Blonde Iranians
Inferiority complex

October 27, 2005
iranian.com

We live in a world where the West, namely the U.S., is exporting its culture on an international scale and is finding a receptive audience the world over.  American commentators claim that the people of the world are embracing its culture because its culture is superior while others would contend that it’s more a matter of having the means and technology to export that very culture. Among the many concepts that “culture” can encompass, appearance, style, and beauty can be included. 

Beauty is a matter of perception.  Where one culture views dark hair as beautiful, another culture can find red or blonde hair more attractive. I believe that Iranians, like many other people on this planet, have an infatuation with the West.  There’s nothing wrong with admiring other cultures. As a matter of fact, Iran is famous for borrowing venerable traits from other cultures throughout time.  This fascination, however, has resulted in associating nominal things like appearance and styles as superior if it’s coming from the West. 

Here’s some food for thought: Imagine an America and a Europe where most of the continents’ inhabitants had black or dark brown hair and had large hooked noses and this standard was glorified in its influential media and displayed to the rest of the world to consume as the Western standard.  If this hypothetical scenario were true, do you think many Iranian men and women would be getting nose jobs and coloring their hair blonde?  If the world’s only super power championed such an image, who would reject it? There’s no real way of knowing, but one can speculate. 

I believe that instead of admiring the American work ethic, we, as in us men and women, admire their stereotypical looks.  I say “stereotypical” because there is no single American facial feature, but stereotypically, most people associate white skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes as American.  Thus, because of Iranian admiration for the West and the U.S. in particular, both men and women employ blonde hairstyles, color contacts, altered noses, etc., and lighter skin is preferred.

I can just hear the response, “What if I look good in blonde hair or with color contacts?”  I’d say looking good is a matter of perception.  What has conditioned you to think blonde hair is attractive and dark hair not so?

How can one be conditioned to have such a mindset you ask, here’s a case study: A young man named Reza grew up in Iran.  All his life he watched American films and dreamt of immigrated to the romanticized west and marrying a white-skinned, blonde-haired, and blue-eyed woman and he did just that. 

Through films and other media avenues that America has employed to export its culture, Reza was conditioning to think that these features displayed by a glamorous character in a standard Hollywood romance film are more attractive.  Attractiveness is a matter of perception and by undergoing socialization, Reza perceived such characteristics as appealing.  To sum it up, he developed in inferiority complex by believing the other’s traits were more striking than Iranian features.

The inferiority complex theme within the Iranian community abroad and inside Iran is precisely the main point of this article.  The adoption of foreign superficial elements and standards like appearance is indicative of an internal conflict, an inferiority complex.  This complex can further entail more important themes like language and national identity. Within Iran at the time of the Shah, the monarch personified this complex and the mentality persists until today. 

In terms of Iranians abroad, this unhealthy mindset views the Persian language as weak in comparison to perceived exotic Western languages like French, Iran as backward in relation to America.  If given the choice to travel to Italy or visit Iran, our motherland, individuals suffering from an inferiority complex would rather visit the former, even if they have never been to Iran.  The inferiority complex is a subconscious issue and therefore, the individual is uninformed about it. 

And Iran is not alone as most of the developing world has been dealing with these identity issues.  Even the movie “The Last Samurai” (which I thought was a weak excuse for a movie by the way) touched on Japan’s inferiority complex/identity crisis that occurred decades ago. What’s more, the issue is at a boiling point in Turkey where some see Turkey as Western and therefore a natural future member of the European Union while others believe that Turkey is Muslim and part of the Islamic community of nations. 

Furthermore, where Iran is not alone in this problem, neither is the Iranian-American community as many other immigrant communities in America have visible characteristics signifying inferiority complexes and its byproduct identity crises.  I’d like to emphasize that many immigrant communities suffer from similar issues, whether they are in OC, America, Canada, or Europe, i.e. African-Americans straightening and/or coloring their hair or bleaching their skin color.

As the first generation of Iranians to grow up abroad many of us have suffered from an inferiority complex that has led to an identity crisis and whether we know about it or not, for some it persists today.  Take me for example, as a child I disliked speaking Persian in front of non-Iranians because I feared they would ridicule the “kh” sound.  Because of my fear of mockery, I wasn’t very proud of the Persian language. I felt the “kh” in Persian made our language seem ghastly and since language is integral to one’s culture and identity, it was one reason I rejected my Iranian identity.

But how proud can you be of your Iranian identity when you shun the language? But that was long ago and I have since solved my identity question.  What about you, is your identity in question? Although there is a vibrant display of pride within the Iranian-American community, sometimes even unhealthy pride bordering on racism, if you analyze a bit further, there is an internal conflict raging in many immigrants or children of immigrants, which is, of course, natural but needs to be addressed and pondered upon.

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