Felt Up in Tehran: Sexual Harassment, Modesty and the Politics of Color

By Nassim Mobasher

The sun is about to set. The bus stop is attracting a restless population, all of them eager to head home. Tehran is busiest at this hour. I notice a set of green eyes following me; they belong to a young man whom I don’t directly look at.

While stepping down the stairs to get to my bus, I get caught in a traffic jam. Too many people are pushing and shoving their way through but none of us can move. I feel someone’s hands on my back. I cannot turn back, nor can I move forward. The hand is on my thigh, the fingers moving about, grabbing me.

Someone is feeling me up.

Someone is touching me.

The shock of it is obscuring my reaction. The reaction is supposed to be involuntary, but I am frozen. I open my mouth but hear my own silence. This is that nightmare I keep having where something horrible is happening and I need to scream to draw attention to myself but I’ve lost my voice. This is me, awake, being violated. And Gagging.

The claustrophobic crowd breaks up and I walk down the stairs and get to my bus. Dirt, dirty dirt that I notice on my shoes. I’m not thirsty but look around for water. I notice a set of green eyes again, a few meters away. He is laughing with his friends. I look at him, pathetically. Shoved down my feminist podium: fallen, silently. No scream, not even a thump.

There is dirt everywhere. I need water.

(A week later)

My cousin and I are walking down Taleqani Street. I’ve just purchased a blue shawl. My cousin asks if I’d like some coke. I suddenly feel a hand on my thigh.

I’ve turned around and I’m hitting him over the head with my purse and swearing at him in English. I stop once I realize what I’m doing. Everyone on the street is looking at us and shaking their heads in disgust. At me.

I don’t want coke, I need water.

Sexual harassment doesn’t happen to modest proper young women; it happens to girls who are asking for it. Provoking it. Being provocative. Covering yourself up completely is an indication that you do not welcome such advances.

“The chador protects women from harm,” reads a massive mural on the sidewall of a state building. On it is a painting of a woman covered in a black veil, the chador, with heavenly light covering her face and surrounding her, white doves circling her. I smirk at it. But I realize I have no right to smirk, I haven’t worn the full black veil and experienced its heavenly protection. Yet.

I’m walking down Enqelab Street, covered from head to toe in the black chador. Both of my hands are preoccupied in trying to hold it and keep it from falling. I have no shape inside it; I’m just a black blob. Black makes you invisible: a part of space, a lack of matter. That’s why the chador is black. Of course, being physically invisible is a choice one should have the right to make, and it has its benefits. The veil is the choice to express existence in a language other than that of sexuality or even physicality, which can be liberating for those who choose it.

Prior to the Revolution, the veil came in all sorts of different colors, and women who veiled themselves did so with a range of fabrics. After the Revolution, the black chador for women became a sign of political allegiance to the new regime. And not paying allegiance was not a choice, so everyone wore black.

In 1995, eighteen years after the Revolution, Mohsen Makhmalbaf made the international award-winning film, “Gabbeh,” about color and the human need for nature and beauty. This film was the first movement towards reintroducing color back into the blackness that had covered Iran after the Revolution. Today, the blackness enveloping the physical reality within these borders is the cause of depression among a noticeable percentage of Iranian women. However, color is still provocative, and any woman wearing anything other than black is asking to be looked at.

I am walking, wrapped inside the protective blackness of invisibility. A man walking past me ‘accidentally’ hits me in the chest with his elbow. A few minutes later, another man walking by commits the same ‘accident.’ Trying to convince myself of the accidental nature of these occurrences while I stop to buy some green lettuce, I suddenly feel grabbed from behind.

Frozen.

Voiceless.

And invisible.

I don’t feel the need to smirk, I just need some water.

Nassim Mobasher is a Canadian political science student currently living in Iran.