Right-Wing White Women Don’t Care About Iranian Women

You’ve seen the routine. Some coiffed white conservative woman goes on cable news, all wide-eyed and sanctimonious, saying: “At least here we don’t force women to wear burkas like they do in Iran!” 

She delivers it like she’s courageously championing global women’s rights. But let’s keep it 100, she doesn’t give a damn about Iranian women and their oppression.  She’s using them as rhetorical props to justify American warmongering in the Middle East and to shut people up about our rights here in America. 

From Candace Owens and Tomi Lahren to Laura Ingraham, Dana Loesch, to Fox News panels, and the op-ed pages of places like the Federalist and the Washington Examiner, conservative pundits and columnists have made a whole genre out of scolding people on the left for supposedly ignoring the “real” oppression of women forced to wear hijabs or burkas in Iran. They routinely invoke Iranian women’s state-enforced modesty as a rhetorical weapon to paint U.S. women as spoiled, ungrateful, and hypocritical for fighting for reproductive rights, equal pay, or freedom from sexual violence here at home. 

It’s not solidarity. It’s not feminism. It’s a threat dressed up as concern. It’s: “Be grateful for the freedoms we haven’t taken away from you yet. And don’t ask for more.”

The same loudmouths are using a deflection tactic to shut down criticism of their own agenda, which aims to control women’s bodies here with its own brand of theocratic, patriarchal policy.

Iranian women are fighting real oppression. Their government enforces compulsory hijab laws. Women can be harassed, beaten, or jailed for refusing to cover their hair. The morality police killed Mahsa Amini in custody for an “improper” hijab, sparking mass protests under the rallying cry: Women, Life, Freedom. Women in Iran face legal discrimination in divorce, child custody, inheritance, and travel. A married woman needs her husband’s permission to get a passport. This is enforced with violence and intimidation.

But here’s what these conservative pundits won’t admit: Iranian women are not passive victims. They are the ones leading the resistance. They’re smuggling out footage of beatings. Burning their headscarves in the street. Organizing strikes. Risking arrest, torture, and death to demand change. They don’t need a Fox News panel to “speak for them.” They are not political pawns.

You’ll never see these TV pundits asking Congress to make asylum easier for Iranian women fleeing persecution. They’re not funding Iranian feminists. They’re not protesting U.S. sanctions that wreck Iran’s economy while leaving the regime untouched. They’re not reading, quoting, or amplifying the words of actual Iranian women risking their lives. Instead, they get on TV in tasteful blazers, furrow their brows, and say, “At least here you can dress how you want!” while working overtime to make sure that won’t be true for long.

Because let’s keep it real, these same white conservative women who cry crocodile tears for Iranian women are busy building a Gilead here at home. 

They cheerlead abortion bans with no exceptions for rape or incest. They back mandatory transvaginal ultrasounds. They want 10-year-old rape victims to carry forcible pregnancies. They defund Planned Parenthood and sex education. They call for banning birth control pills. They support book bans on anything that dares mention consent, sexuality, or LGBTQ existence. These aren’t just “policies.” They’re a vision of state-enforced female submission.

They don’t hate religious authoritarianism. They just want to be the ones writing the commandments. This is the classic con: “Don’t worry about abortion bans, forced births, or states investigating miscarriages—at least you’re not forced to wear a burka!” It’s emotional blackmail. It’s designed to make you feel ungrateful for wanting control over your own body. It’s the same logic as an abusive partner saying, “You’re lucky I don’t hit you harder.”

White conservative women have always been patriarchy’s middle managers. They enforce the rules. Police the boundaries. Explain away the violence. Smile prettily while they do it. They want to be the Wives in The Handmaid’s Tale, doling out punishments and privileges, so long as they’re not the handmaids themselves. And they’ll gladly point at Iranian women’s forced hijabs to distract you from the red robes and bonnets they’re sewing for you here.

This isn’t about empathy. It’s about control. It’s collapsing all Muslim women into a faceless stereotype of voiceless oppression so American conservatives can feel morally superior. It’s deflecting from the fact that they’re building their own fundamentalist theocracy here. It’s weaponizing someone else’s oppression to justify your own.

This isn’t new. It’s the oldest trick in the colonizer’s book. British colonialists claimed they had to “save” Indian women from sati while ignoring homegrown Indian feminist movements and consolidating control over the subcontinent. French colonizers staged public unveilings of Algerian women in “liberation” ceremonies while raping and torturing civilians. The U.S. justified war in Afghanistan as “saving women” while propping up warlords who raped children and then abandoning Afghan women to the Taliban. It was never about saving women. It was about controlling everyone.

Iranian women aren’t waiting for American conservatives to speak for them. They’re writing, organizing, and risking their lives. They’re publishing underground newspapers, making guerrilla art, posting footage of state violence. They’re demanding an end to the Islamic Republic. They don’t need some senator’s wife giving a speech about how sad their lives are. They need actual solidarity: amplifying their voices, supporting their right to asylum, challenging U.S. sanctions that hurt them, and demanding our government stop supporting dictators for oil. But most of all, recognize they lead their own struggle.

If you’re going to invoke Iranian women’s forced modesty to shame American women for demanding reproductive rights, you don’t care about freedom. You’re just pissed you can’t get away with that level of state-enforced religion here yet. You want American women under your control. Your dress codes. Your forced births. Your biblical law. You want to distract people from the Gilead you’re building here.

Women everywhere deserve freedom. The freedom to wear a hijab or not. The freedom to choose or refuse motherhood. The freedom to control their bodies. The freedom to say no to any man, priest, mullah, politician, or police officer who thinks he owns them. Iranian women deserve that. American women deserve that.

If your feminism stops at the water’s edge, or only shows up when you want to shame someone into shutting up about your policies, it’s not feminism. It’s white Christian supremacist propaganda. 

Because if you care about freedom for women, you don’t get to pick and choose which women deserve it. And you sure as hell don’t get to use someone else’s oppression as your shield for maintaining your own.

Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and author of “Spare The Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Children In Jim Crow America.” Read her Substack here.

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