Please Leave Iranian Women Alone
Not Feminism as pretext for war again
You would think that the West would learn from its past misadventures but it never does. If you have read my work in Against White Feminism you know that I (and many others) have written at length about how Afghan women were used as a pretext for war. Chief among this were the histrionics surrounding the burqa…complete with the warphile white feminist Carolyn Maloney Congressional Representative from New York putting on a burqa on the floor of Congress and acting out the feminist pantomime of her dreams. Laure Bush was not far behind…faithfully kowtowing behind her husband’s war project by announcing on her radio address that America was going to bomb Afghanistan to liberate Afghan women. We know all of this was a bunch of bogus trash not least because the United States had no qualms at all at abandoning Afghan women to the vagaries of the Taliban twenty some years later when they had reduced the country to a bombed out husk where neither men nor women had much to live for.
That was 2001 and now in 2025 nothing much has changed. Over on X where wars of narrative play out..Israeli and Indian bots and troll accounts, the neocon wing of #MAGA the usual flanked by a coterie of white feminists who can never resist a shot at potential saviordom are all trying to ply the lie that Trump and Netenyahu are liberators of the women of Iran. One would think that the stench of this sort of smelly garbage would now be so rank as to have been taken out to the curb; however this is not so. The idea that Iranian women are some sort of oppressed lot that need a genocidal maniac and a convicted sexual offender to come to their aid is ludicrous drivel of the most deluded and fanciful sort.
As my friend Professor Susan Abulhawa recently pointed out Iranian women do not require anyone’s help. In the years since 1979, literacy among Iranian women has risen from 42 percent to a whopping 98 percent (Statista) which was 85.5 percent higher than that of Iranian men. Many of these women study in STEM fields where they outnumber men at 70 percent and 58 percent of all doctorates in Iran are given to women ( compared to the US at 56 percent) In Government 27 percent of ministerial level posts are occupied by women, there are 1121 women judges in Iran are women. In addition, laws require paid maternity leave, maternal and delivery services are free and even infertility treatments are heavily subsidized. Finally, gender affirming surgery and care is legal in Iran since the 1980s which provisions for psychological counseling, hormone therapy for individuals over 18.
This is not to say that Iran, like all other countries in the world is not a complicated place for women. It is undoubted that women face constrictions in their personal freedom and movement just like they do everywhere else in the world. At the same time it is important to remember that the rate of femicide in Iran is four times lower than it is in the United States.
Unsurprisingly, the veil features as a dominant motif in the feverish Iran imaginings of #MAGA et al ..as I have written numerous times the bans or requirements of an forms of clothing or unclothing ( France for eg requires that women be half naked at beaches) is wrong. Governments involving themselves in anything that women do with their bodies is a seizure of their rights to bodily autonomy ( take note United States) However, the continued obsession with the veil at this point seems like the tired trope…not unlike your grandma’s dust covered desk top computer. It does not work, it takes up space and it is worth nothing at all. The veil as a symbol of anything least of all oppression must now be retired as the relic that it is.
In the meantime, over in Israel they are celebrating having transformed their idea of strong women into women who rabidly kill and bomb other women. More on this and the idea of securofeminism in Part II of this substack to come through in a couple of days. When strong women are women who are celebrated for killing then feminism is truly dead within the Israeli context
If you take anything at all from what I have to say, please call out the white woman/#MAGA/Israelitroll preoccupation with Iranian women for what it is it..the reuse of a tattered and dangerous argument for self-serving bombings dressed up in a mishmash of psueod feminist vocabulary. Please feel free to post the worst offenders in the comment section below.