Idiocy or revolutionary? In defence of nude protest by Maryam Namazie

photoby Maryam Namazie  Azar Majedi of the Organisation of Women’s Liberation – Iran has attacked the Nude Photo Revolutionary Calendar and supporting video of Iranian women as similar to the tabloids (namely the Sun’s page 3), ‘dim-witted idiocy’ and ‘buffoonery’ and Golshifteh Farahani’s nudity as ‘commercial’ whilst supporting Egyptian blogger Aliaa Magda Elmahdy’s nudity. In her attacks in Persian and English, she has characterised the Calendar and supporting video as ‘absurd caricatures’ of Aliaa’s nudity.

Her attack is a masterpiece in dishonesty, hypocrisy, and regressive politics. Let me explain.
Whilst Islamists often portray their vile politics as a prescription for the debasement of women in western societies (i.e. against the Sun’s page 3), their image of women is very much the same as the pornographic one. Ironically, Azar’s ‘arguments’ against the calendar reveal a deep-seated disdain for female nudity not very different from the tabloids and rooted in the religious/Islamist point of view she claims to oppose.
Her accusation that we are ‘playing into the hands of those [sexists] we claim to fight against’ is disturbingly similar to the accusations that Aliaa’s nudity plays into the hands of Islamists.
Clearly, when you are faced with an Islamic movement that considers you to be worth half of a man and demands that you be bound, gagged, veiled, and segregated, then nudity becomes an important form of resistance and dissent as well as solidarity....Continue reading...