Lipstick Jihad (34 page)

What an accelerated, demeaning, furtive initiation into sexuality. Their evenings should be spent at clubs, dancing; their afternoons in cafés, ankles lazily interlaced. Of course now they could hold hands in public if they really wanted to. Lots of middle-class couples, who had nowhere else to go, did this freely. But it wasn't nice, being affectionate like that with an eye to your back.

Of all the Islamic Republic's casualties, among the most lethal for young people was the deterioration of platonic friendship between young men and women. As far back as I could remember, the lives of my parents, my aunts, and my uncles, had been full of friends of the opposite sex, who were simply friends, nothing more, often not even recycled former flames. Though highly traditional spheres of Iranian society had socialized along gender lines—with men and women in separate rooms, or separate sides of the room, at parties—platonic interaction and friendship had been ordinary among secular middle-class and upper-class Iranians. The revolution reversed this. It threw up obstacles everywhere to casual coexistence between the sexes: segregated elementary schools and university classes, segregated buses, segregated restaurant lines, segregated passport offices.

Separated most of the hours of the day, young people became mysteries to each other, familiar but alien. It became easier for girls to spend time with their girlfriends, guys with their guy friends. Being together involved sneaking away, into the dark corners of public parks, into the woods in the Alborz Mountains, into each other's empty houses.

I wanted better for Mira. I wanted to see her pretty face radiant with the silly crushes of early womanhood, her weeks filled with candlelit dinners, unmolested strolls through the park behind her house. My adolescence in the decadent, satanic West seemed bubble-gum innocent in comparison to hers—footsy under a blanket at a winter football game, slow dancing at the prom, sleepovers where we drank beer, giggled over Monty Python, and fell asleep in a pile, like puppies, in someone's living room.

The next day the seedy boyfriend would collect Mira, covered in a dark veil and
roopoosh
(still mandated by lots of offices) from work. Maybe they would go out to dinner, but maybe they wouldn't because you can only get in the mood to do this about half the time, when you know there are eyes always watching you. Probably they would go to the home of friends, and then wait for an evening his parents would be out.

It wasn't always, or at least exclusively, as bad as that. An imaginative
couple, with some creativity and luck, could create a sparkly courtship out of these circumstances. Sometimes, all the challenges infused drama and romance into a new relationship. Existing as a couple in the Islamic Republic meant facing the petty, the bizarre, and the sorrowful on a regular basis. You had to trust faster than usual, and situations, rather than your own readiness, determined when you would be vulnerable. Islamic Republic coupledom was almost like being in the military together—you got worn down, built yourself back up, and found yourself bonded to the person who had been right next to you the whole time.

In the West, with online matchmaking services, twenty-four-hour restaurants, and the birth-control patch, dating was fast and easy. There was no struggle (worse than not being able to get a dinner reservation) that might elevate a third date from boring to extraordinary. Since romance thrives on mystery and delayed gratification, I had imagined the Islamic Republic would be conducive to excellent love affairs. I thought nothing could be more romantic than love in a time of struggle.

But like most of the conceptions I bore with me to Iran, it ended up being totally wrong. Confronting hardship together didn't magically turn your relationship, or your life for that matter, into Casablanca. Struggle, it turned out, is about as romantic as leprosy. It makes you emotionally absent. It gives you the most compelling, lofty reasons ever to avoid dealing with your emotional problems (you're too busy with The Struggle, of course). It makes you live exclusively in the present. It makes emotions besides hate a luxury. Because in the end, life in the shadow of struggle is really just life in the shadows.

The next day Reza, my security-obsessed, mobile-dissecting friend, was coming over for tea. The hour before he was meant to arrive, I reviewed the newspapers and munched on a handful of chocolate-covered espresso beans, because you could rely on Reza to have you embroiled in intricate discussion within five minutes of entry. Just once I wished we could have a frivolous discussion.

That day, I of course had to tell him about Mira, and we ended up debating whether the Islamic Republic had made it difficult for young people
to fall in love. He said yes, because the mercenary survival skills young people had been forced to develop prevented them from making lasting attachments; because love involved the suspension of selfishness, and the anarchic culture of the regime had made selfishness paramount. I argued that the net effect was neutral, because the mercenary effect was balanced by the incubator effect the Islamic Republic had on relationships. After the twentieth night with nothing to do outside (you can't go to house parties every single night), fiddling with a broken cable box and sipping nasty homemade vodka, you find out quickly whether you actually like each other. The vast stretches of empty time accelerate a realization that might take three months to reach in a Western city, if you were constantly distracted by gallery openings and movies, new restaurants and weekend getaways.

That's how it was with me and Dariush, I told him. Our relationship played itself out in warp speed. We went from attraction to inseparability to power struggle to all-out warfare in something like four months. Do you think that's efficient or awful? I asked.

“I have no comment,” he sniffed. “How many times did I tell you not to consort with a child?” Reza had not approved. He had considered it unbefitting for me to have been involved with Dariush, the spoiled, cloistered son of fallen aristocrats. He didn't understand how I could have wasted my time with someone so trifling.

Rather than rehashing the extended cat fight that had been my relationship with Dariush, I wanted Reza to explain to me what the deal was with Mira's orgasm business. So tell me, I said, tell me why Iranian men are such conflicted sexists. They want a sexually assertive woman in bed, but since they don't respect women like that, and women
know
that, they can't get women to behave that way with them. And so everyone acts out a farce. The woman pretends it's her first time, that she doesn't usually do this, that she was too drunk or high to know what she was doing. She quells her instincts and suppresses her sensuality, so she doesn't lose her dignity—her only status currency in this kind of society.

He interrupted. You blame this on Iranian men being Eastern. But this attitude toward sex is actually more Western than anything else, he said, nodding at an old copy of
Vogue,
featuring a bikini-clad model, on the table. The West treats women as objects, but through the filter of consumerism. The underlying attitude is still materialist.

“Yeah, but at least in the West women get to have orgasms.” He couldn't top that.

Iran was not high on any list of top international vacation spots. You would not open up
Condé Nast Traveler
and find breathless recommendations to sip tea at Isfahan's fabled Shah Abbas Hotel or watch the dusk linger over a beach on the Caspian. Shunned by tourists who still imagined it a dark, dangerous place overrun by terrorists, most of the country's scenic attractions—including its magnificent ski slopes—were usually empty. This was bad for the economy, but great for Iranians who skied. During the winter, it made Iranian ski resorts one of the few places in the world with excellent runs and short lift lines. The slopes at Shemshak were only an hour and a half away from Tehran, and up at the top of the mountain, if you managed to ignore the fact that you had arrived via the “women's lift,” you could forget you were in Iran altogether.

The figure-obscuring bulk of a ski suit satisfied the dress code requirement, and a wool cap, with hair tucked beneath, stood in for the veil. So on any given winter day, men and women skied down the slopes looking and acting as though they were in Colorado or Switzerland. Altitude and social freedom were proportionally related in Iran. The higher you climbed up a mountain, the safer it was to let your scarf fall around your shoulders, to lean over and kiss your boyfriend, to turn up the Western music in your boombox. The freedom that reigned at these heights made outdoor activities immensely popular with otherwise urban types. It was what made hiking in the Alborz Mountains, just outside Tehran, the thing to do on any given weekend. It was why I, who usually went skiing for what came after (cute après-ski clothes, Irish coffee), was always eager to ski in Iran, for its own sake.

That year, in the late winter of 2001, all the decadent, corrupt, coed swooshing about irked the regime. Some office of doomed ideas, doubtless based in Qom, tried to organize an alpine morality police force to ensure everyone behaved Islamically on the slopes. But the sort of people recruited to such a force were not the sort who had been on skis since infancy. Several broken legs later, it became clear they wouldn't reach ski police levels
of proficiency anytime soon. So instead, on weekends when the slopes were crowded, a mullah showed up at the bottom of the lifts to lead noon prayer. He stood there with his turban and robes against the gleaming snow, a Grinch-like figure with no purpose but to inject a little Islam into the atmosphere, in case anyone was starting to feel too glamorous.

During the cold months, the Tehran party scene shifted to Shemshak, and a smaller resort closer to the city called Dizine. Young people preferred gathering in these places to Tehran, because the snow and long driveways between the road and houses muffled the noise and discouraged the police from raiding their parties. Initially I found the parties out in the wilderness refreshing. You could actually see the stars in the sky. You could breathe in crisp, forest air instead of smog. And you could stroll for a good half an hour without seeing a billboard of a mullah or a war martyr.

I wobbled at the top of the perilously steep ski slope wondering whether one of those helicopter-ambulances could be summoned to take me down. Heights scared me, in the same way as yoga headstands. I needed to feel as though I was in control. At that moment, the panic started in my stomach, and spread until I felt there was no longer blood in my veins but liquid terror.

Siamak was already swooshing down, but when he realized I wasn't behind him, he arced into a stop. You said this was an
intermediate
slope, not a ninety-degree angle
,
I yelled, waving a pole at him. Come on
aziz,
dear, just make wider turns, he urged. You'll be fine. That one word,
aziz,
caught my fear off guard, conjuring so many primordial sensations of comfort that I felt a warmth spread through my limbs, felt myself lean forward effortlessly and push off.