In this TEDx talk, Iranian‑American journalist Pardis Mahdavi recounts her personal journey from growing up in the United States to returning to Tehran in 2000 to document Iran’s women’s movement. She discovers a parallel “sexual revolution” where young Iranians use art, fashion, music, and street performance to subvert the regime’s strict morality laws. Mahdavi describes specific creative tactics—spray‑painting over Ayatollah images, pushing headscarves back, loud car music, and the 2004 “Summer of the Cockroaches” protest where women flaunted painted nails despite punitive threats. In 2007 she is arrested by the morality police, stripped of citizenship, and exiled. From abroad she follows successive waves of protest: the 1 Million Signatures campaign, the 2009 Green Movement, Masih Alinejad’s “My Stealthy Freedom,” and finally the 2022 death of Mahsa Jina Amini, which sparked the worldwide “Women, Life, Freedom” movement. Throughout, Mahdavi argues that creativity is a powerful form of political resistance and calls for global solidarity with Iranian protesters.
Chapters
What would you do if all forms of creative and individualistic expression were restricted or banned? What if the punishment for playing your favorite song too loud in your car with the windows rolled down was arrest or detention? What if choosing the wrong shade of lipstick could get your lips Slashed with a razor? What if reading your favorite poem to your beloved on a date could land you both in jail and her subjected to a mandatory virginity test? But what if creativity were part of the resistance? This is what we see unfolding in real time on the streets of Iran today. I am a proudly hyphenated Iranian-American. I grew up here in the United States, a child of the Islamic Revolution of 1978 that forced my parents to flee. Growing up, my ideas of Iran mixed a confusing cocktail of fear and fantasy. On TV, I watched as mullahs with turbans issued decrees to wailing women in chadors, watched as the American flag was burned and hostages were taken. But these contradicted with the sweet and melodious sounds and stories of my aunts' voices that crackled through the telephone during our weekly phone calls, or the aromatic spices my grandmother mixed into our favorite Persian stews to fill our bellies and keep our Iranian culture alive. By the time I was 21, I could no longer stand to watch my homeland from afar. So, In the summer of 2000, I arrived in Tehran, a fresh-faced, budding young journalist determined to write stories about the Iranian women's movement and bring them home to my adopted homeland of America. But when I arrived, it wasn't the women's movement that caught my eye, but another movement, one called Engilab-e Jensi, or sexual revolution in Persian. This movement was about young people using their bodies and arts creatively to resist a regime that was oppressing them. The Islamist regime in power operates its power through a fabric of morality best encapsulated in the following sentence that I saw imprinted on billboards throughout Tehran when I arrived. These billboards featured a photograph of the Ayatollah Khomeini, known as the father of the Islamic Revolution, ushering and uttering the following decree. He said, the Islamic Republic of Iran is not about fun. There is no fun to be had in the Islamic Republic. To my delightful surprise, every time I saw one of these signs, I also saw young people pulling out cans of paint and brushes and spray painting various unsavory images over the Ayatollah's mouth. I'll let you imagine what those would have been. Young people found creative loopholes and red lines to cross. The regime said women had to be covered from head to toe in a chador, a mandatory veil that only showed the oval part of the face. Young women responded by pushing that headscarf back further and further and further until it was gone. The regime said no eye-catching or ear-catching sights or sounds in public. Young people responded by donning eye-popping jewelry and accessories. men and women alike, and cranking up their tunes. The regime said, no fun to be had in the Islamic Republic. Young people responded by blocking roads and creating street-wide dance parties where women stood atop cars gyrating their hips. I was enchanted by this movement. I want to share my favorite episode with you all from 2004. That was the summer we called the Summer of the Cockroaches. You see, prior to that year, the punishment for women being seen in public with painted nails or open-toed shoes was that our hands would be dipped in buckets of cockroaches and bugs set on our feet. And then someone had an idea. There weren't enough cockroaches in all of Iran to punish all of us. So a text messaging campaign was organized, and on a hot summer day in July, We all came out donning our flip-flops and sandals, nails shellacked in bright colors, and they were right. The first 100 or so women did face the cockroaches, but there weren't enough cockroaches in all of Iran, and so victory was ours. Small victory, but significant nonetheless. I spent the next 7 years following this youth movement, intrigued and entranced. Then in the summer of 2007, I was invited to present my findings at a university in Tehran. I climbed up on stage and launched into a lecture about Iran's sexual revolution when exactly 13 minutes into my lecture, all 4 auditorium doors banged open at the same time. I can't remember if I saw them, smelled them, or heard them first. But suddenly, the auditorium erupted in pandemonium and chaos. Boots stomping, weapons clanking, people screaming. I should have been running, or at the very least shredding my lecture notes. But instead, I stood gripped to the podium in a state of suspended animation, watching as 4 members of the morality police came on stage and encircled me. The last thing I remember was was a hand being raised above my head, and then everything went black. 33 days and hundreds of hours of interrogations later, I was stripped of my citizenship and exiled from my ancestral homeland. But I continued to watch the movement from afar. I watched as the 1 Million Signatures campaign brought women's rights as human rights not only to Iran but throughout the region. I watched in 2009 when the sexual revolution gave birth to a civil rights type movement called the Green Movement, where young people protested a fraudulent presidential election. I watched in 2014 as Masih Alinejad led a movement called My Stealthy Freedom, where women pulled off their headscarves and posted pictures of themselves in public across social media for the world to see. Each subsequent movement got larger and broader in its impact. Success begot success. All of this came to a head last year in September of 2022 when a Kurdish Iranian young woman by the name of Mahsa Jina Amini decided to go to the capital for a visit with her brother. As soon as she stepped off the train at the train station in Tehran, she was arrested by the morality police, the same people who had arrested me 15 years earlier. Her crime? Wearing her headscarf pushed too far back, and choosing a shade of lipstick similar to what I'm wearing today. Unlike me, she faced extreme brutality at the hands of the morality police and died in custody less than 3 days later. This was all captured on film and spread like wildfire on social media. The people of Iran were outraged, and they poured into the streets demanding justice, as they had done for decades before, They used creativity to express their resistance. The slogan of this movement, Women, Life, Freedom, Zan, Zendegi, Azadi, was emblazoned across billboards, banners, and brands. It was woven into t-shirts, sweaters, pants, and shoes. And it was memorialized in song, such as the recent Grammy Award-winning Baraye by Shervin Hajipour. The sights and sounds of the Iranian people traveled across continents. And the world watched with bated breath and stood in solidarity, cheering the people of Iran on. Today, my people continue to protest boldly and defiantly, using creative sparks to ignite a revolution and bring the revolution home. Thank you. Thank you.
