Dress Code and Iran

In the first chapter, Margaret Atwood says “ in their red shoes, flat-heeled to save the spine and not for dancing. The red gloves are lying on the bed. I pick them up, and pull them onto my hands, finger by finger. Everything except the wings around my face is red: the color of blood, which defines us.” While the book may seem disconnected from the real world there are many explanations of similar dress codes being used in the real world. The most famous example of this may be the Taliban however I think that a more prudent expansion would be the country of Iran. In Iran, the dress code is for “women to have their legs covered down until the ankles and wear loose tunics or coats that cover their lower waist and have long sleeves.” While the dress code is not as severe as it once was under other dictatorships the potential result could be for you to end up to 10 years in prison. The idea of a region-wide dress code is not unique to Iran. It is very common in religion to have a section on how you should dress and what you can wear. This is going to be more common in theories where the state is a religion. Just like Gilead, the government of Iran uses religion to institute the dress code in their society. All three of the main Abrahamic religions have some sort of verse about how to dress conservatively and be okay in the eyes of god. For example, in Christianity, the bible says “… also that the women should dress themselves in moderate clothing with reverence and self-control, not with their hair braided or with gold, pearls, or expensive clothes …” In a movie that looks just like the bible the Quran says “Revering God is the most important guideline for women when they choose their dress. The righteous reverent woman will know that God is always watching her, she will therefore dress modestly and in line with God’s requirements for decency and morality.” This idea of the need to portray a form of humbleness and sanction through dressing is taken to a new extreme in The Handmaid’s Tale. There are not just restrictions on the people’s dress but as stated they have their own “uniforms”. You can tell it is not just with the lowly handmaids but also with the Aunts who were in a brown uniform and the blue wives. It also makes the appearance of knowing what role you have in society. One of the clearest examples of this is when Atwood says “Frowning, she tears out three tokens and hands them to me. Her face might be kind if she would smile. But the frown isn’t personal: it’s the red dress she disapproves of, and what it stands for. She thinks I may be catching a disease or any form of bad luck.” The conflict in that shows the roles of the society and just how low certain women go. Another thing that Iran and Gilad have in common with the dress code is just how important the code is for a revolution. We know that there were ordinary protests that got shot at. This can also be compared to the recent protests that happened when Mahsa Amini was killed by the Iran secret police. What happened was a large-scale protest that was crushed after a decent amount of time. We can infer that a similar thing did happen in the early days of the revolution where the protesters were shot at and killed. The dress code was a huge element in the Iran protests with women burning their hijabs. We did not hear things like this in Gilead but we do see in the brothel that people see it as a way to rebel. What we can see is that in the end what people were has a large dictation of how society reacts to them. In the maiden’s tale, it seems as a system of repression and It helps the government fit the people into their class roles. While in Iran it is a religious belief it still leads to the untutored role of oppression in the society. This type of operation will hurt people overall and allow us to have a large correlation between societies. While one is fiction the the other is fact it still leads us to have to have to be careful where we go through our government.