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Hello and welcome to the Double X Gab Fest for Tuesday, June 23rd.

I'm Emily Bazelon.

I'm here with my colleagues Megan O'Rourke and Hannah Rosen.

Hello.

And we're going to talk about three things.

We're going to talk about the protests in Iran and the role that women are playing in the

demonstrations and in the media coverage of the demonstrations.

We're also going to talk about Christina Naring's new book, Vindication of Love,

and a related piece about marriage in the Atlantic Monthly by Sandra Singh-Loe.

And lastly, the movie

Up, which we all managed to see, kind of miraculous coordination on our parts. So, Hannah,

what, tell us your thoughts about this video of a woman named Neda, which is making the

rounds on YouTube in a kind of weirdly pornographic way.

Yeah, it's interesting. In Iran, I have more thoughts less about the role of women than the

images of women that have been in the media. One of them is Neda. Now, to begin with,

her name is not Neda. Her name is, we don't know. Neta is the name that's been given to her, and Neda actually means voice, the metaphor

being that her voice has been silenced.

If you haven't seen the video, it's pretty gruesome.

Secondly, there was this notion around that she was 16 and she's actually 27.

And third, and this is a point I made on double X, is that, you know, we have been, I think people have gotten so excited about this notion of Internet and Twitter as tools for democracy that we've forgotten to fact check ourselves.

And so we take a lot of these points as facts when actually what the NETA video is is clearly a building of a martyrs myth, which we've seen many times in Islam.

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