Iranian women’s sexual reconstruction through the internet: Informal education and empowerment

Abstract

The emergence of the internet offered a unique space for Iranian women to inquire about their personal autonomy, including sexual autonomy. While the internet accelerated Iranian women’s emancipation from sexual subordination, critical questions concerning the impact of socio-cultural mores on this relatively new experience remain convoluted. Grounded in critical feminist and sexual script theoretical frameworks, this research investigates some Iranian women’s comprehension and experience of sexual autonomy by closely exploring the educational role of the internet on the discourse of sexual autonomy and its interconnection with the Iranian culture of shame and silence. Through semi-structural in-depth interviews and online ethnography, this research investigates how the internet serves as an informal learning tool that disrupts traditional learning and expedites women’s sexual autonomy in both online and offline spaces. Adopting critical thematic analysis, this study determined that the online realm altered the meaning of sexual subordination and led to a reconstruction that shifted the boundaries of shame and silence around sexuality. Through the interaction and interconnection between online and offline spaces, Iranian women problematize the culture of shame and silence through learning, revisiting their existing knowledge, and then silently acting. Therefore, a cultural reconstruction that is gradually redefining sexual scripts is emerging.

Introduction

The discourse of sexual autonomy is very complicated. There is no education on sexuality. I grew up in a traditional family, but I always disagreed with their beliefs [on sexuality]. Sex was a taboo and unspoken topic. The contradiction between my beliefs and my family induced a sense of shame in me and I carried this shame into my sexual relationships. I used to feel expressing my sexual pleasure to my partner was wrong. This led me to remain silent while holding a tremendous amount of guilt that took away the pleasure that I was supposed to experience. The feeling of guilt combined with learned modesty and shame started to fade away [in the age of technology]. But the fear of judgment lingered in me (Nargol, female, 30).

This narrative of an adult Iranian woman from the generation called the children of the revolution (the generation that was born during and after the Islamic revolution in 1979) shows the struggle between sexual subordination and autonomy. The absence of formal sex education and the persistence of patriarchal cultural mores of shame and silence naturalized women’s sexual subordination. Nevertheless, for years, the generation of the children of revolution has been silently resisting various forms of sexual subordination, including lack of knowledge, asexuality, and the self-reinforcing cultural mechanisms of shame/guilt (Javadroodi et al., 2012; Joodaki et al., 2020).

In a situation where a patriarchal culture denounces the sexuality of women at both cultural and educational levels (Gheytanchi, 2015; Latifnejad-Roodsari et al., 2013), the emergence of the internet as an alternative space of connection and communication (Nouraei-Simon, 2005; Sreberny and Khiabany, 2010) redefined sexual discourse and real-life relationships for many Iranian women. The global nature of the internet provided access to a broad range of information on sexuality that had not hitherto been accessible. Iranian women utilize the internet as an alternative knowledge source to search and learn around sexuality, which gives them better access to desired information and reduced social control over knowledge production (Gheytanchi, 2015). The nature of online spaces provides women with a new opportunity to seek information through various methods and platforms (Bear, 2012; Bonk et al., 2015). However, Iranian society continues to generate a culture of shame and silence and insists on the value of chastity and modesty as desirable and even essential characteristics for respectable women (Merghati-Khoei et al., 2014; Sadeghi, 2009). This clash between inquiry into sexuality from the women’s side and tradition values from the societal side created an opportunity for some women to challenge patriarchal norms.

This study explores how adult Iranian women born after the Islamic revolution of Iran in 1979 revisit the discourse of sexual autonomy by obtaining information online, despite dealing with the restraints of Iranian socio-cultural values of shame and silence. Through critical feminism and cultural sexual script theories, this paper investigates how the internet moves beyond conveying entrenched norms and allows meaning reconstruction at both societal and interpersonal levels. It does this by exploring the interconnection between the culture of shame and silence and the internet in women’s sexual emancipation.

Backdrop on the history of sexual autonomy: then and now

Throughout history, Iranian patriarchal society considered women to be a secondary sex and their bodies tools for male pleasure and reproduction. A woman, a sexual object with virginity decreed to be her most valuable possession, was merely a commodity in a financial transaction between two men, her father and her future husband, who together wielded total legal and cultural power over her person and sexual organs (Afary, 2009). Women’s internalized status as the weaker sex unwittingly contributed to their sexual objectification and subordination. For instance, during the traditional Iranian marriage proposal ceremony of khastegari, women from the groom’s family assess the potential bride’s beauty and body to determine if she was qualified (beautiful) and suitable (healthy) for marriage. Women challenged their secondary sex status by secretly seeking abortions for unwanted pregnancies and by concealing their premarital sexual involvement. However, their autonomous actions were overshadowed by patriarchal cultural values that demanded they focus on earning good marriage qualifications rather than their own liberation (Bamdad, 1977).

The patriarchal desire for modernity in the 1930s reshaped women’s sexuality in comprehension and practice but simultaneously situated women’s bodies as a site of struggle between tradition and modernity. Traditionally, Iranian culture, influenced by Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Jafarism, equated women’s bodies with a source of shame and ritual impurity. More recently, through the influences of modernity, the state attempted to promote body autonomy through public visibility and mobility for Iranian women (Afary, 2009; Najmabadi, 2005). Such a reconceptualization constructed a modern, sexually docile body and mind for Iranian women, in which society dictated obedience from defining the correct way to wear make-up, clothing, and hair, to pleasing husbands. The clash between modernity and tradition created a dichotomy for women’s sexual autonomy during the 1940s and 1950s. On the one hand, a new level of sexual objectification of women was introduced via mass media, which depicted semi-naked and exotic women’s bodies in advertisements, literature, movies, and television. On the other hand, imposed values of female piety and virginity in traditional culture reinforced many families’ beliefs that daughters were sexual objects who had childbearing as their primary goal, and that before marriage they were little more than a financial burden to their families (Bamdad, 1977; Paidar, 1995; Sedghi, 2007).

The often incompatible co-presence of modernity and tradition eventually led to the redefinition of sexual values and practice in the 1970s. The culture of women’s sexuality was reformed, and sexual attitudes gradually progressed: dating, courtship, and pre-marital sexual engagement became acceptable among some sectors of the middle class. Nonetheless, the relentless paradoxical values in the context of men’s authority over women’s sexual autonomy remained preeminent, such as expecting virginity, an indicator of piety, dominance over female sexuality and contraception, and the requirement of the father’s legal permission for marriage (Afary, 2009; Bauer, 1985). Following the failure of the state’s promotion of contraception and population control in 1967, and in compliance with sharia law, the state legalized abortion for fetuses in the first 3 months (Aghajanian and Mehryar, 1999; Sedghi, 2007). While unmarried women could benefit from this law, married women were still required to obtain their husband’s consent (Afkhami, 1984; Sedghi, 2007).

The discourse of sexuality that has been controlled by urf and religion became part of the government’s agenda in 1979. It regulated women’s sexual objectification by promoting virginity, chastity, a young marriage age, polygyny, and temporary marriage, while making pre-marital sex illegal and prohibiting contraception and abortion (Afary, 2009; Hojat et al., 2015; Sharifi, 2018). In this new sexual reconstruction, Article 1108 of Iran’s Islamic Civil Code legally obliged women to fulfill their husbands’ sexual needs and desires, and women who denied these sexual demands without any religious reasons would lose their maintenance, Nosuj (Kaar, 2000).

However, women’s active presence in social, political, economic, and educational realms led to some empowerment, including sexual autonomy at institutional and individual levels in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Women gained an increase to the legal marriage age from 9 to 13, legal abortion for married women if in life-threatening danger, or before the fourth month, mandatory family planning for university students, soldiers, and couples, and easier access to contraception (Jarahi et al., 2013). Despite periodic disruptive protocols at the institutional level such as the reduction of the legal marriage age to 9, the discontinuation of a population control program, and increased difficulty in accessing birth control during Ahmadi Nejad’s presidency (2005–2013), women continued to successfully mitigate the severity of some of the legal restrictions around sexual autonomy.

Increased access to the internet and smartphones in the 2000s brought Iranian women’s ability to resist sexual subordination into a new era. The internet provided women with an alternative educational tool to defy the traditional masculine unilateral sexual rights culture through “connection and communication” and knowledge transformation (Kaivanara, 2016; Nouraei-Simon, 2005; Sreberny and Khiabany, 2010) in their quest for sexual rights. For instance, weblogs such as Dokhtar Boodan (being a virgin girl) and Hamaghooshi-hyae yek zan (One Woman Love Making) claimed autonomy in the online space by focusing on women’s non-pornographic personal erotic sexual experiences and criticizing the duality of heterosexual relationships. Feminist-related channels and pages such as everyday feminism aimed to raise knowledge about virginity, marital rape, and child marriage. Most recently, Hamdam’s educational application aims for the sexual health education of Iranian women.

Some scholars argue that unreliable sources and a lack of digital literacy expose women to untrustworthy and at times erotic material that can be more destructive than emancipatory (Bostani-Khalesi et al., 2017; Noroozi et al., 2014). However, the shift in women’s sexual knowledge, attitudes, and practices in the past 20 years (Mahdavi, 2009; Sharifi, 2018) indicates otherwise. Lack of formal education and the insistence on silence around the discourse of sexuality made the new internet space comparatively safer to seek knowledge. The constructive nature of informal learning enables the raising of awareness and reflection on current situations (Holland, 2019). Globalized information introduced new ideas such as redefining sexuality and its normalcy among many Iranian women and led to the emergence of a new sexual culture (Arjmand and Ziari, 2020). This new way of knowing/accessing information enabled many women to renegotiate sexual inequality through online dating, digital relationships, and discussions on the discourse of sexuality in different online forums. Moreover, pre-marital relationships became more common despite their illegality and the high social value placed on chastity and virginity (Asadi 2006; Sharifi, 2018).

Notwithstanding some women’s successful challenge to the ideology of sexual subordination, the culture of silence and shame, integrated with the illegality of women’s sexual interaction, or lack of legal protection in the case of married women, has placed women in a disadvantageous situation and diminished their opportunity to exercise their body autonomy (Afary, 2009; Latifnejad-Roodsari et al., 2013; Mahdavi, 2009; Sadeghi, 2008). The culture of shame and silence as one of the most internalized mores negatively affects women’s body autonomy, regulates communication about their sexuality, desires, wants, and needs, and equates modesty and self-respect with obedience and submission (Janghorban et al., 2015). While women struggle for sexual freedom, socio-cultural values, culture of silence, and customary scripts restrict sexual pleasure to men alone and assign asexuality as an ideal for women (Merghati-khoei et al., 2008; Merghati-Khoei et al., 2014; Sadeghi, 2008).

Methodology

This paper is derived from part of my doctoral dissertation that was completed in 2019. Grounded in the critical paradigm, this feminist qualitative research embodies women’s personal narrations to explore the role of unjust and oppressive social conditions for women who quest for sexual autonomy. Engaging with the question of the culture of shame and silence during online informal learning on the discourse of sexuality, this paper aims to explore the interconnection between the awareness and practice of sexual autonomy in the age of technology. This research was reviewed and approved by the Human Participants Review Sub-Committee, York University Ethics Review Board, and conforms to the standards of the Canadian Tri-Council Research Ethics guidelines.

Adopting snowball sampling (Hesse-Biber and Leavy, 2011) I conducted 20 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with Iranian women between the ages of 26 and 42 who have been actively participating in social media for at least the past 3 years. The focus of this research was Iranian women who were born after the Islamic revolution of Iran and underwent formal Islamic education before gaining access to the internet much later in their lives. The majority of the participants were from major cities, employed, married, and held at least a bachelor’s degree. The social networks of the participants were limited by their access to the internet as well as education, interests, online interactions, and class.

Due to the sensitive nature of this research and the potential emotional involvement of the participants, I adopted semi-structured interviews to provide them with the flexibility to answer the questions, for us to establish mutual trust, and to create the opportunity to access in-depth information about the participants’ personal experiences that were relevant to the study (Kvale, 1996). I approached consent as an ongoing process through the interview rather than a one-time agreement. I prioritized their emotions and comfort over obtaining the desired answers and often reminded them of their freedom to refuse to answer any questions. Following ongoing ethical protocols regarding the dignity of the participants, pseudonyms, chosen by the participants, were used to ensure the security and anonymity of the participants. Furthermore, the data is stored in a locked folder on a USB that remains accessible only to the researcher.

The research design involves data collection methods and analysis techniques that are consistent with general qualitative methods and addresses credibility, validity, positionality, reflexivity, and power (Lather, 1991). My positionality as an Iranian-Canadian woman provided me with a unique opportunity to comprehend and interact with the participants. My cultural familiarity made the participants comfortable due to our shared experiences, while my simultaneously being an outsider (I live in Canada) tended to make them more open when talking about subjects they would not usually discuss. Although positionality precludes neutrality and my personal experiences shape my comprehension and interaction with the participants, the feminist approach mitigates these complications of my own positionality. This approach helped transform the potential positionality weaknesses to strength by providing self-reflective comprehension of the narration of the participants (Hertz, 1997).

Analysis

Seeking to comprehend the interrelationship among personal narrations, social practices, and patriarchal ideology and power, I adopted critical thematic analysis (Lawless and Chen, 2018). The analysis combines descriptive and exploratory approaches to develop cultural models that allow for the interpretation of women’s experiences to uncover silent/hidden oppression around sexual autonomy. In order to understand the participants’ depictions of their experiences and perceptions in detail, this analysis broke the data apart to create relevant codes and themes (Lawless and Chen, 2018). This analysis looks for recurrence, repetition, and forcefulness patterns, while engaging in critical reading of data to seek answers to why and how such coding reproduces social inequalities (Lawless and Chen, 2018).

As a first step, I created relevant themes by identifying implicit and explicit ideas within the data (Guest et al., 2012). Furthermore, creating themes led to code development, as I used focused coding in order to create categories that would be useful for producing theoretical ideas (Hesse-Biber and Leavy, 2011). Adopting systematic analysis puts the pieces together to help understand the discourse of sexual autonomy based on obtained knowledge, as well as the relation between the factors. The analytical process does not easily disclose hidden meaning in the data, as the meanings are multiple and constructed. Thus, constantly checking the validity of each data interpretation by positioning it against other possible interpretations became crucial (Ramazanoglu and Holland, 2002). Adapting critical thematic analysis, the generated data led to the following common themes: learning shame and silence, the internet as a tool of learning, shame in online space, and practice of sexual autonomy.

Findings

Following a general question about the meaning of sexual autonomy, the participants defined sexual autonomy in ways that ranged from decision making about conception and contraception to expressing their sexual desires to their partner. Neda defines sexual autonomy as: “having control over what to do, to decide with your body without fear of judgement. Just like men.” Moreover, Hasti explains: “Sexual autonomy means I have to want a sexual interaction before it happens.” Nayereh states: “Sexual autonomy is having control over conception and contraception.” While definitions varied, they all indicated a desire for having control over their bodies and their sexualities despite what society and culture had tried to indoctrinate into them. None of the participants directly addressed the discourse of sexuality at the institutional level; rather their concerns remained within their immediate personal experiences.

Although the participants presented a general comprehension of sexual autonomy at a personal level, society sexually objectified their bodies, following the predictable script of shame and silence. Recognizing the culture of shame and silence as a social “reality,” the participants continued to struggle with internalized mores of asexuality and self-suppression that patriarchal subordination regulates for women. As such, culturally mandated values of modesty and chastity led to struggles between a desire for being autonomous and the need to be socially accepted that created discrepancies between knowledge as intrapsychic and action as interactive script amongst all the participants. Shame and silence, as social values learned through interaction (Wiederman, 2015), have smothered the practice of sexual autonomy in the participants and their acquisition of knowledge around sexuality.

Learning shame and silence

As reported, all the participants addressed a lack of access to proper knowledge around sexuality in both formal and informal learning settings in their youth as one of their main struggles. Instead, while society-defined sex education is characterized as inappropriate and a cause of sexual decay, especially for women, they report the learning of shame and silence as a social-gendered message instead. While the participants strongly agreed on the necessity of education around sexuality at personal levels, they describe such education as culturally complicated and entangled with the fear of forbidden sexual involvement and loss of modesty in the eyes of society. Nargol explains: “sexuality is a very complicated matter that no one should mention and there is no proper formal or informal education in this regard.” Furthermore, Mona indicates that “there was never education on sexuality. Sex is bad, sex is taboo, no one should talk about it. I was raised by this ideology from school and family.” Bahareh states:

Sex is a taboo topic, even amongst the family who pretend to be open minded. You cannot even talk about sex hygiene such as your monthly period openly. Instead, I just learned to carry unreasonable fear around sex and sexuality. I am fearful of my family finding out about my sexual involvement. They will judge me.

In addition to a lack of sex education in formal settings, none of the participants had the opportunity to learn about sexuality from a reliable informal source such as a family member. Participants such as Bahareh from less conformist families or ones such as Nargol from more traditional families were both forced to actively practice silence around the discourse of sexuality. Both families played an important role in indoctrinating the shameful and harmful message around women’s sexuality. Lack of conversations around sexuality produces sexual illiteracy, and the silence this engenders becomes a tool to teach and internalize shame and fear of judgment amongst the participants. Mahboubeh, who attempted to break the silence through communication with their family members, mainly their mother, explains:

I attempted to talk about sex with my mother a few times. My mother seemed bothered [to suffer] from the conversation and stopped it promptly. I feel that I need to talk to her and ask her about what I do not know about. But I do not know what will happen if I keep insisting. There are things that I cannot ever share with her.

Mahboubeh’s efforts to depart from the silence were suffocated by reminding her about the modesty that is necessary for her to practice to be accepted and respected as a woman within family and society. As a result, the battle between social values of shame and asexuality and a personal curiosity complicate the practice and awareness of sexual autonomy. Consequently, participants such as Bahareh explain that talking about sexuality was limited to conversations with their peers. Bahareh explains: “I learned [from my friends] what sex is in middle school.” Furthermore, Dena shares: “I always talked about sexuality with my close friends. I initially started to learn about sexuality and women’s bodies from them in middle school.” As the participants above indicated that they exchanged information and learned about sexual discourse within their friend circle, the heavy socio-cultural emphasis on sex as a taboo and a forbidden topic bounded the extent and accuracy of their learning and restrained their sexual autonomy. An example of this is when some incomplete or less accurate information that was secretly circulating placed some of the participants in danger. Bahareh shared how she became pregnant through one such misconception at an early age. Although such peer learning enables the participants to break the silence, the sexual subordination of women remains the focal message within such conversations. The emergence of the internet redefined knowledge seeking and the autonomous learning and practice of women in many ways, including becoming conscious of their varying degrees of sexual subordination.

The internet as a tool for learning

The participants searched for information about their bodies, intimate relations, contraception, women’s sexual desires, different ways of sexual pleasure, sexual harms, sexual health, and personal hygiene on the internet. Moreover, the internet enables the participants to re-evaluate socially mandated values and rethink sexuality in the context of non-masculine rights.

Zahra explains her learning experience as follows:

I learned a lot about sexuality on the internet. I have a much better understanding of sexual diseases, sexual dysfunctions, sexual relationships, sexual hygiene, and orgasm at a personal and practical level. I seek for information on hygiene, sexual desires……You know the stuff that I am uncomfortable to ask anyone or talk about it with anyone. I can freely find any answer that I am seeking.

The relatively free space of the internet, with less surveillance and higher access to broader information, enabled many women—including my participants—to choose and learn beyond the institutionalized shame and subordination of the discourse of sexuality that society had imposed on them. For participants such as Zahra, the internet became a liberated learning space where individuals had the opportunity to expand their learning on the discourse of sexuality as part of their reality, beyond cultural indoctrination and gendered scripts and a lack of trust in institutionalized information.

In addition to seeking relevant information, many of the participants were inspired by the lifestyles other women shared on social media. Such exposure to other women’s ways of living enabled many participants to reflect on their own levels of autonomy, including their sexual autonomy. Consequently, the act of seeking knowledge and learning about other women’s lives empowered some women to reflect upon and depart from the pressure of asexuality toward a renegotiation of their own sexual autonomy. Nargol explains:

I learned a lot about sex and sexuality and my body on the internet. It [learning about sex and sexuality] is a very complicated matter. As I learned more, I realized how much guilt and shame I have always carried in my sexual interaction. But learning more let me get rid of some of these uncomfortable feelings. I know what I want, and I make sure I fulfill my sexual desire [in my relationship].

Elmira explains how learning from the internet strengthens her sexual relationship with her partner:

The internet is great, I learned almost everything [about sexuality] on the internet. The internet opened people’s minds. For instance, my partner read a lot about many things on the internet including sexuality. His way of thinking about sexuality has become more open. I have sexual autonomy and easily express my sexual needs.

The new online learning spaces providing flexibility in both learning subjects and platforms empowered participants such as Nargol and Elmira to depart from traditional sexual expectations by discovering new ideas of sexual autonomy, enabling them to reconstruct their sexual scripts in a less patriarchal mindset. For instance, Nargol found the opportunity to transform from a passive to an active sexual being in her sexual interaction. Moreover, Nargol’s conscious journey of self-construction along with online learning disclosed her true sexual identity and empowered her to become aware of the destructive feelings of guilt, shame, and subordination embedded in the cultural script she had been raised to believe in. The internet allows the participants of this study to defy subordination and suppression through knowledge, and at times empowered some participants to exercise self-expression and negotiate their sexual autonomy. Furthermore, the challenges to cultural pressures around shame and modesty that they discovered while acquiring information on the internet empowered these participants to re-evaluate their own experience of sexual autonomy. As a result, the educational effect of the internet empowers women by broadening their awareness and allows them to reassess restricted patriarchal values such as asexuality.

Shame in online spaces

Despite much literature concluding that online space has become a new site of communication and connection for Iranian women to express themselves in, the culture of silence and shame has permeated into the online realm and negatively affected online communication and interaction. While the participants reportedly gained knowledge around sexuality on the internet, they continued to remain concerned over conforming to social values on women’s expected asexuality and chastity. As seeking to learn about sexuality was equivalent to being improper and shameless in society’s eyes, the participants chose to remain invisible and voiceless online learners rather than submitting to end to their knowledge acquisition. Zahra explains:

I search for information, and I visit many related pages regularly, but I avoid liking the page or leaving comments. I do not want anyone to know that I check this page. You know I am embarrassed.

Zahra’s narration clearly indicates a lack of shame in the act of acquiring knowledge privately, but still a desire to conform publicly. Zahra’s online behavior remained cautious, and they often avoided any activity that could reveal their identity on the internet. Instead of communicating and sharing information online, they chose to lurk anonymously. Dena as a young woman who learned about sex and sexuality online explained: “On sex and sexuality, most of the time I do not follow the pages that I like to view. I search the internet for pages that do not identify the visitors of the page.” Claiming her sexual autonomy while struggling with embedded shame ultimately caused Parisa to search silently for information online about sexuality:

I started to learn about sexuality from my friends in middle school. I tended to search the internet to seek answers to my questions regarding sexuality. There are some pages like…that I regularly check on Instagram. But I do not follow the pages, I do not make any comments or like anything on those pages. People still judge you as inappropriate.

Therefore, learning experiences on the internet are conditional and often exist through a veiled identity to avoid any negative social consequences. The internalized shame led to the practice of anonymity and shifted their quest for sexual autonomy to a silent unspoken type of empowerment. Moreover, such paradoxicality between the desire for emancipation and the culture of shame and silence trapped the participants within an oppressive schema as they mixed internalized fear and guilt with the new liberating information. Trapped within the paradoxicality of personal emancipation and cultural body discipline, women’s sexual desires remained a source of embarrassment and an object of judgment that mandated her to silence in order to remain a “proper and acceptable” woman. Despite Messing’s (2011) argument that women do not suffer from insufficient knowledge regarding gender inequality, passivity, and sexual double standards, this study’s participants’ practices were bounded by patriarchal power and the normalization of guilt induction and control over their behavior.

However, some of the participants adopted such oppressive normalization as a tool to defy shame and renegotiate their sexual autonomy. Their anonymity and invisibility on the internet temporarily eliminated the participants’ anxiety over the social and cultural consequences of seeking knowledge around sexuality. The participants emphasized that learning anonymously allowed them to depart from the fear of judgment and empowered them to learn about their sexuality, and thereby successfully escape from the culture of shame. The participants’ reports on their online learning processes indicated how culturally normalized values faded away at the personal level. This discontinuity between intrapsychic and social mores promises some progress toward sexual autonomy for these women.

Practice of sexual autonomy

Confirming the findings reported in the current literature on embedded shame around sexuality, the participants’ stories demonstrate the struggle between the attempt to avoid social stigmatization and the urge for autonomy. Even though the internet as an educational tool successfully weakened the patriarchal knowledge construction on sexuality, chastity, and modesty, it is not a space free from power and patriarchal indoctrination. When talking about the struggle with shame, the narrators that I present in this section were explicitly and implicitly involved in the practice of conformity rooted in the culture of shame and silence, even though they expressed high satisfaction with their online learning experiences. As Golnoosh mentioned: “expressing your sexual needs and desires mixed up with shame and modesty, even if it does not seem like this anymore, but these things still exist.” Maral makes these points clearly when she explains: “I experience a tremendous amount of guilt in my sexual interaction, and I never experienced the pleasure I should have. The feeling of guilt that is embedded in (sharm) shame that we learned.” Parisa, who describes herself as a sexually autonomous woman in her late 30s, describes how shame silenced her autonomy and gave rise to subordination:

Despite all the information that I have and all the experiences that I went through I still struggle with expressing my sexual needs because I am afraid if my partner will be turned off with my conduct. I feel ashamed/embarrassed.

The above narrations demonstrate how showing any sign of sexuality (even in a conversation to voice your needs or searching the internet for educational purposes) leads to shame and guilt and is also strongly tied to their social respect and social acceptance. Zahra indicates that “talking about sex is considered shameless and people perceive you as improper.” Social consequences and the internalized feeling of guilt regulated the practice of conformity as a part of reality that is reinforced through various degrees of silence. The practice of conformity did not remain limited to their sexual interactions. It extended to their communication about sexuality as well. For instance, the participants avoided using the word sex and replaced it with words such as matter, thing, and it, which indicated their acute feeling of shame and discomfort not just around sexuality but its language as well.

Even though the participants tended to discover new ways of claiming their sexual autonomy, many underlying issues remain untouched through a lack of dialogue and insufficient knowledge, again as a result of the incompatibility between online and offline realms. Most of the participants problematized and reconstructed their awareness and practice of sexual autonomy via the new knowledge they obtained online, but they also experienced substantial struggles over internalized fears of rejection, punishment, and judgment rooted in patriarchal cultural script.

Soha explains: “I know what I want I know it is my right to ask for what I want, but I am afraid if he is going to judge me as immoral and unchaste woman.”

Moreover, the above narrations show how shame is not merely the measurement of modesty and respectfulness but that women employ it to mitigate the stigma attached to sexual autonomy or to any related sexual conduct that is beyond sexual subordination/conformative sexuality. Consequently, censorship of their sexual needs as sources of shame and impurity did not just become the default practice and communication around sexuality but also expanded to their online behaviors. The embedded shame draws our attention to an obscured power that controls women’s sexual autonomy beyond offline realms. The normalized shame (as predictable scripts of a proper woman) embedded in women’s sexual attitudes and actions complicated their quest for sexual autonomy in practice, even for the most rebellious participants, those who successfully pushed boundaries and renegotiated their sexual autonomy. Ziba explains:

We learned [online] together and increase our level of knowledge and awareness [on sexuality], he is open and I talk about what I want. But always at the bottom of my heart I am concerned what he thinks of me, what if he leaves me because I am too vocal or too demanding.

The internet redefines the shared understanding of sexuality that is influenced by social participants’ awareness and practice of sexual autonomy. Institutionalized cultural values, offline socio-cultural power and more liberated online activities complicated the practice of sexual autonomy in online and offline realms. Notwithstanding this, the interconnection rooted in patriarchal ideology created an imbalanced power relation in women’s awareness and meaning making around the discourse of sexuality and sexual autonomy.  Although historically women have challenged sexual subordination, the patriarchal socio-cultural ideology of their families and communities, rooted in a culture of shame and silence, hinder the participants’ desire for sexual freedom.

Discussion

Although society defines sexuality as a masculine right, and women have been described by such cultural scripts (Khalajabadi-Farahani and Cleland, 2015; Sadeghi, 2009), their minds and consciousness venture beyond the oppressed schema of the society. Sexual scripts as a way to make sense of their experiences and interaction (Wiederman, 2015) can reconstruct and modify (Brickell, 2006) the discourse of sexuality through the emergence of the internet. The internet provides new ways of acquiring information by enabling the participants to informally learn beyond socially constructed information. The internet as a site of informal learning facilitated women to engage in casual daily learning without the same levels of restriction that learning in offline spaces imposes. While unstructured learning in daily life does not usually come to mind as an act of learning (Holland, 2019), the learners’ ability to easily search for their desired information on the internet provided a new autonomy for achieving meaningful outcomes (Ally et al., 2006; Heo and Lee, 2013) around the discourse of sexuality. Less institutionalized online spaces removed limitations for accessing knowledge and the participants were able to revisit their level of knowledge and practice, and advance their thinking according to the new information, leading to a cultural transformation of the formerly entrenched practices of shame and silence in the traditional Iranian discourse of sexuality.

Acquiring knowledge on the internet enables the participants to re-evaluate socially mandated values around women’s sexuality and to rethink sexuality in the context of non-masculine unilateral rights. As a result, this new online knowledge available empowers some of the women through raised awareness to problematize the idea of perceiving women’s bodies as subjected to shame, sexual decay, and sexual objectification. The knowledge obtained through the internet helps the participant to reconstruct their attitude and comprehension in many areas related to their sex education, while concern over social judgment and personal reputation often complicates their willingness to take autonomous actions.

In practice the participants seem to be struggling within the cultural scripts in their interactions, trying to maintain that schema to maintain their good standing in society. Institutional shame, silence, and subordination are conveyed daily through government structures, laws, religion, and mass media (Gagnon, 1990; Simon, 1996; Simon and Gagnon, 2003), which leads to the matching of sexual relationships with sexual scripts (Janghorban et al., 2015), despite Iranian women’s increased consciousness around the discourse of sexuality. Shame and silence as cultural scripts lead to predictable and gendered social interactions. Women as social actors create personal scripts based on learned experiences and social encounters (Simon and Gagnon, 2003), causing fluctuating tensions between personal and societal desires. This simultaneous pattern of oppression and resistance embedded in oppositional duality enables some women to renegotiate their sexual autonomy from within the culture as a tool to defy prescribed silence, even while superficially adopting the oppressive practice of conforming to that silence. Social and cultural discipline regulated women’s bodies and spaces through surveillance, subordination, and obedience, generating contradictory behaviors and actions— silence in the public realm and resistance in the private realm—that is, oppositional duality.

Moreover, repression and resistance are not two distinct concepts. Instead, repression produces its own resistance, and power would be meaningless in the absence of resistance (Foucault, 1979, 1980). An individual’s resistance in this case is when she practices her autonomy based on the information available to her. Although such information may not afford her full autonomous conduct, her resistance to patriarchal sexual scripts will empower her autonomous action. Sadeghi (2009) argues that Iranian women adopted “social identity surveillance,” which allowed them to learn about the rules and restrictions in public while finding ways to circumvent the restrictions of their traditional fixed identity through the private realm—to show conformity at interactional levels yet resist it at a personal level.

In this study, the participants’ silent and gradual resistance to sexual scripts of subordination and sexual subjectification act as everyday practices, challenging patriarchal social expectations and contributing to changing social orders and cultural transformation. Although there is no leadership or direct action against institutionalized discourse of sexuality, it is quiet, individual, everyday practice and ongoing action rather than an ideological or organized action that resists oppression (Bayat, 2013). Ultimately, this form of repeating actions persisted as a dispersed action that gradually brought changes to society in the form of everyday practice.

On the surface there is a culture of silence and shame that is deemed essential for women’s modesty, but in reality, these women are eager to learn about and understand their sexual rights. The fact that most of the participants were involved in pre-marital sexual interactions, despite all the potential socio-cultural consequences, indicates that they have been becoming agents of cultural change around sexual subordination.

The gap between sexual awareness and the perception of taboos surrounding sexuality indicates that the participants constantly renegotiated their sexual autonomy within the patriarchal cultural ideology that imposed silence and shame on their sexuality. Learning about their own sexual needs and becoming aware of the normalcy of such desires rejected the imposed asexuality within their minds, but the deeply rooted culture of shame and silence, and the incompatibility of this new learning with urf and real-life Iranian values, hindered their full emancipation. The contradiction between the societal culture and the personal quests these women embark on increases their awareness of sexual autonomy, even while the practice of submission at a surface level remains, to a certain degree, to avoid unpleasant social consequences, such as being labeled as improper. Therefore, discreetly but inexorably, cultural transformation is happening, knowledge is reconstructing, and social orders are changing.

Conclusions

This study aimed to unpack some Iranian women’s comprehension and experiences of sexual autonomy by closely exploring the educational role of the internet on the discourse of sexual autonomy and its interconnection with the culture of shame and silence. Iranian society still endorses traditional sexual morality based on chastity and modesty. As actions are rarely if ever taken independently of the influence of culture, the lingering effect of shame continues to complicate sexual autonomy amongst the participants. In practice, online learning about the discourse of sexuality is haunted by the notion of judgment, which is embedded in the culture of shame and silence in both online and offline realms.

Despite new levels of awareness in the offline realm, the participants tended to act passively and with caution while carrying feelings of guilt over voicing their sexual needs. Hesitation around talking about sexuality and their discomfort around using certain words such as sex were the most prominent patterns identified during the interviews. Such hesitation also extends to their online behaviors in the form of lurking. They tend to learn in silence without leaving any trace of their learning or exploring sexuality on the internet, while they continue to be concerned over facing social judgment and being labeled as sexually excessive. In both realms, the internalized and normalized weapons of shame and silence force them to conform by imposing the responsibility of maintaining their image as a proper woman in the eyes of others. The way they rationalized and comprehended their quest for other ways of viewing themselves helped them to continue their online search for new learning, as they were able to overcome the culture of shame and silence to varying degrees, at least privately.

Most of the participants, affected by internalized values, did not practice their sexual autonomy to the extent that they desired, and the interconnection between raising awareness through online learning and societies’ socio-cultural impact on the practice of sexual autonomy remains enigmatic. Certainly, some of the participants learned without practicing, while others modified their practice, and most indicated a desire to continue learning in order to more fully free themselves from subordination and achieve body autonomy. Despite the complications and inconsistencies between their growing awareness around sexual autonomy and actually acting on that autonomy, Iranian women involved in this study had some successes in their quest for sexual emancipation. Their increased awareness often pushed them to take actions silently, albeit gradually. Furthermore, the practice of repeating actions can lead to the normalization of these actions, breaking barriers, and establishing new standards of conduct (Mahmood, 2005). As such, learning is taking place amongst the participants, but due to the difficulties involved in bridging mind and action, their learning cannot yet be considered complete. Such difficulties must continue to be challenged for these women to feel more fully emancipated.