My Stealthy Freedom

Following Alinejad's initiative, queers also opened a Facebook page, My Stealthy Homosexual Freedom, posting images with the inverted aesthetics of covered faces with rainbow flags or headless images.[12] Iman Ganji, a doctoral student from Free University of Berlin, sees both pages as a result of general political transformation in mid-2010s, when a new middle-right government replaced the far-right one, and states that the struggle for the liberation of desire has long allied women's and queer movements together in Iran.[12] In mid-2016, some Iranian men started Men In Hijab campaign, expressing their thoughts as well as briefly wearing the hijab themselves. This Facebook page has received over 100,000 likes and is largest among rival initiatives, but it has been criticized by foreign commentators as a "laddish" for containing juvenile jokes, cartoons and videos.[13] Among other smaller rivals is the Real Freedom of Iranian Women page, launched exactly a week after the My Stealthy Freedom, with a message celebrating the veil: "Beautiful Hijab, My Right, My Choice, My Life".[13] Former page has received less than 10,000 likes and has also been criticized for insisting that Stealthy Freedom is part of a soft war against Iran, and also for trying to generate fear.[14]

Sedigheh Karimi, researcher at the University of Melbourne, in 2014 argued that virtual environment like My Stealthy Freedom provides opportunities for independent representation and for introducing new identities.[15] Alison N. Novak from Temple University and Emad Khazraee from the University of Pennsylvania stressed importance of breaking boundaries of the state's internet censorship efforts: "The goal of My Stealthy Freedom is to mobilize public opinion regarding the issue of women's rights, hijab, and the female body."[16] Gholam Khiabany, a senior lecturer in Media and Communications department at Goldsmiths, University of London, has praised Alinejad's campaign,[17] as has Victoria Tahmasebi-Birgani, an assistant professor of women and gender studies at the University of Toronto.[18]. According to Gi Yeon Koo, a cultural anthropologist from Seoul National University, "This online movement finds its value in that it has become a new platform for women to raise their voices in the public sphere."[19] As Iman Ganji,[12] Koo also aligns the movement with social changes started since Hassan Rouhani assumed the presidency.[20] In 2015 the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy gave Alinejad its women's rights award for "stirring the conscience of humanity to support the struggle of Iranian women for basic human rights."[21]

There are no official statistics to show what percentage of Iranian women are against mandatory wearing of the hijab. One western researcher says "It is true that there are still many women in Iranian society who choose, of their own will, to retain the image of the hijab and wear the most conservative type of hijab. Furthermore, it cannot be said that the women participating in this stealthy movement of removing their hijab are the majority."[22][14]

In early June 2014, Iranian state television ran a story claiming that Masih Alinejad was in a drug-induced, hallucinatory state when she removed her clothing and was raped by three men in front of her son.[23] Alinejad said that the story is false.[24]

Researchers state that although movement focuses primarily on state gendered violence, its message has been disturbed by challenges arising from the embedded normativity of conceptualizations of gender and sexualities in relation to Middle Eastern women in general and Iranian women in particular.[25]