Learning to Love

[from Reading Lolita in Tehran ©2003 by Afar Nafisi, p303-304:] 

---By the time I had chopped the cucumbers and the herbs, adding them to the yogurt, I had come to a conclusion:  our culture shunned sex because it was too involved with it.  It had to suppress sex violently, for the same reason that an impotent man will put his beautiful wife under lock and key.  We had always segregated sex from feeling and from intellectual love, so you were either pure and virtuous, as Nassrin's uncle had said, or dirty and fun.  What was alien to us was eros, true sensuality.  These girls, my girls, knew a great deal about Jane Austen, they could discuss Joyce and Woolf intelligently, but they knew next to nothing about their own bodies, about what they should expect of these bodies which, they had been told, were the source of all temptation.
---How do you tell someone she has to learn to love herself and her own body before she can be loved or love?  By the time I added the salt and pepper to my dish, I had come up with an answer to this question.  I went to the next session armed with a copy of Pride and Prejudice in one hand and Our Bodies, Ourselves—the only book I had available on sexuality—in the other.

[Reading Lolita in Tehran was such a moving glimpse for me into the cultural life in Iran that it made me appreciate anew the freedoms we take for granted here.

Enjoy (and exercise!) your freedoms, Patient Reader.]