It’s been called an Iranian #MeToo movement, and it is. Thousands of women in Iran - and some men – are going online to speak about the sexual assault and harassment they experienced. What is crucially important, at what promises to be a historic turning point in Iranian women’s struggle for their rights, is to set the movement clearly in its proper local and global context, rather than locating it in terms of the familiar binaries of East and West, as much of the coverage in the coming weeks and months will do.
This is an article which has been in the making for years, although I never thought there would be a revolutionary online commitment to naming names and to speaking out against #rape (#Tajavaz), #sexual harassment (#Azar-e Jensi), and #perpetrators (#Motajaves). Nor, probably, did the brave women who - unlike me - have spoken out against their abusers. It’s been over two weeks now: hashtags are still pouring out, naming more names, and it does not seem that they are going to stop soon. ‘Let’s build a hashtag storm’, said a tweet.
As a media anthropologist and gender studies academic, I have been following this eruption of rage and pain from the beginning, but I noticed how difficult it was for me to start writing about it, since it is partly my story - the story of my eight years as a journalist in Iran. I have not been surprised to see many names of men whom I never dared to call out for their actions, many of whom I considered as colleagues and friends, who would make ‘benign’ sexual references and/or advances, who would tell you to ‘loosen up’, not to be ‘provincial’ or ‘old-fashioned’ - using a discourse which associated liberated metropolitan modernity - not (be it noted) religion or tradition - with female sexual subordination. In turn, I was expected to be ‘enlightened’ and ‘modern’ enough to regard all this as male joking around, in order to protect their feelings.
