Warning — the following scraps of memory may shock some male readers. Women, on the other hand, will think: tell us something we don’t know.
Memory one: A scorching day in the Vatican and admission to St Peter’s Basilica is barred by a Swiss Guard for the alleged sin of baring arms. We’re talking fleshy, female arms; not the sort manufactured to kill.
Memory two: A hot day in the holy city of Jerusalem and a hooded, full-length robe in a shade of Virgin Mary blue is proffered by a man, along with the command: “Cover yourself up.” This time, the culprits are two knees peeping out below a skirt so unremarkable that one would have thought the only offence it could have caused would have been to the fashion police.
Memory three: A sweltering day in the Italian city of Como and a man in a steward’s coat points to the cathedral door and orders: “Out.” It’s those brazen arms again, gasping for a cool draught of air. Banished, they hang forlornly outside the cathedral while men wearing shorts breeze past and go inside, unimpeded.
Can Israel destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities by itself?
From almost drowning in Scotland to a bug in his toilet: four of the best moments from Boris Johnson’s book
Eric Adams, the swaggering, ‘weird’ mayor of New York, is the first to face indictment in the office’s 360-year history
Netflix telling of Menendez murders chimes with elements of US election
Why do men allow themselves to be belittled in this way as weak-willed, dim-witted sex maniacs?
Girls are marked from birth because they are delivered into this world inside a package commonly known as a body, stamped “public property”. To various organised religions, the female is a vessel of temptation whose sole purpose in life is to lead men astray. Why do men allow themselves to be belittled in this way as weak-willed, dim-witted sex maniacs? While they were watching a bareheaded Elnaz Rekabi, the Iranian champion climber, ascend a competition wall in Seoul with deft and dizzying movements, were they not admiring her physical and mental strength rather than taking the fast track to hell at the mere sight of her ponytail? Amid alarm, Rekabi temporarily disappeared from public view immediately after her gutsy anti-hijab stance, only reappearing to claim she had unintentionally neglected to cover her head. As if.
[ Johnny Watterson: Death threats and fear all part of sporting protestOpens in new window ]
Twisted thinking has a ruinous history. Yet it keeps repeating itself. In Rekabi’s country, the “morality police” punish girls and women for the transgression of letting a fringe of hair escape from beneath their headscarves while Iran’s rulers send drones to Vladimir Putin’s invading army to mass-murder innocent civilians in Ukraine. In occupied Kherson, Russian soldiers killed the region’s principal conductor, Yuriy Kerpatenko, after he refused to participate in a propaganda concert. Twisted thinking extinguished an artistic life in the name of the country that gave the world Tchaikovsky, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Pavlova and the Bolshoi Ballet.
Last month, Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman, died in custody after the morality police arrested her for not wearing her headscarf correctly. What a stupid reason to die. Many Iranians thought so. They took to the streets in protest. Women and girls whipped off their head coverings in public squares and sheared off their lovely locks in courageous acts of defiance. More than 100 people are reported to have been killed, including more than two dozen children and teenagers, in the state’s crackdown on the demonstrations.
[ ‘We need happiness’: Iran’s teenage girls on the front line of protestsOpens in new window ]
Iran is not the only country where being female can damage your wellbeing. Since Joe Biden abruptly pulled US troops out of Afghanistan last year, leaving the stricken country to the mercilessness of the Taliban, girls have been forbidden to attend secondary school and women have been ordered to cover their faces and not to travel farther than 60km from home without being escorted by a male relative. The Holy See, which is internationally recognised as a state, believes little girls who are raped must endure any pregnancy caused by that act of violence and give birth to their rapist’s child. The ideal woman in the virtually all-men state is the Blessed Virgin, who has never been known to expose as much as a clavicle
On Wednesday night, Simon Coveney, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, assured the Fine Gael parliamentary party he would be speaking to the Iranian ambassador about the killing machinery his country is sending to Russian troops and the murderous aftermath of Amini’s death. On Monday, the EU announced sanctions against Iran, including against chiefs of the morality police. These penalties are not enough. What those brave protesters in Iran and people like Kerpatenko in Kherson need is solidarity from the outside world. Any woman visiting Iran — if she must — in an official or elected capacity should eschew head coverings and make a bold public statement with her loosened hair. That includes Clare Daly, the purportedly left-wing Dublin MEP who, in the past, has donned a black hijab to visit an Iran-backed militia in Iraq. Imagine how isolated women who crave freedom in Tehran must feel seeing a supposedly fearless feminist from Europe obsequiously bowing to the morality tyranny that blights their lives.
A country obsessed with women’s fringes can never be its best self. The idea of a state deploying morality police is readily seen by young Irish people for the idiocy it is but older women have not forgotten the atmosphere of fear and suspicion that prevailed here in the 1980s, nor this newspaper’s chilling caricature of ayatollahs patrolling Dublin Airport after the X case in 1992 when the High Court ruled that a 14-year-old pregnant rape victim could not travel for an abortion. When Mary Robinson, as president in the 1990s, fetched up to meet the Pope in the Vatican wearing an audacious green dress and a mantilla-free head of hair, some ultraorthodox Catholics were so furious you’d swear she had invited him for a quick snog in the confession box.
[ ‘I’m happy to be in Ireland because it’s a woman-centred country’Opens in new window ]
In Wednesday’s edition of this newspaper’s New to the Parish column, Maryam Moeim Mehr, an Iranian health professional who came to live in Ireland in 2019, said she was happy here because this is “a woman-centred country”. Her words leapt from the page. Hard to believe, but it is, comparatively, true. Ireland did not pull itself out of its dark ages on its own. It got a helping hand from the European Court of Human Rights, the UN and powerful individuals with an international voice. Ireland has two months left to go on the UN security council and should use that time to confront the twisted thinking of member states. Because it’s our turn to extend a helping hand to others.