Now, hopefully no one's coming to WWPD for cutting-edge reporting on Iran. (On a good day I make it all the way to Wegmans.) But re: noses, I have some thoughts, coming as I do from the people most stereotyped as schnozztastic. With Jews and noses, my sense is that once the thinking is that Jews have big noses, even if no more Jews have 'em (Western Europe not being the sea of button noses one might imagine from Great Neck), those who do will feel this is a Jewish trait, and be more inclined to do something about it. As in, white non-Jews would get them as well, but only if they actually had (or, via a mental illness, mistakenly believed they had) remarkable noses. And - permit the digression - it's worth remembering that the definitive "Jewish" features vary by time and place. In the 19th C French documents I know so well, it's all about how Jews have "Oriental"-looking eyes. I'm not even sure what that entailed - not East Asian-looking, presumably. Point being, it hardly matters if the features in question are more common among whichever minority, if the main issue is what's associated with the group in question.
Although... do Jews still get nose jobs, outside the entertainment industry where seemingly everyone does? From what I can tell, and apparently the evidence agrees, the era of the Jewish teen nose-job has ended. No one, to my knowledge, showed up at my high school with a new nose, and what were we if not Jewish and Korean? And yet, in Iran, the de-schnozzification lives on. Why?
Again, it could be that there's some obvious answer, albeit one someone as Iran-ignorant as I am would never come up with, but if there is, it's not in the Guardian piece. We do get a few clues, such as that if only one's face is revealed, one's nose is particularly key, and there are some hints that this is a desire to look more Western, as if in protest against a not-so-Western regime. (No reference to the possibility that what with Ahmadinejad, it's frowned upon to look Jewish, likely because that's not what this is about.) But in general, reasons given are not nation-or ethnicity-specific. In which part of the world do women not want to look beautiful, do women not think being beautiful will help them on the marriage market? Why noses?
My best guess would be that there's this sense, for Jews, and perhaps for Iranians as well, that one is this close to looking white, to 'passing.' If your ancestors are from China or Kenya, you on some level realize that even if you'd like to look Swedish, it's not gonna happen. But this still doesn't quite explain it - for postwar American Jews, the idea was to blend in with the non-Jews around you. And there were of course the unstated anxieties about what it meant to look Jewish not so many years prior, not so far away. Presumably there's no stigma in Iran on looking identifiably Iranian. Is there even a stereotype about Iranians and noses? (This is what I would have wanted from the Guardian piece.) There's at any rate no concern, as far as I know, that one will be rounded up and murdered if one has a big nose, but not if one does not.
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