Letters

Write for The Iranian Editorial policy

Tuesday
November 13, 2001

What did you expect?

It is entirely justified that Mohsen Alavi ["Iranians will never get ahead"] felt enraged enough to respond to Siamack Baniameri's letter on the "Passive aggressive volcano" syndrome he claims that Iranian women have. However, these letters have flayed a very raw nerve inside of me, for the criticism is aimed in a most inappropriate direction.

Understand this: Freud was wrong in his assertion that sex is the most important motivator. Our most vital desires, apart from food and drink, are to feel validated by other human beings and to feel competent in our ability to influence the world. In short, to be able to fully connect and engage with the world. Psychologists wired an eight week old baby's pillow so that when the baby pressed his head back, a colourful mobile would spin. The baby, even at that age, recognized that he could control part of his world, and grew excited, wriggling about in his cradle. Leave a toddler with some object that they have never seen before and without fail she will poke, prod, rip, throw, stroke and punch it in an attempt to find out what it is, what it does, and what it means.

The search for meaning is hard wired within both males and females from birth, and is something that cannot be removed from our desires. Ever. What happens, then, to a person who has been told from birth that they have no value? A child who hears her father say to all and sundry "I have no children," when she expects to be valued by her family? A child who is trained as soon as she learns to speak that she does not have an identity of her own, that her only value lies in what she can provide firstly for her male relatives, and then eventually her future husband?

An adolescent who is constantly harassed, perhaps even beaten and arrested by religious police for trivialities such as wearing lipstick or nail polish, or showing her ankle in the street, or even (horror of horrors!) a wisp of hair from beneath her veil? An adult who has been told all her life that she is a burden, because the dowry system insists that her birth automatically imposes a massive debt on her family? Do Siamack Baniameri and Mohsen Alavi honestly believe that a human being can grow to maturity in this kind of emotionally toxic environment into a well-adjusted and fulfilled person? That there is nothing essential in their souls that would rupture with the despair of finding that nobody in their lives sees them as worthy human beings?

Siamack Baniameri may have thought he was just making jokes, but he has uncovered a sickness that urgently needs changing. The sad thing is that many people will not even recognize that things could be any different. If everyone you meet behaves in the same way, you cannot help feeling that this behaviour is normal and natural. If every woman Siamack Baniameri meets turns out to be a screeching harpy, then the conclusion he will draw, to his eternal loss, is that this is what women basically are.

Men in this situation are in a double bind. Firstly, they are forced to believe through their experience that women are irrational, while they are the strong, constant sex. Everything falls onto their shoulders. Secondly, they grow used to this power, and when a woman attempts to break the mould society has placed her in, men will tend to feel threatened by this. Thus the discrimination we see in many societies.

Human beings are capable of believing anything at all when they are placed in an isolated situation where everyone else believes and acts in the same way, right or wrong. You do not even have to live in a wider society where everyone has the same beliefs- all you need is for everyone you know (maybe only a few dozen people!) to point the same way, and it is likely that you will eventually fall into line. This aspect of human nature is what religious cults thrive on!

The extent to which this is true sends shudders down my spine when I look at the site www.prisonexp.org. Phillip Zimbardo, an American psychologist, enlisted volunteers to play the roles of either prisoners or prison guards in a basement that had been fitted out with prison cells. He wanted to see how placing human beings in a stressful and isolated situation would affect them. Remember that these volunteers were just ordinary people like you and I, and the roles of prisoner and guard were assigned at random.

The experiment was planned to run for two weeks. It had to be called off after six days. In that short space of time "guards" who were in reality ordinary people were beginning to torture the "prisoners." Parents who visited the "prisoners" fell into line, acting submissively, as though their children had actually committed crimes and been legally incarcerated. Even the psychologist who was running the experiment started feeling that people who questioned whether human rights were being abused were weak and spineless. He had become, in his own mind, a "real" prison warden.

Six days in which ordinary people were influenced to turn into psychopaths? Try a whole lifetime in which you are told you have no value, and see if you, too, do not morph into a screeching harpy at the end of it. I want to stress that I am not making an anti-Iranian, or even an anti-Muslim case here. Heaven knows, there are many, many women right here in the West who are brought up to value themselves very little, and turn out to resemble "passive aggressive volcanoes." If we are to bring up a generation of women who are strong, who have a healthy sense of their own identity apart from men, and who can be free to make a real contribution to society, there must be a radical break with the past. Fathers, check yourselves when you are about to say "I have no children." Recognise publicly that you have daughters who are every bit as valuable as your sons.

Let your daughters know how highly you value them. Sign a pledge petition that you will no longer support the dowry system, that you recognize its' part in the oppression of women. These women will face a lot of extra difficulties at first. There will be strong resistance to their new sense of self from family, friends, and maybe even from political forces that do not want society to change. These women may come to feel even more isolated from society at first than they are now. However, have faith. Continue the changes, even though nothing in your own experience tells you that women can be more than the irrational creatures you have been trained from birth to believe they are. To remove this toxic behaviour from your world, changes have to be made, and you might as well start where you are now.

Men who feel that strong women are a threat to the moral standards of society are misguided. It is instead the weak ones, as portrayed by Siamack Baniameri, who are the greatest threat. Women who have a weak sense of identity are the ones who are more likely to be irrational. They are more likely to destroy relationships through jealousy and nagging. They are more likely to use sex as a means to fill their loneliness, or as a weapon against the men they feel grudges about.

Society these days is too complicated for any problem like this to be completely eliminated, but at least we can largely resolve the issue with determined action. Create a generation of strong women, and these problems will fade away to a shadow of their original power.

Rick Pratchett,
Australia