Meeting, Mating, and Cheating Online in Iran

Abstract

Urban young Iranians have recently begun to use the blogosphere and cyberspace to construct new sexual and social discourses. This article describes how Iranian youth link indigenous discourses of sexuality to other discourses of sexuality and how they understand their practices as political and social statements. For these youths, the internet provides important avenues to circumvent restrictions on cultural consumption and production while allowing them to engage in “safe” sexual encounters. As such, it fuels the creation of social movements that may pose new challenges to the regime.