Essay: Dear White Women Cheering Iranian Women

Photo: Christian Mang/Reuters

This essay is paired with Iran’s Feminist Revolution—Women, Life, Freedom

It’s thrilling, isn’t it, watching women far away rise up?

Especially when they are women whose plight was always used to shut you up.

“Women in Iran should be able to wear what they want without the fear of being killed for it,” extolled that paragon of I support women over there but not over here, U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn. 

ccMarsha is Exhibit A of the hypocritical fuckery of white Christian theocratic women. Yes, Marsha, and American women should be able to access abortion care without the fear of being arrested, tracked by bounty hunters or vigilanted, or being killed for it.

Oh and look at Senator Lindsay Graham, another paragon of support for freedom over there who doesn’t give a fuck about freedom over here, who dares express concern for “Iranians dying for their freedom over there,” at the same time as he wants a national abortion ban that is the antithesis of freedom and which will result in Americans dying over here..

Marsha and Lindsay point at the theocrats in Iran because it is easier to see theocrats when they don’t look like you. 

But it’s imperative to understand that the theocrats who look like you and those who don’t both follow the same rule book: control desire and control our bodies.  More simply:  Control.

 Enforced hijab. 

Enforced pregnancy.

This isn’t a “whose flavour of patriarchy is worse” letter. This is a “fuck the patriarchy everywhere” grenade that I gift to you. This is not The Handmaid’s Tale, it’s real life. This is a wake the fuck up because clearly you’ve been drifting, cruising on the delusions that your whiteness will save you from white supremacist patriarchy.

Nothing will. 

Donald Trump anointing Amy Coney Barrett Five-Star General of the Footsoldiers of the Patriarchy on the White House Lawn, Sept. 2020

So successful has white supremacist patriarchy been at convincing you that you’re lucky to live in the U.S. and not Saudi Arabia or Iran, that so many of you did not pay enough attention to the theocracy that white supremacy was building right here, at home.

It was being built by white men who look like your fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons–men who look like Lindsay Graham–not the scary brown men with beards, right?

And it was being built by white women who are your mothers, aunts, and sisters—women like Marsha Blackburn–all too willing to foot-soldier for the patriarchy in return for its crumbs.

White supremacist patriarchy so successfully lulled you into a delusion of “Be grateful you don’t live over there” that you sleep walked your way into the disaster that is now and over here.

So successful has white supremacist patriarchy been at convincing you that you’re lucky to live in the U.S. and not Saudi Arabia or Iran, that so many of you did not pay enough attention to the theocracy that white supremacy was building right here, at home.

Liberal or conservative, white women in the U.S. are more obsessed with Muslim women and whatever you think is oppressing Muslim women than you are at recognizing your own oppressions. You are more obsessed with what you think Brown Muslim men are doing to Brown Muslim women than you are at what your own menfolk are doing to you.

And now here are Brown Muslim women rising up, sparking a revolution, setting alight a tool of their patriarchy, leaving us breathless at their courage, and still you cheer at the women whose plight over there you are grateful not to share, and still you remain comfortable pointing fingers at the patriarchy in Iran and fail to complete the sentence by asking “What about my patriarchy, over here?”

White liberal women want to save Muslim women - preferably over there somewhere - and white conservative women want to feel superior to Muslim women and so refuse to see anything in your beliefs that consigns you to the subservience and submission you think Muslim women must live with.

And so you’ve been grateful you live over here and not over there. But now over here has fucked you over. And you didn’t see it coming?

Liberal or conservative, white women in the U.S. are more obsessed with Muslim women and whatever you think is oppressing Muslim women than you are at recognizing your own oppressions.

The Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v Wade did not come out of the blue. 

The 1979 Iranian Revolution was co-opted by the clerics who then claimed as an achievement the mass covering of an entire nation’s women’s hair. Iranian women ripping off that compulsory hijab in public and shaving off their hair in public are seizing the narrative and the revolution that the theocrats and the misogynists stole from them. Iranian women are literally burning the symbol of their patriarchy’s oppression.

What are you setting on fire? 

If 1979 was momentous for Iran, then it was momentous too for the U.S.--the year that the “Moral Majority” was formed. That white American Christian political organization, associated with the Christian Right and the Republican Party, was instrumental in mobilizing conservative and right wing Christians and turning them into a political force–the political force that has succeeded in bringing the U.S. to where it is today, with Roe v Wade overturned. And always remember the white supremacy at its core.

The patriarchy atop theocracy melange of Iran’s “morality police” is easier to see because it is so visibly expressed in enforced hijab. But what is the enforced pregnancy of the Christian zealots in the U.S. but a melange of patriarchy built atop theocracy right here?

And because they’re white supremacists, the GOP’s Southern Strategy used southern white women as the nexus of their reliance on race, gender, and religion to keep white people in that part of the U.S. resolutely Republican and increasingly right wing. 

White supremacist and increasingly evangelical patriarchy has an army of willing white women who have delivered victory over a fundamental tenet of feminism–the right to abortion. 

The deadly blow to the federally protected right to have an abortion belongs to the “sisters”–women who are what I call Foot Soldiers of the Patriarchy–a tag team of white, Christian terrorists, legislators, attorneys general, governors, and judges—the white women who destroyed Roe v Wade.

It is harder to see Foot Soldiers of the Patriarchy when they look like you.

The patriarchy atop theocracy melange of Iran’s “morality police” is easier to see because it is so visibly expressed in enforced hijab. But what is the enforced pregnancy of the Christian zealots in the U.S. but a melange of patriarchy built atop theocracy right here?

Those same white and Christian women are rarely analysed, examined and pathologized in the way that Muslim women are, as I’ve written here and here. 

White and Christian are considered default – the harmless norm – in the U.S. White women are afforded an innocence that is both a reward and a leash, that ensures they work diligently on behalf of a patriarchy upon which their own livelihood depends. And which they must remember will hurt them because nothing protects them – or protects you – from patriarchy.

And that’s exactly why white women have not been paying attention. White supremacist patriarchy is their patriarchy. It looks and sounds just like them. It’s much easier to see Brown men and Black men as the danger. That is where white supremacist patriarchy always kept the attention -- always promised to save white women from.

It is way past time for white women in the U.S. who have ever asked “How can I help Muslim women” and “Why do Muslim women submit to misogyny?” to start obsessing instead over their white sisters who benefit from white supremacist patriarchy and who don’t give a flying fuck how it hurts everyone else. I’ve had white women come to my events and ask how they can help Muslim women over there because it’s easier than actually doing something about women over here.

White women are afforded an innocence that is both a reward and a leash, that ensures they work diligently on behalf of a patriarchy upon which their own livelihood depends.

Fascism doesn't happen overnight. Theocracy is not built in a day. And fascist theocrats are obsessed with what’s on our heads and what’s in between our legs.

We are more than what's on our heads and what's in between our legs:

In Iran, women are fighting against theocrats who enforce hijab by burning shit down, including their hijab.

In the U.S., what are the women who are fighting against theocrats who enforce abortion bans doing?

As you watch the glory and power of the feminist revolution against theocrats in Iran, ask yourself where the fuck is your feminist revolution against theocrats in the U.S.

No one is under any illusion that the theocrats in Iran came to office as a result of free and fair elections. 

In the U.S., they did.

In the U.S. the theocrats are in office as a result of free and fair elections in which many white Americans signaled very clearly they wanted their favourite candidates’ white supremacist Christian zealotry.

Roe v Wade was overturned this summer by the Supreme Court of the United States– a court stacked with Christian zealots. 

Roe v Wade was overturned because of very ordinary Christian zealots who voted for fellow very ordinary white Christian zealots who installed other Christian zealots on courts, including the highest court in the land. 

Roe v Wade was overturned as the biggest victory of a white Christian theocratic revolution. 

As you watch the glory and power of the feminist revolution against theocrats in Iran, ask yourself where the fuck is your feminist revolution against theocrats in the U.S.

And what will most Americans do about it? 

Will you burn things to the ground? Will you risk your lives as the very Iranian women you are cheering do? 

Next time you are tempted to ask how it got so bad for women in Iran, ask yourself how you allowed white, Christian zealots to use democracy to cut it at its knees by destroying the right to abortion–a right which most Americans support. And recognize that the destruction of that right is but the first of many other destructions. Anyone who is not an able-bodied, white cisgender heterosexual man should fear what is to come.

When will you start burning things to the ground? Where is your fucking rage?

Where is your feminist revolution against your theocrats?

Point to your “morality police”and what they have made compulsory and burn it to the ground and join the revolution that women in Iran have ignited against theocracy. Stop pointing over there and point to your theocrats and rise up!

Are revolutions dangerous? Patriarchy and theocracy are more dangerous. 

Fuck theocracy everywhere.

Fuck fascism everywhere.

Fuck the patriarchy in every time zone and every universe.

Burn. Shit. Down. 

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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editing an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell! And Other Stories: Adventures in Menopause from Across the Personal and Political Spectrum. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.  

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