and went to check on Wikipedia about Islamic law and women. Apparently a lot is left to the discretion of individual countries, which is why such things happen in Iran but not, say, in Tunisia. Here's a quote from the article entitled "Women in Islam":

"Islamic criminal jurisprudence does not discriminate between genders in punishments for crimes.In case of sexual crimes such as zina (fornication), however, women may be found guilty more easily than men, because of the visible evidence of pregnancy; without a pregnancy, four witnesses are required to file a zina case. The difficulty of prosecuting rapists and the possibility of prosecution for women who allege rape has been of special interest to activists for Muslim women's rights. In the past decades there have been several high profile cases of pregnant women prosecuted for zina who claim to have been raped.

The overwhelming majority of Muslim scholars believe that there is no punishment for a woman coerced into having sex. According to a Sunni hadith, the punishment for committing rape is death, there is no sin on the victim, nor is there any worldly punishment ascribed to her. However, the stringent requirements for proof of rape under some interpretations of Islamic law, combined with cultural attitudes regarding rape in some parts of the Muslim world, result in few rape cases being reported; even the cases brought forward typically result in minimal punishment for offenders or severe punishment for victims. It can be difficult to seek punishment against rapists, because a zina case cannot be brought without four witnesses, Most scholars, however, treat rape instead as hiraba (disorder in the land), which does not require four witnesses. The form of punishment and interpretation of Islamic law in this case is highly dependent on the legislation of the nation in question, and/or of the judge."

Hey, don't jump to conclusions. The fault here remains exclusively with the mullahs, not with us. I assume you're not doing anything practical to, say, fight hunger in third-world countries; do you feel like this is your personal fault?

Personally, I´m against military intervention in this case for the same reason that I wouldn´t favor Russian military intervention in America to, say, close cultist groups and save people oppressed by Jim Jones-like crazy evangelists. Things have to get pretty genocidal (say, Srebrenica-like) before active military involvement becomes a plausible idea. If that´s not the case, the issue remains their damn internal business, no matter how much it disgusts us.

Of course it would be OK to do a similar study on fat men -- I agree with Amerigo. And I also have to agree that women -- for all kinds of reasons, including social stereotypes, higher expectations, etc. -- tend to care about obesity a lot more than men. So, to me, that explains the focus on obese women in the study. As far as I can see, the sexism that Mr Hannaham implies isn't really there.

I also don't know. But the impression I had from the quote is that a lot is up to the country itself. In this case, prosecuting the woman is not demanded by sharia law. So Iran is behaving differently than Muslim countries like Syria or Tunisia. Also its own population seems to be against it. I wonder what the final consequences will be.

Thanks for the model letter and the e-mail address. I've already sent a message to the embassy.

I agree with hOtrOd: a history of physical abuse is OK, but 'he made me wear high heels is not'. But how about verbal threats? Suppose a spouse had said several times 'I'll kill you!', but never really abused his/her partner physically; and then s/he buys a gun. I.e. there was some evidence that the abusive spouse might be thinking about carrying out the threat. Could the verbally abused partner still use the abuse defense to explain his/her crime?

The thing says I have 62% chance of being female, and only 38% chance of being male. Hm! I'm offended. Or maybe I'll take that as evidence that I'm a sensitive male in contact with his anima and his feminine soul... despite my wife's complaints about me forgetting to wash the dishes. Damn! the script took no note whatsoever of all the strip club and beer-drinking gambling sites in my history, and decided I was probably female because of a couple of visits to victoriassecret.com and familywatchdog.us (motivated by links from here!) Curiously, my visits do jezebel.com actually added to my masculinity (male-femaleness ratio of 1.02).

This reminds me of those babel-fish-like automatic translation sites. Ever tried to translate a sentence from Engish to, say, Hungarian, and then back from Hungarian to English? In some sites you get such funny answers that you wouldn't believe