Always Stand Against Misogyny, Always Stand Against Tyranny
Autocrats universally repress women. Iranians are demanding freedom.
For several weeks now, protesters have taken to the streets across Iran to demand an end to the theocratic regime that has terrorized and repressed the population for decades. Hundreds and perhaps thousands have been killed by government forces that are raining bullets on unarmed citizens; more than 10,000 people have been arrested. The government has imposed an internet blackout as it tries to violently quell dissent.
It’s hard to overstate just how brave these protesters are. Every single night they turn out on the streets, knowing that simply by doing so, they may never come home. Every single person who protests risks their lives. And thousands upon thousands of them do it anyway.
Iranians have risen up in protest before; their government has crushed them before. It is a fool’s errand to make any predictions about how this ends. But I hope, for the sake of Iranians, it ends with the fall of this regime and the blossoming of a vibrant democracy. Those are not likely nor easy outcomes. But bigger miracles have happened.
The Iranian regime, like most autocracies and certainly like all theocracies, is a fundamentally misogynistic one, and so it is perhaps not surprising that much of the protest momentum has come from women and those who support women’s rights (the Women Life Freedom movement lit a fire that was for a time dimmed to a mere ember, but clearly has not been extinguished). The Iranian regime’s control of women is vast and harsh. A severe and modest dress code including mandatory hijab is widely enforced, with the “morality police” roaming the streets and beating women who don’t comply; as is common in many authoritarian regimes, the authorities will sometimes relax enforcement, only to suddenly scale it up and make an example of some poor soul who did the wrong thing at the wrong time, creating a pervasive sense of fear and insecurity. Men have many more rights than women to jobs, money, property, power, and lives free from violence. Sons inherit more than daughters; widows barely get any their deceased husbands’ property, leaving them impoverished or dependent on whoever does; a woman’s testimony in court is worth only a fraction of a man’s; children almost always go to their fathers in cases of divorce, making it impossible for many Iranian women to escape abusive marriages; Iranian women are allowed to get degrees, but they cannot travel abroad without their husbands’ or fathers’ permission. Husbands can bar their wives from working. Men who abuse or kill women too often face little or no punishment.
The Iranian regime tends to clamp down harder on women’s rights when it feels under threat. “When the government faces unsolvable problems, it turns to issues it considers controllable,” one Iranian human rights lawyer told DW. “The oppression of women has become a central instrument of state power demonstration.”
This is not unique to Iran. When autocrats grab power, they almost universally begin bulldozing the rights of women and minorities. Autocracy itself hinges on hierarchy, with a strongman at the top. Autocrats understand that their followers often want to see facsimiles of that hierarchy in their personal lives, with them at the top — and the easiest way to do this is to enforce gender hierarchies. This also creates a broader social normalization of top-down male rule, which of course the autocrat needs to be considered legitimate (an agent of the state who calls an unarmed woman a “fucking bitch” as he kills her and enjoys near-universal defense from the regime is representative, not anomalous). That the autocratic and theocratic Iranian government is also a fundamentally misogynistic one is not a coincidence, but a feature and a necessity of autocratic and theocratic regimes.
Supporters of and apologists for Islamism love to claim that they are the ones really truly standing up for Muslim women in opposition to a cunning West that uses feminism as a dirty trick to justify war and regime change. Like most widely-believed lies, this one has a grain of truth to it: The invasion of Afghanistan, for example, was bolstered by a sudden right-wing interest in the rights of Afghan women who had been long oppressed by the Taliban. But the cynical appropriation of feminist activism by George W. Bush and his administration — men and a few women who opposed women’s rights in just about every other context — is not the same thing as actual feminists beating the war drum. And I think you’ll have a very hard time finding many actual feminists today who argue that, because the Iranian regime oppresses women, the US should invade Iran, depose its leader, and usher in a new golden age of gender equality (this did not exactly work out well in Afghanistan).
But the misappropriation of feminist politics is now common among conservative reactionaries, pro-Islamists, and autocracy supporters. Some of it comes from a familiar “separate but equal” view of gender equality: That women and men have equal dignity in the eyes of God, but different roles and obligations and therefore different rights. In this line of reasoning, men having more authority and power and freedom than women isn’t indicative of inequality, but of the reality of different needs and abilities. Another line is that actually, Iranian women want theocratic rule and mandatory hijab, and so do millions of Muslim women around the world.
This is, of course, hot bullshit. That some women want to see other women oppressed (and yes, legally mandating that women wear specific “modest” garments is oppressive and misogynist) is not a good argument for oppressing women. That some people want to impose their religion on everyone else is not a good argument for theocracy. Lots of people have bad idea and want bad things. The foundational ideal behind liberal democracy is that generally, people should get to choose their own leaders and determine their own paths, while minority and long-persecuted groups should also be protected from the tyranny of the majority — everyone gets individual liberty, the collective gets self-governance, and if the results are bad you get to change your leaders through elections. This is admittedly an imperfect and horribly inefficient system, and also, to paraphrase a line you have certainly heard, better than all the other systems we’ve come up with.
In short: The Iranian protesters no doubt have a wide set of beliefs when it comes to their country’s future and rights of their countrywomen. But what they’re demanding now is very simple: It’s the right to decide their own future. And the first thing they want is an end to the tyrannical misogynists who have strangled their nation for nearly half a century.
This should be an easy thing for liberals, leftists, moderates, and freedom-loving conservatives alike to support. But, no. The Iran protests have also revealed a deep moral rot among some in the American far left, and (not surprisingly) a profound hypocrisy and reflexive racism among many on the American right.
