Il Tirreno Giornale (PISA, Italia, Monday 15 July 2002 )
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Used in Iran for Publicity Against Impotence PISA. A man who, by strength of muscles, straightens the Tower of Pisa. It is this image selected to become publicity for an Iranian firm that creates devices to take care of masculine impotence. A cartoon that appeared on the pages of the Iran government daily paper has aroused the disdained reaction of a conservative newspaper. "An obscene and immoral image", has written "Jomhuri Eslami" (Islamic Republic), one of the strongholds of orthodoxy in publishing, commenting on the not too thin double message. Another problem, beyond the debatable taste of the cartoon, is symptomatic of the reality of profound change and it is fraught with many contradictions. Under the blanket of a propaganda that attempts to show a Country totally soaked in Islamic morality, exists a society with behaviors, aspirations and very similar problems to those of any Western Country. The arrests and the bodily punishments inflicted for "illegitimate" sex out of marriage, or for the consumption of alcohol, or for the simple participation in mixed parties of men and women, do not seem able to stop a process of deep change. Since it is possible, precisely, that on the pages of a daily paper from the official agency "Irna" appears this advertisement for a device that promises "98 per cent success without surgery or medicines" for the men with difficulty of erection. "It is not clear how this notice has had the necessary permission to arrive on the pages of a newspaper", writes scandalized "Jomhuri Eslami". But the answer seems clear: the Iranian society has changed and is changing, and not necessarily in the auspicious sense of the conservative daily paper. The use of every type of contraceptive, including sterilization, is after all publicized with a lively campaign in a Country with a demographic explosion that has doubled the population in 20 years. A country that has made extremely positive results, reducing the rate of growth from 3.2 per cent in 1986 to little more than the one per cent today. And even in the Iranian city of Qazvin, 130 kilometers west of Teheran, is situated the largest factory of condoms in the Middle East, that exports most of its products to the ex-Soviet republics of central Asia. |
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