On July 12, more than a dozen women dressed in long green headscarves and flowing white robes performed a ceremony in Tehran for Hijab and Chastity Day, a holiday invented by Iran’s Islamic regime. They moved in circles with their arms raised up as a narrator, clad in a black chador, recited Quranic verses on the importance of women being covered. The choreography and the narration were designed in part as a threat and a warning to domestic opponents of the Islamic regime.
A group of Iranians nevertheless launched an online campaign called “No2Hijab” to ridicule the performance. In one thread, Iranians tagged novelist Margaret Atwood, suggesting that the author of The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian novel in which a misogynist regime violently discriminates against women and co-opts other women into its campaign of systemic misogyny, draw inspiration from Iran for her next novel.
The nationwide protests that have engulfed Iran since the death in September of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini after she was arrested for improperly wearing her hijab has drawn renewed attention to the country’s state-sanctioned misogyny. Ever since, Iranian women fighting for their rights have refused to back down in the face of repression. But what’s often gone overlooked is the way that the regime’s misogyny continues to be aided and abetted by the regime’s female agents. The country’s architecture of fear and social pressure has always been maintained in part through the regime’s female spies and ambassadors.
