Ernest Dempsey — “This is my body, my choice,” an Iranian woman says in the style of a reminder, flashing her bare bosom to the camera’s eyes. She is one of a number of women from Iran, where harsh Islamist laws are imposed on citizens and women are forced to observe an orthodox Islamic dress code in public. But the women in the video say “no” to the possessive right of the state over the female body.Naturally, many supporters of women’s rights and opponents of state control of one’s body would see this video as a laudable measure that supports the belief in rejection of male despotism acting as “state”. The reaction of the females in this video, however, has its downside, one less obvious and more pervasive, i.e., that you can compartmentalize a gender into ethical poles solely on the basis of whether they cover their bodies. These women, daring and courageous as they appear to be, do not fit the “good” Islamic picture of womanhood painted by the religion’s crude values; instead, they make a “satanic” example of what a woman can become. This is how the orthodox Islamic eye will see them.
From an objective, analytical viewpoint, however, this bare-bosom show of female courage has made the unimagined (but not unimaginable) error of stepping into a role defined by the same authoritative mindset that means to possess their bodies. By baring themselves for people to watch, this group of moral daredevils has reinforced the belief that woman will treat her own body as an object. The possessive male desire and its descendant Islamic code for women work as a double-edged sword that can control your responses. If they can’t make women cover themselves, they can make them bare themselves, with the illusion of the women that they are in control while their response is already anticipated and categorized by the oppressive authority. What the authority connotes can be phrased as, “We may not possess your body; but we will be one to define how you use it.”
In the case of the Iranian women here, these ladies have gone a step further to prove the Islamist prejudice against female sexuality. Their topless photos have been compiled as a calendar that is available for sale online. The earnings from the sales, as told in news, will go to serve the causes of women’s rights and “freedom of expression”. What seems to have never occurred to this daring group of women, and not surprisingly so, is that they are directly serving the Islamist state and the mindset underlying it by making themselves for-sale objects. Dogmatically, fundamentalist Islam sees women as either prisoners of male authority or objects of sale in marketplace – the pious and the characterless. What message does the calendar for sale actually creates for feminists? It is these women refuse to be prisoners make themselves available for sale? In this case, this point is painfully obvious. And the Islamists will surely make all political profit of it.
To this scribe, the best, and perhaps only, way of refusing to conform to any dictatorial mindset/system is to not let it define you. Women need not be “pious” as their oppressors like to see, but they must not be “characterless” also for the same reason. The either/or thinking is the plague of religion and tradition that make things go wild in the minds of their victims. So the Iranian woman who claims that it is her body and her choice can make sure that the latter part of her claim is subject to serious speculation. Imagine instead a Muslim woman who refuses to accept religious dogma and lightly brushes it off with a joke, dressing herself as she would like in everyday life in public, and confidently saying, “When was the last time I let fanatics possess my body or define my character?”