IFEVER ONE wanted to illustrate the cultural chasm between western and Muslim worlds, this is how. In Britain, newspapers and magazines publish special supplements telling women how to manipulate their partners during the World Cup, by requesting GBP500 Mulberry handbags during a penalty shoot-out. While in Iran, women have been banned from entering football stadiums because it is decreed un-Islamic to look at the naked legs and arms of male strangers. Even - oh, even - if they took no pleasure from the sight.
So there it is in black and white: handbags or hijabs; a metaphor for gruesome decadence on one hand, and repression on the other; and how disturbing it is that spoiled western women take their freedoms Brass Bangle so lightly when otherwomen are so discriminated against. Yet are the differences really so great? In both worlds, it is clear, women are patronised and face barriers - both real and cultural - to stop them entering a male preserve.
The World Cup, the showcase of the most popular sport on the planet, which begins tomorrow, is a glut of beauty, athleticism, pride, control and money. It is as exclusive as it pretends to be inclusive. Football is about power. Wherever you go in the world, the right to control the game, to have access to it, to televise it, is to hold power.
So who denies women the right to enjoy football? In Iran, it is the male clerics. When the Iranian team qualified for the World Cup last summer, thousands of women, as football mad as their brothers, husbands and sons, took to the streets to celebrate with the men. President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad then made a startling populist gesture. Families, including women, he said, could be allowed into special sections of football stadiums. Previously, this had been forbidden because women had to be "protected" at football matches from the shouts and swearing of the men. Crowd noise was muted during television coverage for the same reason.
(This is the country, don't forget, where the Iranian women's football team, having broken the taboo saying they were too weak to play 90 minutes, have just been allowed to play their first open- air game. They played fully clothed, with hijabs over their hair, and the German team that played against them had to observe the same rules. ) The clergy, appalled by female fans at football matches, came up with a religious reason for a ban - the need to preserve their modesty from the shock of naked male limbs. Naturally, once Allah had joined in the battle, the women's case was hopeless.
An Iranian film highlighting the absurdity of the ban has itself been banned. Offside tells the story of a girl who dresses up as boy to get inside the stadium but is arrested, along with other female impostors.
Loewe HandbagsIn the west, in the absence of censorious clerics, women are their own worst enemies. Thousands are denied the right to enjoy football by the tyranny of traditional role play. In the world of football, women can be caricatured two ways: as footballers' wives - high-maintenance, vacuous, vulgar - or as bored parasites, manipulating their dim football-fan partners into giving them mindless luxuries. The London quality press prefers the latter. Win a World Cup Widow Wallchart. How To Score With Every Game, they twitter, pointing out the crucial moments to ask for lipstick, pedicures, hair cuts, Manolo Blahnik shoes (whatever they may be), and make-up as England progress through the stages.
Is it funny? Not remotely. It's not even true. A recent survey showed that female football supporters spend GBP1bn a year watching the game - GBP269m more than all UK women spend on
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