There has been a dramatic change in what it is now possible to talk about, and how it is framed. In 2018, in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein revelations, Sharq (The East), a prominent left-of-centre newspaper in Iran, ran an article by Mahzad Elyassi. This was the first article that not only reflected on #MeToo, but introduced a local connection, sharing Elyassi’s own experience of how, as a 21-year old in the early 2000s, she had to fend off sexual advances from a famous Iranian film director, who was not named in the article.
In our conversations over the past few days, when I asked her about reactions to her piece back then, she told me the response was basically zero; one woman shared her own story, but didn’t want to speak out. In a follow-up article a while later, Elyassi concluded that ‘perhaps we [Iranians] are not ready for it’, that #MeToo was for privileged whites only, at least at that time. As she points out, the current movement in Iran actually seems to involve women from smaller as well as larger cities, and comprises a range of political as well as economic backgrounds. In that sense, it is more intersectional than the original movement of 2018.
The first hashtag storm was built quickly in early August around two cases, the second involving an internationally famous artist, one of those ‘national treasures’ who, more often than not in Iran, are men. These cases sparked empathy, but also fury at women who want ‘more followers’, who are ‘attention-seeking’, and ‘do everything that it takes’- which in this case meant willfully ‘lying’ and making up stories. These patterns of insult and abuse will be familiar. They speak to ‘toxic masculinity’, to use the well-known term, as an integral element of mediated global culture. (This, of course, supposes there is or was a ‘healthy’ masculinity, inside of the system of gender, as opposed to becoming a ‘healthy’ human being). It speaks to the idea of ‘popular misogyny’, as Sarah Banet-Weiser has termed it, which accompanies ‘popular feminism’ in the global media ‘economy of visibility’.
Unlike in the US, however, the first set of revelations, using the hashtag #rape, did not involve a powerful celebrity, but an art school graduate and bookshop assistant, who was later arrested by the police. This ‘ordinary guy’ would invite female colleagues and friends over to eat and drink homemade wine, taking the opportunity to slip a drug into their drink. Women woke up in his bed without remembering much of the previous night. One woman posted the story of her shame, her anxiety, the fact she kept quiet for years.