Lipstick Jihad (13 page)

Shut up, Azadeh. This isn't the time for political analysis. I don't need you getting lashed on my conscience.

Throughout that jolty ride, through my concern for my shoes and my entertainment at Dariush's uncharacteristic gravity (he seemed like a boy trying to keep his pet safe), I felt a warm sense of security. With someone who knew the gaps in the rules, there was adventure to be had behind the grim, rigid façade of the Islamic Republic.

—ADONIS

A couple months after I arrived in Tehran, my uncle charged his assistant at work with helping me through the country's labyrinthine bureaucracy. When I met Celine for the first time, she was peering into a compact, applying a thick coat of mocha-red MAC lipstick. Celine became my first new Iranian girlfriend, guiding me to the best manicurist, waxing lady, and private pastry chef in the city with the shared belief that these were urgent priorities. Of all my new friends, Celine's curiosity thrived the most; she was always on her way to learning something—Italian grammar, step-aerobics, puff pastry. She had lived in Tehran all her life and was still impossibly bubbly, ever enthusiastic about what Tehran had to offer.

Unlike most of my girlfriends, Celine still had lots of time for me. In the Tehran of my first visit, my female cousins and family friends were available to me all the time. We spent hours drinking tea, dancing in the living room, napping, and waking up to drink more tea and repeat the cycle. Now they all had boyfriends, and were constantly off at cafés, dinners, and parties, so I had to book them in advance. Happily, Celine was single and so was I.

A kinship blossomed between us, centered on leisurely afternoons sipping mochas at our favorite café on Gandhi Street. All week I looked forward to our coffee ritual with great anticipation. We had marvelous conversations, skipping from topic to topic and dissolving into malicious giggles, but communicating a complex thought took me so long I bored even myself in the process. One afternoon, as soon as we settled into our usual spot, I asked her why, given how talented, curious, and hard-working she was, she had never gone to college.

“I knew, from everything I'd heard, that there were
Ershad
groups active on campus, telling women to fix their
hijab,
asking them why they were talking to this or that guy, or telling them that their laugh was too loud.” The verb she used,
gir dadan,
was common in the vernacular that evolved after the revolution, minted to describe the new realities of everyday life. It meant “to hassle, purely for the sake of hassling.”
Ershad
means guidance,
and these groups were charged with “guiding” students toward proper Islamic behavior.

They were interested in torturing people, not educating them, she said. They don't understand that young people need a relaxed and happy mind to be able to learn, and improve themselves. I didn't think I could stand it.

A slice of cheesecake later, she asked me why I had broken up with my boyfriend in Cairo before coming to Tehran. I tried to explain, dismayed to see notions like “I need space” evaporate into meaninglessness in Farsi. It was as though the soft, soap-opera lighting of English had been switched off, and replaced by the harsh, fluorescent glare of Farsi. I realized that lots of flimsy, disingenuous things I said in English (“I love you, I'm just not
in
love with you” or “Let's see other people, while we work things out”) were codes. They stood in for feelings I didn't want to admit to myself (I just spent a really long time with someone I don't even like) or that were too harsh to air (“It's totally over, erase my number from your cell phone”). Breaking up, or explaining why you were breaking up, relied on a linguistic shorthand everyone understood, and that no one but a therapist or a best friend would challenge you over.

Celine sat listening through all of this, her hands patiently folded in her lap. She occasionally murmured “Hmmm.” She was far too polite to tell me that everything I said sounded false. That I would be better off confronting reality, rather than obscuring the sadness of sad things through a hazy filter of language.

It wasn't always like that. Sometimes I arrived with straightforward stories of wounded pride. Those times I wanted nothing more than to be direct and talk about how humiliating it was to be molested during a security pat-down (by a
chadori
woman, no less), how I couldn't bear the thought of another session with Mr. X, or how weak I felt, letting it all get to me. I knew precisely how I felt and was bursting to tell her, eager to ease the hurt with mockery, and unravel it all over and over again, from a hundred different vantage points—the sort of deep, swirling conversation one has with one's girlfriends. But Farsi denied me the nuance I needed. Without those shades of gray, my descriptions and ideas came out as partial, crude sketches. In the course of these halting monologues, I realized that some of my most integral parts resisted translation. It was only in not being able to transport them into another language that I saw how much they mattered.

A couple we knew walked in, and sat down at the table next to us, so we steered the conversation toward a new topic, one that was frequently on my mind as I sought to decipher exactly what it was that made me feel, and seem, so different from other Tehrani women my age. Khaleh Farzi insisted it was all in my head, and repeated her frequent refrain: You're just not used to looking like a peasant. Originally, I assumed it was a simple matter of style and comportment: I walked too quickly, rushing in and out of stores and offices, and didn't wear lipstick. I felt eyes on me constantly, and I wanted to pinpoint precisely what is was that gave me away as a foreigner.

After watching me for several weeks as we rode in taxis and shopped and had coffee, Celine concluded that it was nothing so obvious. She leaned forward in her chair, as if to make a serious pronouncement. One, you laugh whenever you want. And two, you smile too much. This is very American of you. It doesn't really occur to you, to alter yourself in public. So I should smile less? I asked. I should be less nice? No, she replied, you need to be more selective about who you're nice to.

Celine was my authority on how to wear and subvert the veil, as well as my guide to delightful public places, such as our café. She was friends with the café owner, whom I dubbed Elvis, for his head of dark, wavy hair. As Celine outlined whom one should not smile to, Elvis placed a second slice of cheesecake on the brushed aluminum table. He ran the café as a cross between a living room and an art gallery—a place people went for his cozy hospitality, and to see and be seen. A series of abstract paintings or drawings always decorated the walls, and he redesigned the aesthetic of the espresso menu every month.

The pebbles underneath our feet—the slate and earth tone décor was minimalist, in the style of a zen garden—crunched as we crossed and uncrossed our legs. Young people sought Elvis's café as refuge from the relentless ugliness that pervaded most public gathering places. Even in the rainy winter, people would crowd outside in the drizzle for an hour, smoking soggy cigarettes and waiting for a table. It was the only café in Tehran designed with innovative elegance and attracted young people starved for aesthetic beauty—the artists, writers, and musicians whose sensibilities suffered acutely in a city draped with grim billboards of war martyrs.

Elvis's coffeehouse inspired imitations all over the neighborhood and then the city. In early 2000, when Celine and I first began to haunt the tiny,
modern nook, it was one of a kind. By the following summer of 2001, dozens of tastefully decorated cafés dotted the city, but Elvis's remained the original. In the Gandhi shopping complex, where it was located, at least six others sprang up, and the area became center stage in a café scene of shocking permissiveness. By that time, the dress code was so relaxed that everyone buzzed with tales of “You'll never believe what I saw this girl wearing!”; the fashion spring was likened to a silent coup.

Girls dressed in every color imaginable—veils of bright emerald, violet, buttercup—and in short, coat-like tunics called
manteaus
that hugged their curves, Capri pants that exposed long stretches of calf, pedicured toes in delicate sandals. They sat at the tables outside, in mixed groups, alone with boyfriends, laughing and talking into the late evening, past eleven. For a few weeks, Tehran actually had something like nightlife in public, not just sequestered parties inside people's houses.

Not everyone was keen to exploit the new Left Bank café scene. Because of the ever-present specter of the morality police, young people with strict parents or more reticent personalities often turned to the Internet to socialize. Online, they could be as outrageous and indecent, tame or sensitive as they pleased. Chat rooms, Celine explained, were an easy way to showcase one's personality minus the clogging distractions of public space. At that time, before the crazed advent of the weblog, chat rooms were the preferred venues in the virtual sphere. You were on
all
night, I complained to her, your phone was busy for years. Sorry, she said sheepishly. I met someone last week I really liked, and we've been emailing back and forth ever since. He's the perfect age. Funny. Speaks Italian. But I don't know, he hasn't sent a picture yet.

Often, once we finished discussing work, men, and the new styles of head scarf we coveted, Celine and I would sit and people-watch. The throng of students and young professionals flirted brazenly, and the coquettish slipping of veils produced nothing less than social theater. The Tehran of the revolution was one of the most sexualized milieus I had ever encountered. Even the chat rooms, Celine informed me, were rife with erotic discussion. People really, really wanted to talk about sex.

The major social aim of the revolution had been to impose Islamic faith on Iranian society. But the catalog of restrictions—on dress, behavior, speech—meant to instill a solemn decency instead inflamed people's carnal
instincts. Made neurotic by the innate oppressiveness of restriction, Iranians were preoccupied with sex in the manner of dieters constantly thinking about food. The subject meant to be
unmentionable—
to which end women were forced to wear veils, sit in the back of the bus, and order hamburgers from the special “women's line” at fast food joints—had somehow become the most mentioned of all. The constant exposure to covered flesh—whether it was covered hideously, artfully, or plainly—brought to mind, well, flesh.

The relaxing of the dress code encouraged this tendency, by breathing sexuality back into public space. Women walked down the street with their elbows, necks, and feet exposed, their figures outlined in form-fitting tunics. After two decades in exile, skin was finally back. And so imaginations flared, everyone eagerly thought about and talked about sex a lot, as though they were afraid if they didn't exploit the new permissiveness in dress and mood, they might wake up to find it had disappeared.

Perhaps the preoccupation had evolved gradually, so at no point did it seem remarkable that in a country run like an Islamic theme park, complete with long lines for bad rides and portraits of ridiculous characters everywhere, everyone was addicted to talking about sex. Sexual innuendoes, double entendres, and dirty jokes were commonplace in daily conversation, in taxis, among politicians, in formal meetings. Viagra had recently debuted in Tehran, and a day did not pass when I didn't hear a handful of fresh jokes about its powers. At the bank. During an interview. In line for pastry.

In such a climate, the country of my birth singled me out as a sexual target: a giant, blinking red light signaling availability immediately after a round of introductions. It fell to Najmeh, a fellow high-strung journalist-workaholic, to instruct me on how to discourage unwanted attentions arising from the clichéd belief that Americans exchange sex like handshakes. We worked from the same office, anchored by the BBC, and our desks sat across from each other. Each morning we took up our stations with a stack of newspapers and steaming cups of tea, and she educated me about Iranian politics—horrid vs. less horrid clerics, insignificant reformers vs. highly insignificant reformers—and social conduct. Najmeh admitted to assuming the worst about people's intentions but argued this was a function of the Islamic Republic's skewed gender relations, not an innately dire view of human nature.