No Women Allowed...to Eat Pizza

How patriarchal societies control women's consumption

On 27 September 2021, Amir Hossein Shamshadi, PR director at Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIS), posted on his Instagram page that women were no longer allowed to be shown on TV eating pizza or sandwiches or drinking red beverages. A TV director further added that he had also been told that he must not show women eating cucumbers or carrots - and that this applied to female puppets as well as humans. These strictures were imposed around six weeks after Iran's Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance started legal action against Tehran’s Domino Dairy for an advertisement showing a woman eating a choc-ice-on-a-stick type of ice-cream. The sight of women eating such items was labelled by the regime and its supportive news outlets to be ‘deviant’, ‘disgusting’, ‘erotic and sexual’ and ‘promot[ing] promiscuity’. A woman who had been interviewed on TV added that, for similar reasons, she had been asked not to smile broadly enough to show her teeth. The desire to remove one female …