An opinion piece,  published on January 12 in Le Vif, on the uprisings in Iran and the “invisibilized feminist revolution,” by Viviane Teitelbaum, Senator, President Europe of the International Council of Women, and Sylvie Lausberg, historian, psychoanalyst, Secretary General Europe of the International Council of Women.

For several months, Iran had almost disappeared from the Belgian—and even French—media radar. Not because repression had ceased, nor because Iranian women had given up fighting, but because our collective attention had shifted elsewhere. This silence is neither accidental nor trivial. It is political. And from a feminist perspective, it is deeply troubling.

What is unfolding today in Iran is not a simple social crisis linked to the rising cost of living, nor yet another wave of protest. It is a revolution, led first and foremost by women, then by a generation of young people who reject an order built on fear, the control of bodies, and institutional violence. A revolution whose very name—Woman, Life, Freedom—says it all.

An Invisibilized Feminist Revolution

In 2022, the death of Mahsa Amini, arrested for allegedly wearing her veil improperly, was not merely an emotional trigger. It revealed to the world what Iranian women already knew: in the Islamic Republic, women’s bodies are a political battlefield. Their appearance, their behavior, their freedom of movement are subjected to state control that can extend as far as death.

Since then, Iranian women have burned their veils, confronted the morality police, defied revolutionary courts; they have been arrested, raped in detention, executed—even when they were minors. International reports are piling up. So are testimonies. And yet, for long weeks, media coverage was almost nonexistent. More recently, media in both Belgium and France have begun to mention the situation in Iran, but without highlighting the central role women play in opposing a patriarchal and theocratic system of domination.

Reducing this movement to social anger over inflation or precarity is a serious analytical mistake. Woman, Life, Freedom is not a sectoral demand: it is a direct challenge to the very existence of a theocratic and patriarchal regime that has oppressed, tortured, and murdered for 47 years. In this sense, it is one of the most courageous feminist movements of our time.

These Iranian women are neither silent nor invisible. They speak. They document. They warn. Voices such as Masih Alinejad or Mona Jafarian, joined by universalist feminists, call on the West not to look away and tirelessly alert us to ongoing repression, the surge in arrests, and the daily climate of fear.

But these voices are unsettling. Because they force us to confront an uncomfortable reality: that Western feminism sometimes hesitates when violence is exercised in the name of a religious ideology. As if denouncing the oppression of women in Iran risked disturbing diplomatic, cultural, or political balances deemed more important than these women’s freedom and lives.

Some have said this openly. Sophia Aram, among others, has denounced this form of selective blindness that fuels invisibilization—a kind of media fatigue that often looks very much like moral abdication.

Other Iranian voices in exile, equally clear-eyed and unsettling, make the same argument. Abnousse Shalmani tirelessly reminds us that the Islamic Republic is not a culture to be respected, but a regime to be fought, and that Western relativism in the face of women’s oppression is less about tolerance than about intellectual cowardice.

Like these courageous women, we must insist that the struggle of Iranian women is not a peripheral demand, but the very heart of a confrontation between freedom and submission, between the universality of rights and ideological accommodations.

This silence echoes another recent discomfort: the recognition of sexual violence committed on October 7, 2023. There too, women testified. There too, facts were documented. And there too, part of the public debate hesitated, relativized, or even denied, in the name of pre-existing ideological frameworks.

The parallel is not meant to conflate contexts, but to highlight a shared mechanism: the hierarchy of victims. Not all women would be equally worthy of being believed, defended, or supported. Some forms of violence would be more “audible” than others, depending on the identity of the perpetrators or the political embarrassment they generate.

A coherent feminism does not choose its battles based on media convenience or ideological compatibility. It begins with a simple principle: believe women, and refuse any instrumentalization that leads to silence.

Even today, forgetting threatens to produce the same effects. Every time the West remains silent, it is women who pay the highest price. Their freedom becomes a variable of adjustment.

Silence is not neutrality. It is abandonment. Abandonment of Iranian women who continue to resist. Abandonment of Afghan women. Abandonment of a universalist feminism that should be able to name all forms of oppression.

Woman, Life, Freedom is a fault line for contemporary feminism. It forces us to choose: look away, or look directly at reality. Remain silent, or accept that feminist solidarity only has meaning if it is unconditional.