There is a scene from the movie The Seed of the Sacred Fig that has stuck with me ever since I saw it in the cinema last weekend. A woman in her car with the window rolled down. She has a buzzcut and a neck tattoo. Sunglasses, I think, maybe even lipstick, I can’t quite remember. What I do remember is the tattoo. The woman isn’t just any woman and the road she is driving on isn’t just any road: It is a road in Tehran during the height of the Jina Mahsa Amini protests. It is a woman who is supposed to be covered up – her hair, her neck too – but has chosen not to be. The man who is perceiving her, as they pull up side by side at a red light, is the patriarchal head of a family and an investigative judge at the authoritarian state court. He rolls down his window. He cannot believe, it seems, what he is seeing: A woman choosing. A woman sitting in her car. A woman driving away.
I don’t have any tattoos. People ask me this often these days; don’t you have a small one somewhere? On your ankle maybe? No, I answer, I don’t. But this woman makes me want to reconsider. I can’t even remember what the tattoo was of – the scene was so brief, just a footnote in the film’s main narrative – I just remember it was there, serving as a silent fuck you to this man who is watching her, to any man, any system, trying to control her, to tell her what she ought to do with her body.
A tattoo as a sign of a woman self-defined.
After the film ended I stepped outside into January air, where the cold wind brushed my neck. How lucky, I thought as I unlocked my bike, how lucky am I to live this life. To be a woman in this moment in space and time. I biked home in a daze, thinking about the violence so many women face both from the state and at home — the double frontiers they are fighting at — and how, really, in the scheme of it all, my freedom is an anomaly.
I could get a tattoo. On my neck or on my ankle. Either way, it wouldn’t be a radical thing. On the contrary, where I live, I’d simply blend in. That’s the thing about signs; their meaning depends entirely on their context.
Thank you for reading! I consider writing a collaborative act — everything I write is informed by everything I’ve read, the conversations I’ve had and the places I’ve visited. If you have any thoughts or questions, I’d love to hear them.
Courageous woman. Women still have to be courageous and put themselves in danger in many parts of the world if they want to choose the way to look or behave. Control over these so personal and obvious rights is so often in the hands of men, and not even frowned upon. If by magical wand the situation would be turned around for just one week and men’s appearances would be controled by women , would it change anything ?
Does it simply boil down to the fact of less musclepower and more vulnerability when we are pregnant , giving birth, feeding our babies? Did their power over us start there?
We can change the education of humans but crude primitive force seems to prevale and overrule all civilisation and justice.
Lovely- yup, context & context is so multivalent