How do I negotiate my thoughts on the murky hypocrisies of this country? I guess what scares me the most is that it could have been me. I could have been compromising my youth and my health, fearing that I would not bleed on my eventual wedding night. And I hate the idea so much that it haunts me. It haunts me so much that their reality might as well have been mine.
Tina Solmazi was born in California in 1985 to Iranian parents. She is currently working on her degree in journalism and focuses her writing on women in Iran.
January 2007 |
