Profound blindness
Male domination and the gazing Narcissist
By Leila Farjami
A couple of recent Iranian male writers of Iranian.com have graciously voiced their concerns about the rising number of Iranian women claiming their rights as equal partners [See: " What has happened to Iranian men?" and "I'm the boss"]. Of course, no narcissist wants to lose his position in a power/control game; however, a narcissist always acts to his own detriment. Take the myth of Narcissus for instance: a beautiful man gazing at his own celestial image in the reflecting waters, frozen, immobile, eternally unaware of all other possibilities within himself. This is the death of the human soul: the rigidity and inflexibility of the mind.
As we observe in any patriarchal society, including the Iranian diaspora, we can always feel this air of perturbed unreality, the self-mortification of the Narcissus, the unrealized disease of many of our male counterparts. So you think you need to reclaim your generational throne because you are an Iranian male? Let’s talk about the natural disasters of this sinister dynasty. What is really the true cost of patriarchal chauvinism?
See Husband-killing on the rise in Iran. Also read the stories of some of these women here on the Amnesty International site.
Shahla Moazami, a criminologist in Iran, performed a conclusive research in 2003 on the topic of “spouse-killings”. These were her findings:
“From her interviews, Moazami found a clear and common pattern in the stories of the female killers. The women married young, often 12-14 years old, and they had from 5 to 7 children. At the time of the murder their average age was 29 years old. Many of them tell that their husband had lost interest in them, and they felt that their beauty was fading.
When a new man takes an interest in them, they fall easily for him. The law gives women few possibilities to get a divorce, and the murder of the husband is planned and done together with the new boyfriend. Only 33% of the women did the killing on their own. Moazami also found cases where women, sometimes with the assistance of their daughters, killed a violent husband.....more