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Mehrangiz Kar - 2008.04.27
RoozOnline
The Iranian website known as “The Feminist School” was yet another media outlet that was banned by Iranian authorities last year. Prior to that, a number of websites run by women activists engaged in anti discrimination and justice issues were also silenced.
Women in Iran have been subjected to so much abuse, to so many legal and unlawful ways, and to so many laws forcing them to stay at home, that they were driven to establish “large feminist schools.” Feminism and schools founded on its principles of course do not allow for women’s right to be trampled on or their value be appraised as half of that of men’s. Feminism does not allow a father or a grandfather to prevent his daughter or granddaughter from marrying the person of her choice. The principles of feminism do not allow men to have four permanent wives, or scores of others. This view does not allow men to divorce their wives as easily and women to have to go through such harship and to give up so many rights - sometimes even forcing the woman to give something to the husband in addition to get his permission for divorce. The school of feminism does not allow women to receive next to nothing as heirs to their deceased husbands. What the school of feminism battles against are injustices of the sort just mentioned. When bullies are present to shut down a feminist school in order to preserve injustice, many consequences should be expected.
The result of such discrimination in Iranian society is a feminist explosion that will shape the future. When we come to that point, and mismanagements result in the eruption of radical feminism from the womb of radical gender discrimination, suppressive measures will no longer have any effect. The feminist explosion, or explosive feminism, will not be summarized in an Internet website and cannot be filtered. Radical feminism will shake the foundations of a regime that has sponsored discrimination.
Future disasters must be averted and moderate and peaceful feminism, which conforms to characteristics of Iranian culture, must be given the opportunity to grow and define itself, in religious or non-religious, local and global terms. They must allow dozens and dozens of feminist schools to be built so that, in accordance with principles of Iranian culture, a moderate school of feminism is recognized as the norm and measuring stick. But with measures that are currently implemented, such as suppression, filtering, arrests and such, one can expect the emergence of radical feminism in the future. The laws that hey have passed and worship like holy life itself, and the offices that they have placed on the streets to harass women, all and all help to create a feminist school, of the radical kind of course.
Because feminism has been able to thrive and grow into several branches in the open arms of the Western culture, which is enriched with freedom of expression, radical feminism does not have many buyers in the Western world, even in women’s circles. In Iran, the cultural environment that has been established creates the opposite effect. They suffocate feminism as expressed by an Internet website and do not realize that they are planting the seeds of what the West has been able to avert thanks to freedom of expression, meaning radical feminism.
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