In a coffee shop in Tehran, Yasmin* adjusts her scarlet-flowered headscarf and plucks a book from a nearby shelf. 'This one is called The Secrets about a Man that Every Woman Should Know,' she says.
She removes a second tome and checks the title written on the book's jacket, back-to-front in Farsi style. 'What Women Want Men to Know,' she says, to rumbles of laughter from the group of (mostly) foreign women sitting at the table with her.
Yasmin opens the book and runs a long, ruby-lacquered fingernail down its table of contents. '"How we can seduce a man and not fall in love",' she reads. And then: '"Why women can't keep secrets from men". "How we can learn to keep secrets from men".'
Is the government okay with this, one of the women asks?
'What can you do?' Yasmin shrugs. 'Everybody knows people fall in love, they have sex. This is how life works.'
Such enlightenment is at odds with my idea of post-revolution Iran, a repressive theocracy in which Islamic clerics preside over a society of shielded women and downcast men.
Indeed, the revolution in 1979 transformed the country from an ancient Persian monarchy into an Islamic theocracy, one bristling with rules, dictates and enough plainclothes morality police to enforce them. It is true that such policemen exist; they will reproach a young woman for wearing a skirt that reveals her bare ankles, Yasmin tells me, complain that her scarf is too brightly coloured, or demand that she adequately cover her flyaway hair. Her father might be summoned to discipline her.
"Much like their western counterparts, Iranian women are raising their voices against the gendered prejudice endured by them for decades."
They will rebuke men, too, if they sport too many tattoos or are caught drinking, but it's really women who are expected to uphold the strict moral codes, to police their femininity lest it offend — or worse, arouse — the men in their midst.
But much like their western counterparts, Iranian women are raising their voices against the gendered prejudice endured by them for decades. The month before I arrive in Tehran, during a wave of anti-government protests, a woman is photographed standing on a telephone box, her headscarf removed and draped on a stick. In prurient Iran, this is the equivalent of removing one's clothes. The woman, Vida Movahedi, is arrested and later released.
Her act of defiance (which earns her the social media tag