Embroideries

In Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi told the story of her own life. In the sequel Embroideries, she sits down with a group of women of various ages. They tell her and each others stories from their lives.

In this context, "embroidery" refers to sewing up a woman's vagina so that she will bleed on her wedding night.


 * My Girl Is Not a Slut: A main motivation for several male side characters - often men of iranian descent living in the west and trying to import a virgin from Iran because the western women are all sluts.
 * Old Man Marrying a Child: One of the women got married at the age of 13. He was 69 years old, but a really important military general.
 * Arranged Marriage, "justified" by the fact that she happened to be born into an aristocratic family.
 * She tried to do a Child Marriage Veto, but was ignored. So she ran away on her wedding night.
 * Turned out that Divorce Requires Death, as he refused to divorce her. She refused to come back to him, however. Which also meant she had to stay away from her family, except from an aunt who protected her.
 * Thus she spent the following four years doing Prayer of Malice, begging God to kill her husband in all kinds of way. "Dear God, please have him get cancer", "Dear God, please have him be hit by a car", and so on. He finally died, leaving her as a seventeen years old virgin widow.
 * Sex Is Evil and I Am Horny: Invoked to the extreme, with the main characters claiming that the sexual puritanism doesn't only ruin lives, it also create a state of sexual obsession that prevents society from progressing. They feel that the reason the west is more advanced is that westerners are more sexually free, and thus don't waste their time obsessing over sex.
 * Except that the aristocrats of the west operate in the same way as the iranian people... but that's just because all aristocracy everywhere is degenerate.