>> and now a "time" magazine correspondent explores the underground world in iran.

>> it is wonderful to be here at politics and prose. one of the best bookstores in the entire country and i say that having visited that many bookstores very recently and so it's one to be here and tuall for coming tonight and spending part of your evening with me. to talk about iran. i feel very fortunate to have the opportunity at particularly this time to be going around the country to talk not only my book but about this country that is so vexed in the american imagination. it seems as though right now the united states is very much having a conversation about iran. and this is for a handful of reasons partly because iran, it seems, permanently in the news. but also because now is a particularly unique time. it's the 30th anniversary of the iranian revolution, this february marked that 30th

anniversary. and who can really imagine that three decades have now gone by. and it's been an opportunity for everyone who thinks about iran and covers iran and is related to iran to stake and pause about this revolution and where it may ago. it's also a relevant moment to be talking about iran because there's a new administration in washington who is reviewing this country's policy on iran. there seems to be a recognition of the fact that the previous administration's policy of ignoring and belittling iran has been a failure. and there's a sense there may be at least a willings in no, sir consider other ways of dealing with iran and perhaps reaching some sort of place of comfort to talk of the issues that are of mutual interest to these two countries. of course, there's an election

coming up in iran later this year, in june. it's a presidential election and it will be a profoundly important one. certainly, for iranians everything that matters will be at stake. their relations with the outside world, the economy, and how the government conducts itself and how iranians and their daily lives feel the presence of the state. so for all these reasons, i think it's quite important right now, specifically, to talk about what the real ambitions and attitudes and desires of the iranian people are. and especially young people. and i think that we've seen in recent times what happens when our country formulates policy with a very incomplete or superficial understanding of countries in the middle east and the societies that we end up very much impacting with our policies. so the voice that i add to that conversation is one that is

based on my experience in iran. i've lived there many years in the past decade and have reported there extensively. i wrote a book about youth culture in iran "lipstick jihad" and, of course, the starting point of that was recognizing what a young country iran is. iran is a country of 70 million people and over 70% of the 70 million people are under the age of 30. perhaps, even under the age of 25. so this is an extraordinarily young country. and i was moved to write about this young generation because i had moved to iran as a young reporter for "time" magazine. and not only was i charged with covering iran politically and trying to understand american readers what the political situation was like, what sort of changes the country was going through, but also i sort of saw that these young people were so

critical to that whole debate about where iran was headed. because at that time, there was a moderate in power, president mohammed khatami and there was a particular set of power that he would be transforming iran to a more democratic and a more open society. as i was living in iran at that time and i was in my early 20s, and these young people were my friends and my relatives, and i grew quite fascinated with their political attitudes and behavior. and i felt that i couldn't really capture what they were striving for in these short 600-word news stories. and so i wrote -- i decided to write a book about them to portray how they were going about trying to transform their society. many of you may have read that book but i'll quickly because i think it's important to talking about what iran is going through today remember what young people

were dealing with back at that time, in the years sort of early 2000/2001. i described their culture of as-if pretending all the rules in place, what people could wear, how they could behave and read and watch, they pretended these rules did not exist. young women started to flout the dress code and wear brighter colors. they were wear tighter coats and push their veils back to show a little bit of pair. young people would hold hands in the street and watch band movies and videos, perhaps depending, of course, on their taste, drink alcohol at home. there was an underground music scene. young people would start rock bands and hold private concerts. they were very much determined as i saw it to change their society through daily life. and their individual behavior rather than through the political process because it

seemed to them at the time and that was certainly my sense disillusioned with the prospect of being able to change things politically and so that was the young generation that i wrote about and grew to know in that time. and i left iran at the end of 2001, and went on to move to beirut and cover other developments, of course, the war in iraq and the aftermath of that, which sort of played out across the region. and was based in beirut when 2005 rolled around. and in 2005, iranians went to the polls in may of that year to elect their president. i flew to tehran to cover that election and it resulted of the victory of someone whose name we struggle to pronounce, president mahmoud ahmadinejad, who won that election.

and it came as something of a shock and certainly my editors at "time" were a bit flummoxed as well and they called me up you've reported on iran for so many years of this country of a secular young people who are open to the west and very sophisticated and very -- in ways affectionate towards the united states, how have they gone and elected such a radicalb and so at that time it was fascinating to me also as a reporter to go back and report on that election. and to try and chronicle how it had come to pass that iranians had chosen a man that ended up being a very defiant and vitriolic leader, certainly not what they had expected.xv and i moved back to iran at the time and in the course of reporting how it had come to be and i'll quickly just -- and i'll quickly mention my reading of all that, which was that

president mahmoud ahmadinejad, who was unknown before that election virtually even in the preceding weeks, no one had really taken him seriously as a contender emerged at the last moment as a proponent of change. and i think in this country we've recently had an election in which a candidate has run on a platform of change and we can relate to how appealing that can sound during a time of deep disillusionment, and that's certainly what president mahmoud ahmadinejad -- or at that time candidate mahmoud ahmadinejad attempted to do. people in "lipstick jihad" they were no longer in their entire 20s, they were in their late 20s. they were still interested in political freedom and social freedom and they certainly still did want to be able to hold hands in the street without being stopped by the morality police but their needs and their attitudes had also evolved because they were approaching

their late 20s and were starting to think about marriage. and so other issues began to also become a priority. like can i afford an apartment? can i find a job where i can be able to support a family? these were questions that were urgent at the time because the iranian economy was bad before the global collapse acquainted everybody, especially in the west about what a bad economy could really mean. iranians were dealing with this all the way along. and so young people also were attracted to his message. he promised to battle corruption. he promised to bring the country's oil wealth to people's dinner's table and this was certainly appealing to a young generation who was starting to think very seriously about whether or not they could afford and sustain decent married adult life back in iran. my move back to iran was occurred with a change in my life. given the title of my book, i

met someone who would later become my husband, and when i moved back so that we could start our life together and go forward, i began to experience and sort of firsthand witness all of the things that iranian young people were dealing with when it came to marriage and moving on in life beyond simply being single and young. this all started for me in the course of planning our wedding and there's a chapter in mygcw k devoted to this and it's called "the persian bride's handbook." it looks at weddings in iran and, of course, i being the woman, the one who was planning the wedding, and was quite astonished by the world that i encountered in iran, the world of weddings and what a middle class dream it had become to have an extravagant, beautiful, over the top wedding. being from california, i was very familiar with, of course, this culture of extravagance of

a wedding. and i didn't expect to find it in iran and the middle class who could certainly not afford these kinds of lavish spectacles. it all started for me when i started looking for wedding coordinators to help me plan our wedding.!í ask my friends and i started to go around with my fiance at the time to meet them and was quite amazed -- they were sort of characters out of a hollywood film and would run these empires, these g& wedding-coordinating empires and we would be ushered in and be taken into a room that was devoted to the food that would be served at the wedding and there would be a+ñ powerpoint presentation and the7+÷ wedding coordinator would be sitting there in this immaculate suit looking like clark kent or a calvin model saying we could 13 courses or 18 courses and i was sitting there quite amazed by

all of this. and i remember asking, well, could we have two or three? and he was mortified by my suggestion and said, absolutely not. my reputation would be demolished no one would come to me again to plan a wedding. these are your options. and we sort of silently sort of not and went along with the next step in that wedding empire of that coordinator which was photography. and we were handeds&÷ a big boof photos to show us, you know, if we went with this wedding coordinator what could we have in terms of wedding photography. i started to go through these albums and it was quite astonishing. there were photos of young couples galloping off onto horses in the desert and frolicking in the ocean waves and finding each other dressed, of course, in a tuxedo and ball gown on a grand estate and we were told, of course, this could all be set to music and we could have a dvd made of it.

that our friends and family would, of course, then have to suffer through repeatedlyt because it was very expensive and, of course, what would then, of course, the point that everyone would have to watch it all the time. [laughter] >> and so this was of course our introduction to this world of lavish weddings. and there was also a security element to all this. many of the wedding coordinators also offered security packages because in iran, if you're going to have a wedding in public, at a public reception hall men and women have to be separated because, of course, the islamic regulations of the government hold that men and women can't listen to music or dance or sort of cavort in each other's presence in public. and so if you want to have a public reception, men and women have to be separated and i attended one of these segregated weddings once and it was a rather grim affair. and i didn't certainly want to have that be my wedding. 500 women on one side of a ballroom and 500 men on the

other side of the ballroom and the war on terrorism could talk amongst themselves as women do but 500 men alone didn't quite know what to do and my husband and i were texting each other throughout the whole thing and i discovered that that sided a stand-up comedian. so this is what people had to to either have this -- of course i wanted to mention, very traditional and pious families would still would have a segregated weddings but for majority middle class secular city-dwelling sort of spectrum of iran, that was not something that would certainly have any appeal. and so if you wanted to have many young couples chose to have their wedding parties at home. their receptions at home so that men and women could be together and, of course, this would be conspicuous at a certain point because there would be many cars outside and there would be loud music and inevitably, the police would come knocking at the door

and usually there would be someone who had been charged with having a bribe ready to give to the police so the wedding wouldn't raided. they had security packages as well. you could have different types of security guards attired variously. you could have them dressed up as guests and not as guests. this was part of the world of weddings that iranian people were inhabiting. these were all the things that they had to consider when planning this very transforming moment in their lives. >> the middle class in iran, although, very sophisticated and educated is not financially or materially very well off. their standard of living could be compared very much to the lower middle class in the west that are in this country and so it was really a strain for couples and their families to have these kind of weddings but

it had become such a social standard; it had become such a way for couples and families to exhibit their status within their community that it was just what young people aspired to, whether or not their parents would have to go into debt, for example, to afford this for them. and the government was concerned because in an islamic country marriage is the cornerstone of society. it was very important to the iranian government to uphold the institution of marriage and to encourage young people to get married at a younger age, and they would hand out marriage loans to sort of help with this but what they would give out in the loan, of course, could barely even cover a fraction of the type of weddings that young people wanted and so the government started to pursue this moderation scheme to promote moderation in weddings and also in wedding contracts because in iran, in the modern iranian wedding contract also in

the old prerevolutionary marriage contracts there's a line that there's a financial sum that the couple agrees upon before marriage and it's basically the woman is entitled to collect that sum upon divorce. and in my mother's generation, very often this was symbolic because they felt that women -- a woman's worth could not be determined by a sum of money and very often my mother had a symbolic line. it was some sugar crystals and a book the poetry, you know, these very kind of idealistic kind of things but in the very status-conscious and in a calculating iran today young women were putting in things like my weight in gold. my birth year in gold coins. this had become very common. and, of course, many times young men couldn't afford to pay these sums of money in the event of divorce, but it had become sort of again the bride's family could go about and circulate, you know, what an immense sum she had managed to secure but

down the line a young man wouldn't be able to pay this and very often the woman's family would have him in prison because she was legally entitled to collect this so young men -- the prisons started to fill up with young men who couldn't pay the dowry. it wanted to promote moderation in both the wedding parties themselves and in the marriage contracts. they wanted young people to start to seek and to have kinds of weddings that they could actually afford. and so you would read in newspapers about the decline and how sad it was and one day i read about the government's party -- to gain admittance you had to show that your marriage contract had a very modest line. it had to be under the equivalent of something like under $1,000 and i read about this party and it sounded like

something like an islamic disco because the reporter described there being big portraits of shia saints on the walls and they brought a mulla to read from the koran and after that they brought somebody to talk about the irani/and iraqi war and this was meant to be a party and they passed out the snacks that usually kids in elementary school will eat. and then the party favor was a book on marriage written by the ayatollah khamenei who is the country's supreme leader. only 300 people attended the government's moderation party. and so i mention this anecdote and i write about it as a way of illustrating how the government is slowly -- is recognizing the social crises that are on its hands and what young people are struggling with but it's very often unable to address these

problems because the tools that are at its disposable very often, religion and ideological tools like that, don't resonate with young people. most iranian young people although they may have faith certainly, they may pray during -- they may pray, they may fast during ramadan but are very alienated of the official youth of religious ideology and so in many ways this makes the government ill-equipped to deal with this young generation and its changing needs. now i'm going to read to you from a little passage that suggests otherwise, another little experience that led me tongue that the government wasn't so inept after all when it came to dealing with what is young people's changing expectations, the implications that they had. so before my husband and i -- before my fiance at the time and i were able to get married we

had to go do blood tests and then we were escorted to this other room and we were told there was going to be a premarital class that we had to attend and i asked my friends, of course, before and they all told me it was mostly about contraception and i didn't want to go so i told the instructor well, i went to elementary school in california so i learned all of this there. [laughter] >> can i skip the class? and she said, no, no. there's a lot of up-to-date information. you should really go. so i reluctantly went, of course, men and women were separated and i went off to this room and my fiance went in this room and we sat down and indeed it was about contraception but i was actually impressed. the instructor talked about emergency contraception even in this country a few years ago was not widely available. and explained to this room full of young women from very different walks of life, some in very modern bright colors, some in traditional. explained how they could use it

and going through all the different kind of birth control they could use. and it was quite impressive because the state does run a very effective family-planning program. it is one of the ways in which it has managed to get the birthrate down in iran and basically deal with one of the most pressing of the country's problems, which is that it couldn't support the birthrate that had come about after the revolution in the iran/iraq war. so after the birth control lecture, i'll just read to you about what happened next. the instructor finished the birth control lecture with an admonition. it's very important that you don't get pregnant too quickly. you should wait at least two or three years and see whether your marriage is going to work out. if you don't have a child, you can easily get divorced after a couple of years and re-enter society with your prospects intact. that's not going to be the case for a divorced single parent. what she said was harsh but

true. most single mothers face tremendous challenges in iran. from the lack of affordable daycare to the impossibility of living on one meager salary. the difficulties were steep enough to keep the majority of women in bad marriages from seeking legal relief. a divorced woman unburdened with a child, however, would fare well. she could easily remarry provided she lower her standards a shade. the instructor sat down behind the wooden desk, adjusted her caramel colored scarf and imparted the lesson as well. you must also derive pleasure from sexual interaction. this is natural and nothing to feel ashamed of. don't be embarrassed to ask your husband to be person. if he does not know you can tell him. women's bodies are different. they are built differently and this matters. why? because for women arousal takes longer. since when had the government

concerned about women's sexual fulfillment since one acknowledged women had sexual desires at all. this seemed rather at odds with the authority's general hostility of pleasure on the flesh. perhaps by the alarming rates of divorce and prostitution, the state decided to shore up the institution of marriage rather than simply make it a yolk held in place by repressive divorce laws. so i hadn't been prepared at all for that turn and that frank discussion in my premarital class and i was more astonished how frank and open the other women in the class were because as soon as the instructor finished, their hands shot up and they had questions and they were very frank. it seems striking to me how the taboo of talking about sex and especially what women could expect physically in their relationships with men sexually had not only eroded in terms of

the government, although, i don't want to suggest this is something that would be in newspapers on or on official television. that the government was willing at least in some of these classes to have frank discussion among women and women for their part, i think, had grown to feel comfortable enough with themselves and with this aspect of their life to talk about it very candidly in a room full of other women and to ask questions and to feel very natural in doing so. and i write about this and i read it to you -- i read it to you tonight sort of in contrast with the phenomenon of weddings and how unable how the government was able to deal -- as i wrote in my book about the iranian government and how ambivalent headlights at some moments it seems tremendously pragmatic and very able to deal

with this young generation and the challenges that they're going through and other moments it's so unable. and so prone to just on uncertain cracking down and this is really at the heart of how iranians experience their society. this is a government that is still ambivalent over all the big questions. doestype to be a democracy? does it feel comfortable staying authoritarian? does it want close ties with the west or does it want to be a leader of the islamic world? this is something very much still in the air, and i think iranians are very much frustrated because they are aware of what kind of government they want. they want accountable, effective government that upholds of rule of law. they want a better standard of living and they're impatient with a government that can't sort of itself out after all of these years. i'll end with one other anecdote because i was in iran in

december, and when i first got there, everyone was just talking about the economy because inflation had just gone through the roof. inflation in iran is always high, but in the last few years, mahmoud ahmadinejad's economic policies have had the effect of really driving up inflation in a way that people's ordinary, daily quality of life has really been gouged. families that would regularly eat meat before are finding that's too expensive. families who have lived in a certain neighborhood all their lives are having to move because the rent has just gotten too expensive in that district. so everyone was really feeling this very acutely. and in any sort of just buying groceries or going to the butcher shop you could hear people complaining. the price of pomegranates had gotten so expensive, for example, because of some change in the government's import and export policy and people were very much complaining. and my visit coincided a few

days after my arrival with the eruption of violence in gaza. and, of course, the iranian government is a supporter of hamas and very quickly seized upon this conflict and suddenly the evening news was all about gaza all the time and there were -- there was very visceral footage of palestinians' bodies and it was quite distressing and it was very clever propaganda and it had the effect of distracting iranians from all of their economic concerns and all of their daily preoccupations before the fighting erupted. and for some time at least those early days i found that people were very distracted. instead of talking about the economy and complaining about price increases, they were talking about gaza and how horrible it was and how the palestinians were suffering. but over time after maybe 10 days or two weeks, they grew a bit accustomed to hearing about