Tak­ing the lead from Par­dis Mahdavi’s lat­est book, Pas­sion­ate Upris­ings, The Nation looks at Iran’s ‘sex­ual rev­o­lu­tion’ in these days of polit­i­cal dis­sent and upheaval.

Some­how, one sus­pects that the grass­roots push to change sex­ual mores can­not be totally divorced from the effort, on the part of fem­i­nist activists but also some reformist par­lia­men­tar­i­ans and even liberal-minded cler­ics, to improve the sta­tus of Iran­ian women under the law. But the women in Mahdavi’s study seem to occupy a wholly per­plex­ing his­tor­i­cal moment, or a palimpsest of his­tor­i­cal moments. They live in a theoc­racy with a pre­mod­ern, reli­gious legal code, and they are under­go­ing, all at once, what we in the West would rec­og­nize as a 1960s-style sex­ual rev­o­lu­tion, 1970s-style second-wave fem­i­nism and the con­tem­po­rary post­fem­i­nist embrace of female sex­u­al­ity, with all its com­plex­i­ties. The mes­sages these women receive are mixed, to say the least.