Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran is a celebration of reading and of women. It tells the story of a private class in the Western novel offered to women in the home of a female professor, a class which mixes believers with cosmopolitans. Nafisi’s students become her friends and the characters of her book.

Nafisi introduces her students as types: the poet, the lady, the comedian, the wild one. Her prose is not entirely successful in its attempt to differentiate them. In the opening chapter, she describes her students removing their outer coverings: “Each has become distinct through the color and style of her clothes, the color and length of her hair; not even the two who are still wearing their head scarves look the same (p. 4).” The idea of their hidden individuality remains somewhat abstract here.

She seems to take the popular view that every woman is not only inherently unique but also secretly very powerful. The outward oppression of women is taken as paradoxical testimony to their inner greatness. Of her student Sanaz, she asks (p. 27): “Is she aware... of her own power? Does she realize how dangerous she can be when her every stray gesture is a disturbance to public safety?”

Of another, she writes (p. 31): “To me, Yassi was the real rebel. She did not join any political group or organization.” This apoliticality is taken not as powerlessness but as the mark of powerful individualism.

Nafisi’s portrait of contemporary Iran is sharp and vivid. She describes a totalitarian society like that of the Soviets, with giant posters of the leaders and mind-numbing slogans everywhere. Forbidden books are passed around in thick photocopied bundles and Western goods like Lindt chocolates are highly prized on the black market. No educated person believes anything unless they hear it from the BBC.

But the Islamic republic is also a place where women are forbidden to run on the street because it draws attention to their behinds, and no female singers are allowed on the radio. Morality squads drive around in white Toyotas, raiding cafés and stopping people on the street, making sure that men and women are kept apart unless they are blood relatives, imposing sexual segregation by threat of force.

There are ample horrors related for those who seek to know the worst. Female political prisoners who are virgins are married to guards and raped before being executed, because it is believed that if they die intact they will automatically go to heaven. During the Iraq war, local militias arrive quickly at the scene of bombings to prevent bystanders from helping the victims, to prohibit any sign of mercy or mourning which would deviate from the official doctrine of the joy of war.

In this world, the veil is in some sense symbolic. Unlike in Saudi Arabia, Iranian women can vote. The marriage age, which was for a time reduced to nine, is now back up to thirteen, which is approximately the age at which each of my grandmothers was wed. Divorce is allowed with a husband’s permission, which must often be paid for, and he usually gets custody of the children.

Part of what makes the events of Nafisi’s story possible is that women are not barred from education; in fact, more women attend university than men, though only 10% of the women work. Education seems to be functioning here as diversion or leisure or social outlet rather than preparation for a career.

When discussing the novels of Austen, James and Fitzgerald, Nafisi addresses themes of marriage and adultery and with her class compares them to the values current in fundamentalist Iran. At times she slips into clunky allegorical interpretation, as in the passage on Gatsby in which she states: “What we in Iran had in common with Fitzgerald was this dream that became our obsession and took over our reality, this terrible, beautiful dream, impossible in its actualization, for which any amount of violence might be justified or forgiven (p. 144).” — awkwardly likening Daisy Buchanan to the 1979 revolution.

Nafisi believes she is defending literature against moralism, but mostly she is a hopeless romantic who admires defiant heroines and their male votaries. Whenever a friend announces her engagement, Nafisi asks, Are you in love?, despite an awareness that the question is rude.

Both Nafisi and her opponents practice the moral interpretation of literature, but applying different moralities. She states the central question of her course as “how these great works of imagination could help us in our present trapped situation as women (p. 19).”

At the same time, she wants the novel to be an escape from reality (p. 38) rather than a model for it. The freedom which Nafisi advocates most passionately is a secondary freedom of the imagination, the freedom of an escape from defeat by an unfree world into a realm of fantasy (p. 338). In celebrating the secret power of women, she may already be resorting to fantasy herself.

I find Nafisi’s feminist take on Lolita perplexing, though she explains it with her usual directness and clarity (p. 33 & 41):

To take the novel as the story of Lolita herself is outside the scope of the book, as Nafisi is aware. If you intend to read a work of fiction for the story it does not tell, why read it at all? How can one possibly hope to rescue a figment of someone else’s imagination?

The attraction of women to Lolita has always puzzled me; I know at least two or three women who love it and no men. Sometimes I suspect the lush style marks it as a kind of luxury item, as if the prose were a deliciously relaxing bubble bath. Sometimes I think women are drawn by its rapturous expressions of male desire, which is still alluring to them even in a grotesque and repulsive form.

I myself have never known quite what to make of it. I think of it as a book whose cartoonishness is meant to excuse it from ordinary moral judgment. The verbal style screams put-on, parody and provocation rather than a depiction of events to be taken as actually occurring. I take it as a story of obsession, with the youth of the girl to be taken not as innocence trampled but rather as a blankness, the objective proof of a misunderstanding.

I can see the appeal of Nabokov to Iranians, even beyond the fact that he mastered a foreign tongue and surpassed his nationality to win fame in the West. He is also the century’s best model of the post-revolutionary aristocrat, disinherited, stripped of his financial trappings and thus rendered all the more glorious in his vestigial cultural plumage. He is the hero of anti-politics as politics, a survivor who has earned the right to flaunt his personal idiosyncrasy as if it carried greater social relevance.

Still, I would expect a feminist to condemn Lolita outright rather than admire it while trying to reverse its presentation. Leonard Michaels writes somewhere about his own disapproval of the book, which he was assigned to teach in California at a time when the abduction of 12-year-old Polly Klaas was in the news every day.

If we take the narrator’s claim that she seduced him at face value, the book becomes an attack on the pre-Freudian myth of the sexual innocence of children. Why is the legal age of consent set later than the onset of puberty in some societies, and what are the consequences of this interval? Could the unspeakable truth be that the young must be placed off-limits because they are too desirable to adults, even so-called normal adults, that nubiles must be taken out of circulation so society doesn’t come to ruin fighting or revert to savagery at the sight of them?

The last, post-adolescent glimpse we get of Lolita somehow came to mind recently as I watched the recent appearance on NBC’s Dateline of Britney Spears, pregnant again and tearful, having been roughly used by the collective imagination and then abandoned to the inevitable squalor of domesticity.

I was once asked by an editor at Nerve to write something about how the veil is actually sexy. I found the suggestion offensive on so many levels: that I should be presumed to have any expertise about Iran because of my racial background, that important political issues should be approached in such a breezy, frivolous manner, and that an editor should give me the conclusion of an essay rather than merely the subject. To make an analogy, it would be a little like asking an African-American to write about how soft the cotton was that was picked in the old South, the thread count of white Georgia’s bedsheets.

The veil can be erotic but in a political context it is not; it is a kind of seal on property, a mark of submission. (That said, Wikipedia points to a veil-fetish subculture on-line at Yahoo and Flickr .)

Nafisi explains the veil primarily in political terms (p. 112):

Verse 24:31 of the Koran says that women should not “stamp their feet in order to draw attention to their hidden ornaments.” It is unclear to me if the ornaments referred to are jangling ankle bracelets or if the injunction is against coyly shaking your body to draw the eye to a jiggling bosom. The Koran also contains a truly scathing indictment of the top bun hairstyle, an issue which would seem somewhat beneath the notice of a holy book.

In the orthodox Jewish world magnificently described by Isaac Bashevis Singer in In My Father’s Court, pious women wear wigs to cover their natural hair. Even today you still see women wearing hats to go to church on Sunday in towns like Baltimore. Of course, in theory the veil persists as a tradition for brides on their wedding day, but I have rarely seen it. It is said to be a symbol of purity, the ancient equivalent of the safety seal on over-the-counter drugs. Its mystical justification, which Jews and Muslims share, is that the light of God shines too brightly from the face of a bride or even the hair of a wife. Like politics, religion can not be understood without recognizing that it is mostly hypocrisy. For the psychologist, however, hypocrisy is an opportunity.

If modesty is relative, how can we judge? Relatively. There are dress codes in the West as well, though most are not written down as law. To take a trivial example, men can not wear shorts at the office, despite the millions of dollars in air conditioning this could save in the summer. Some exception seems to be made for the deliverers of packages.

When the Islamic government succeeds in making the veil mandatory in 1980, Nafisi stubbornly refuses to comply and resigns her position at the university. She makes the interesting argument that wearing it would involve false pretenses if it were not voluntary; it takes away from the meaning of the gesture for believers. On page 165, she asks, ”What did he imagine our students would think of us if they saw us wearing the veil when we had sworn never to do so?“ Instead she stays home and gorges herself on novels.

The meaning of the chador changed over the generations, she notes. There was now in the younger women ”none of the shy withdrawal of my grandmother, whose every gesture begged and commanded the beholder to ignore her, to bypass her and leave her alone... Now the chador was forever marred by the political significance it had gained. It had become cold and menacing, worn... with defiance (p. 192).“

In 1987, the battle now well-lost, she again accepts a full-time position offered by a persuasive administrator and teaches for ten years wearing the chador, before she and her family finally make the difficult decision to leave. In her epilogue, she tells us that most of her private students were also able to leave Iran and that the situation has improved even for those who stayed. ”Their scarves are more colorful and their robes much shorter; they wear makeup now and walk freely with men who are not their brothers, fathers or husbands (p. 341).“

My mother, who returned from a trip to Tehran recently, confirms that women are wearing colors again, bright scarves and light pastel overcoats. It was only since the revolution that women were forced to wear black. It is hard to distinguish between the protective and the punitive in this. One may admit the possible sexual effects of tight clothing, but why should bright colors be banned? Are they not simply festive rather than in any way provocative? Was it not merely unruly desire but even cheerfulness that was being interdicted? Khomeini’s titanic frown seems to say yes. This revision of the religious tradition suggests that the veil was not mandated to protect women but rather to erase them entirely, to simply blot them out like confidential information in a declassified document.

It’s jarring to go from Nafisi’s hyperliterate cult of the book to Marjane Satrapi’s seemingly post-literate cartoons. Nafisi is shocked by the younger generation who think all men are perverts, while the author of Persepolis is herself a member of that generation. One night after her car breaks down, Satrapi’s mother is harassed on the street by two bearded fundamentalists who tell her that women who don't wear the veil should be “pushed up against a wall and fucked and then thrown in the garbage (p. 74).”

Satrapi was attending a French school in Tehran when the revolution came and her parents sent her to Vienna to finish her education. On her own in a strange country, she fell in with anarchist punks, read Bakunin and de Beauvoir, and got deeply into drugs, using and dealing. Then, homeless for two months after a bad break-up, she returned home feeling like a failure and attempted suicide.

Persepolis was published in two volumes but comprises a single story. It is a compelling personal narrative which strays from the political for long stretches, though at times it can be as didactic as Rius' comic book Marx for Beginners. There are moments of humor sprinkled throughout, my personal favorite being a street vendor hawking tapes who calls out: Estevie Vonder. The Persian habit of adding ligative vowels everywhere was the source of much confusion to me growing up.

Nafisi and Satrapi both come from aristocratic families. Nafisi’s father was the mayor of Tehran, while Satrapi’s grandfather had been prime minister. Satrapi, who lives in France today, stands somewhat to the left of her compatriot. Rather than trying to simultaneously celebrate sisterhood and the individuality of all women, she is herself a loner and critical of the hypocrisy of Iranian women who dress Western but have internalized the repressive sexual morality of Islam.

Meanwhile Nafisi thanks Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami in her acknowledgements. The idea of her being allied with conservatives is particularly disturbing because it raises the concern that the oppression of women in Iran will be taken by the American public to support the case for invasion, that it could function as propaganda for war.

In the end I don’t see a great distance between their two views of the veil. Satrapi comments on p. 148:

It does seem to weigh a little more heavily on her, press a little deeper, as if the fabric lies draped across the brain, veiling a woman's own mind from her.

Of a Muslim student leader in one of her classes, Nafisi writes (p. 103): ”At times he could be very gentle, and when he talked, he would not look you in the eyes--not just because a Muslim man should not look a woman in the eyes, but because he was too timid.“ Of the head of her department (p. 183), similarly: ”He did not look me in the eyes. Most of the time he kept his head down like a shy eighteen-year-old."

Nafisi tends to see men as weak, while Satrapi sees them as brutal. To Nafisi, they are timid and shy, threatened by the radiant power of women. Satrapi simply believes they want to control and abuse them.

They are both right but perhaps the emphasis matters. I lean towards the latter. After all, if they are merely weak, how can men control women without any numerical advantage?

Men do have the advantage of established power, a legacy from the age of brute force. The authority of tradition derives largely from the sheer fact of its existence, from inertia, and also from its usefulness in the eternal struggle between generations. Being established puts you in a position to attract defectors one by one, without the difficulty of organizing and mobilizing starting from a minority position.

There has never once been a clean slate, a fair fight, an even start between conservatives and progressives. In fact only the progressive is running; the conservative is trying to stop the race. In my opinion, conservatism is not an idea but the opposition to ideas. Sure, the conservative can make words too, talking about the rights of kings or of private property, but intellectually it is an empty bluff that only wins by force or funding. Iran's revolution was unusual in that it went backwards rather than forwards, back to priestly rule and public stoning. Thus it was paradoxically a conservative revolution.

In addition to the political explanation of the veil, there must be a psychological explanation. On page 304, Nafisi offers this one, pointing again in part to the weakness of men before the glory of woman:

I would have expected a society ruled by men to require women to show their bodies rather than hide them. Every bar would be a Hooters and attractive female job candidates would have to actually disrobe instead of only being undressed mentally. So why would men create a society that seems to limit their own sexual access as well? I guess because keeping a grip on power is more important to them than sensual pleasure, or because on their own merits some would have no access at all.

It's hard to please a woman, hard enough that some male-run societies seem to be based on the idea that it is impossible. It's hard for some men to understand the things that please them, like cut flowers withering away in a vase or a simple remark about a new haircut, rather than sitting down to dinner on time or exposure to an erection.

Men are brutal. When a man helps a woman, he is at the same time gauging the strength of her resistance. A man tries to understand a woman primarily in order to possess her; he tries to get into her head in order to get into her pants. With luck he may accidentally attain an understanding of why she does not want to be possessed by him, though he certainly will not know what to do with that knowledge. Even the idea that men are brutal is still somehow flattering to them, since it is part of their weakness to always confuse brutality with strength.

Perhaps harsh religions were once necessary to create a civilization that no longer needed that harshness, to breed an animal with a conscience, as Nietzsche would say. It is true that desire is hard to master, and that it must be partly mastered even to be enjoyed properly, to be surrendered to.

Days, weeks, perhaps years of my own life have been lost in the haze of desire. In moments of relief I often felt disoriented, even bereft, as if abandoned by a long-time persecutor. I might regret the energy I once spent in getting and forgetting women, but without such excesses of desire, half of humanity wouldn't be here — more than half, maybe all.

Personally I exhort the citizenry to take pressure off on the demand side of the equation. The only dangerous side effect of masturbation is a sheen of sweat and dark bags under your eyes, the fashionably intense jack-off look lately being sported in the movie houses by Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers. The undeniable benefit is an instant return to mental clarity.

Perhaps the root of the problem is imagining that sexuality somehow dwells within the female form. By covering women’s bodies, you would therefore have solved the problem. In fact, covering the bodies of women is a way of covering the hearts of men, their fears and desires.

What is required for civilization to advance is recognition that the issue is not to decide difficult questions on behalf of others but to allow them the freedom to make their own decisions. Islamic men must learn deeper self-control, as men in the West have to try to do every day. The best way, the only way to protect women is to teach men they must respect them as equals.