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The country's economic malaise has also led to a reportedly sharp rise in plain old, non-Islamically sanctioned prostitution. Tehran's high-end taxi drivers, often underemployed university graduates, casually point them out on the street.

"When economies take a downturn, informal economies and illicit networks become more attractive," says Pardis Mahdavi, author of a book on sexuality in Iran. "Technology facilitates this too."

During the shah's time, Tehran's notorious red-light district was known as Shahr-e Noe (New City), a place where countless young Iranian men lost their virginity. Like many things post-revolution, however, the Islamic Republic just imagined that banning the symptom would make the problem go away. But pouring saltpeter from the minarets hasn't worked. "They razed Shahr-e Noe thinking it would end prostitution," a retired Iranian laborer once told me. "Now all of Tehran has become Shahr-e Noe."

UNSURPRISINGLY, THE OUTWARDLY CHASTE nature of Khomeinist political culture has perverted normal sexual behavior, creating peculiar curiosities -- and proclivities -- among Iranian officialdom. Omid Memarian, a journalist who spent several months in the notorious Evin prison for his articles critical of the government, told me that his interrogators seemed far more interested in his sex life than his political peccadilloes. "I tried to answer their questions in very general terms, but they'd interrupt me," he recalled. "They wanted to know details. 'Start from when you were unbuttoning her blouse....'" In one instance, he told me, he was horrified when an interrogator appeared to be rubbing himself while listening.

Observers of American politics -- the land of Jimmy Swaggart, Mark Sanford, and Newt Gingrich, to name just a few -- won't be surprised to learn that it is often the most outspoken Iranian advocates of traditional values who fall short of achieving them. Memarian spent part of his mandatory military service in Tehran writing speeches for a senior Revolutionary Guard commander who routinely attacked the craven immorality of the "Global Arrogance" (i.e., the United States). "His filmi [the person who brought him bootlegged films on CD] later told me that he always requested 'films with scenes' [film-haye sahne-dar]," a euphemism for porn.

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