a couple of highlights from sean penn's writing, day two in iran
link to full article
On women's rights in Iran:
Three women sat at the table behind us. We asked if they
would talk to us about the election. They were happy to talk, but not
so much about the election. They didn't intend to vote. Seemed like a
sham to them. Women count as one-half a man in this country. Insurance
benefits are half. Death benefits, called diyeh, half. And in the "he
said - she said" weight of testimony in a criminal case, half. Guess
who wins that verdict? The disappointments of the Mohammad Khatami
regime had created a lot of this. "Nothing happened and nothing will
happen. We have zero sense of hope in the election," one of the women,
a 31-year-old Arabic instructor, told us. "Khatami promised us some
freedoms," she said. "I can't even get any in my house. I can't even
have satellite television. They are playing with us."
On sexuality:
Two of the women lived together. It seemed that they
might have been insinuating that they were a lesbian couple, but I
can't say for sure. I refer to my internal manual of ethics, and there
it is right there, in "questions unbecoming a gentleman": Don't ask two
women you just met if they're lesbians. I'm big on prudish restraint.
Yet without asking, they do make it clear that their holing up together
is frowned upon by their families and society alike. A single woman may
live with her parents, perhaps on her own if she is able, but with
another single young woman, everybody's back gets itchy. Yet, whatever
the private truth of these two women, "sexual freedom" would make for a
difficult movement to mount, as even uttering those two words together
is against religious law in the Iranian republic.
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