🩷💅🏻 Pink: A Display of Women’s Power or the Regime’s Foolish Propaganda?
These days, Tehran is witnessing the presence of pro-government women in military exercises and parades organized by the Islamic Republic in the city’s central streets: pink military Jeeps equipped with heavy machine guns, pink-colored AK-47 rifles, pink Shahed-136 drones, and even pink display missiles.
State media in Iran have portrayed these ceremonies as a symbol of “the active and powerful presence of women in defending the revolution and the homeland” and the “revolutionary Muslim woman.” The Islamic Republic’s propaganda machine, by employing this color, has tried to present a “modern and feminine” image of itself. The apparent goal is to convey the message that “women in Iran are not oppressed; they even participate in the military sphere and can be both feminine and combative.” However, this display is nothing more than a “pink mask on the face of a rigid ideology.” While women march in this parade carrying pink weapons, the laws and policies of the Islamic Republic remain discriminatory and restrictive toward women:
-Compulsory hijab continues to be enforced rigorously, and violating it is met with fines, violence, and deprivation of social rights.
-Civil laws regarding inheritance, divorce, child custody, women’s testimony in court, and polygamy place women in a subordinate position.
-Women’s presence in actual combat roles is extremely limited and largely symbolic.
-Women’s rights activists continue to face arrest, imprisonment, and heavy sentences, and demands for legal equality are often met with repression. And so on…
The regime holds a superficial and instrumental understanding of “woman”: women are only considered “valuable” when they remain within the framework of the official ideology: hijab, loyalty to the Supreme Leader, and revolutionary symbolic motherhood or militancy. Any deviation from this framework, even a peaceful protest against compulsory hijab, is met with severe reaction.
The “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement and other struggles by Iranian women and men in recent years have shown that a significant portion of Iranian women have genuine demands for legal equality and individual freedoms. In such circumstances, the pink parade is seen more as an attempt to co-opt feminine symbols and neutralize the voice of real protests than as genuine progress.
For many Iranian women, whose daily lives are shaped by legal restrictions and social pressures, these visual displays are not only uninspiring but sometimes appear laughable or even humiliating. The Islamic Republic regime has repeatedly used propaganda tools to manage its international image. The “Daughters of Iran” (Daughters Who Sacrifice for Iran) parade with a pink theme is the latest example of this strategy, revealing a structural weakness in confronting the deep-seated demands of Iranian women’s society.
In the end, these pink color schemes cannot change or conceal the legal and social realities that Iranian women live with every day.
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