Women Are Nuts, They Need Shells

In recent months a number of poster and banners have appeared across Iranian cities and on various websites promoting Islamic covering, or hejab, for women.

Some of the images compare women to chocolate, candy, mixed nuts, chairs, chickens and other such sundries. One poster features a piece of candy in its wrapper with a fly hovering overhead, and in a second frame, flies are sitting on the now unwrapped candy. The message: if only women kept their hejab on, they would be spared molestation.

Iranians have greeted the series with widespread protest and ridicule on social networks.

Another billboard which has gone viral shows a pile of mixed nuts including pistachios, hazelnuts, almonds, walnuts and other hard-shelled nuts and declares, “My daughter: It is a rule that valuable things need stronger coverings.”

 “If this is the case,” asked one social network user, “how come cashews which are completely naked are more expensive than other nuts?” A shelled pistachio, commented another one, “is more popular than one completely in its shell.”

The poster series also includes an image of a chair with a broken leg. “A woman without hejab is like a chair with three legs,” says the poster. Here is not quite clear what the designers of the campaign meant to convey: the improperly covered woman is liable to topple? To injure others? To be uncomfortable to sit on?

Yet another poster portrays a young man and a young woman next to each other, and the woman’s hair is partly showing from under her scarf. The man’s face has been replaced by a potato, a symbol for lack of honor and indifference in traditional Iranian culture. “What is the connection between lack of hejab and lack of honor?” the poster inquires.

Different Names, One Mission

Several months into the Islamic Revolution, the newly formed state began imposing mandatory veiling by force. The enforcement groups have changed names over the years, the revolutionary Committees in the early years after the revolution, hardline Basiji groups in the years after the Iran-Iraq war under the presidencies of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami and, finally, the “morality patrols” under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The mission, however, has remained the same: harassing women whose clothing does not meet the standards of a model Islamic citizen.

Thousands of women have been harassed, beaten and arrested for flouting these dress codes, but some Iranian authorities and media have criticized these violent methods and called on the state to promote Islamic dress through a cultural campaign. To convince women, rather than bully them into, being an oyster in a shell, a pistachio in a shell, something or anything in a shell.

The new billboard campaign appears to be such a campaign, finally underway. Ayatollah Khamenei as declared the new Iranian year of 1393 (started on March 21^st) as the year of “economy and culture, with national determination and Islamic management” In his new year address he called on the “revolutionary youth” to intensify their cultural activities and emphasized that culture has priority over the economy. So we should expect more “cultural activities” along the lines of posters promoting hejab.

A group which calls itself the Cyber Group for Promoting Chastity and hejab has been very active in this regard. The group has designed a large number of the posters and devised many products as well, including dresses and handbags. It has also published some of its posters in English and French.

The Cyber Group prides itself on coming up with “innovative ideas in regards to chastity and hejab after nine months of research and study.” The groups lists 11 people as its principals of which only one is a woman. The posters, however, have all addressed women. Except for one: “Muslim brothers, avert your eyes so that your sisters can keep the hejab.”