The Soul of Man Under Iranian Repression

When I was twenty-two, having never visited any other country except Dubai for a couple of weeks, I left Iran for good. My only understanding of life outside was what I had seen on TV and in movies. Eight years later, having lived in Arizona and Washington DC, now I can look back on the society that formed me. I can reflect on what was normal where I grew up, and what was not. By the time I left, I believed Iran’s national history and culture to be rich and beautiful, and I had already intuited that they were under siege by the regime in power.

But it was in the U.S. that I discovered something deeper about Iran. The dimension of human life most distorted there by the fundamentalist regime is not politics or economics, but Iranian social life. In particular, the effects of government repression are manifest in the most intimate domain of social life, where widely accepted, informal codes of behavior structure the sexual life of the young. Indeed, contrary to what the average American or Iranian might think, the social and sexual ills that affect Western democracies like America are, in truth, even more prevalent and much more harmful in Iran. But unlike the democracies of the West, where sexual license is perhaps an unintended consequence of social freedom, it serves there to help strengthen the regime’s totalitarian rule. Let me explain how.

Totalitarian governments are so designated because they take over the totality of the nation. They nationalize industry and centralize power. They dictate political and economic norms. They regulate the flow of information and govern public behavior. All that’s left is what takes place in the confines of one’s home, in private areas, or in hiding. And even that does not remain free of the regime’s influence, for what agents of totalitarian rule cannot change directly they corrupt indirectly. And indeed, such is life in Iran. The regime may not intentionally engineer Iranian society at the micro level of arranging the sexual encounters of individual citizens, but it nonetheless benefits from the sexual atmosphere that pervades the society of the Iranian young.