Women, ladies and girls

There has been some talk about women’s rights in Iran lately, whether it was concerning the access to the Iran/Costa Rica match or our first lady accompanying Mr. Ahmadinejad to Malaysia, or on the subject of domestic violence.

Today, the BBC had on its site a piece by its correspondent on how increasingly difficult it was to be a female journalist in Iran. Interestingly, however, there is just one bit of the audio that does not appear in the text on the page, although to me it is perhaps the most revealing, so I have transcribed it:

“Every time I go to the weekly foreign ministry briefing the security officials reprimand me for some tuft of hair showing, then there is one public relations official in the foreign ministry who delights in leaving my name off the list of reporters who want to ask a question during the news conferences. His clear enjoyment of humiliating me borders on some perverted kind of flirtation. He clearly gets a kick out of it. And when I once accused him of having a problem with me because I was a woman, he just laughed as if I’d complimented him. In retrospect, I thought it was quite amazing that I could tell an official he was a male chauvinist, and he wasn’t at all offended.”