Unbearable excitement!
Who was right about what year it became legal for women in Iran to ride a bike?
I am sorry about that it has taken a while for me to get back to you about who the winner is, the reason is that the question was much trickier then I first thought.
I remember reading in a news paper many few years ago that the law in Iran had changed and women now was allowed to ride a bicycle and I remember how odd it all sounded to me who grew up in Sweden where dads sit outside café’s with their toddlers and discuss sour dough recipe’s with each other and women are doing the same jobs and are practicing the same sports as men. I could not believe that there would be a place on earth where women would not be allowed to cycle. I imagined streets filled with Iranian women on bicycle’s biking just for the sake of it as a way of showing the finger to an repressing regime and I thought that it was great news.
But things seem to have changed since that article and whether women should be allowed to ride bicycles seem to be a controversial issue in Iran and has been so for a long time. There are re-creation parks where women can cycle in special lanes made for women and there are female athletes and tourists cycling through the country while according to various news articles from 2010 and 2011 there are still police chiefs in various cities who consider it a crime for women to cycle or roller-skate in public and who target the women who does.
According to an article in USA Today "The country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, announced in 1999 that "women must avoid anything that attracts strangers, so riding bicycles or motorcycles by women in public places causes corruption and is thus forbidden.""
It seem as if women are not allowed to cycle in public any more or am I misinformed? Maybe my Iranian readers can enlighten us?
Otherwise I will pick a random winner.
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