Chupacabra Report

“TEHRAN — In one of the coldest winters Iranians have experienced in recent memory, the government is failing to provide natural gas to tens of thousands of people across the country, leaving some for days or even weeks with no heat at all. Here in the capital, rolling blackouts every night for a month have left people without electricity, and heat, for hours at a time.

The heating crisis in this oil-exporting nation is adding to Iranians’ increasing awareness of the contrast between their growing influence abroad and frailty at home, according to government officials, diplomats and political analysts interviewed here.

“I think the Islamic Revolution is going through an identity crisis, and is trying to mature,” said Nader Talebzadeh, a filmmaker who supports Mr. Ahmadinejad. “We are maturing, gradually.”

There are increasing signals, however, that the government is not interested in hearing other voices and is geared instead toward maintaining power by silencing critics. For the parliamentary elections, so far about 70 percent of all reform candidates have been disqualified.

Last week, the government shut down Iran’s most important feminist magazine, which had been published for 16 years. The authorities also arrested a small group of students after a protest at Tehran University over poor conditions in their dormitory.

In the middle of a snowy, icy winter, women have been arrested for not wearing proper Islamic clothing. Hats over head scarves, boots over pants, can bring trouble.”


“ANKARA, Turkey — Some 125,000 Turks, mostly women, denounced the government on Saturday over its plans to lift a decades-old ban on Islamic head scarves at universities in the mainly Muslim but secular nation.

Many Turks, including the country's influential military establishment, see the move as a serious threat to the country's traditional separation of church and state. The government has defended its plan as a reform needed to give its citizens religious liberty and bring Turkey in line with European Union human rights guidelines.

"We want to lift all ridiculous bans in Turkey; we want everyone to freely walk and receive education, either with their miniskirts or head scarves," said Egemen Bagis, a close aide to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is a devout Muslim.”

-These stories caught my eye on the week-end wire, and I saved them for a Chupy report, but before I got around to posting, I picked up a copy of “The Magdeline Sisters” at the library and watched it last night.

What a story. A nineteenth century “rescue movement” out of Britain and Ireland to take women off the streets and redeem them as washerwomen worthy of paradise grew into a system of Magdalene Asylums where girls in trouble, or girls deemed trouble by family or priests, were locked up to toil in laundries, unpaid, for indefinite terms.

Especially striking is the fact that this film was set in the year 1964. This made me wonder about the “homegirls” that hired out to do domestic work in my little town when I was a kid. As a pyro-feminist, I get indignant at the state of women’s rights in some quarters of the world. Just last month I heard a woman reporter knock the President for talking freedom and justice in Saudi Arabia, where she was barred from the hotel fitness room because of her gender.

Reminds me of John Lennon’s line, (yeah, he’s a great one to ask, I know) “I gotta ask you comrades and brothers, how do you treat your own woman back home?”

The film’s epilogue notes that the last Magdalene Asylum closed in 1996. They disappeared with the changes in sexual mores - or, as historian Frances Finnegan suggests, as they ceased to be profitable: "Possibly the advent of the washing machine has been as instrumental in closing these laundries as have changing attitudes."