Tuck those locks away

UNDER the moonlight on a hotel roof, a 22-year-old Iranian woman last month unfurled her black headscarf, leant back on a carpeted bed, and took a puff of mint-infused tobacco from a hookah, a traditional water-pipe recently deemed illegal by the morality police in Yazd, a city in central Iran's desert. A man to whom she was not married stroked her hair, another crime under Iran's law. “My hair is too beautiful to hide under a headscarf,” she said defiantly.

After focusing their energy on stifling political dissent in the wake of disputed elections in 2009, the authorities are back to business as usual, meddling in personal lives and curbing social freedoms. These renewed efforts, directed at Iranians aged 30 and under, who have known life only after the Islamic revolution of 1979 and make up a good half of Iran's people, are causing a wave of discord and frustration across the country.

In Isfahan, Iran's third city, morality police have recently stopped unmarried couples from walking the streets together, drivers from turning up music in their cars, and girls from the wicked pastime of riding bicycles. Similar curbs are being imposed in Tehran. A teenager in the city's north says the morality police recently broke down the door of a house where she and her friends were drinking alcohol and playing music. “You whores! You whores!” screamed a heavily veiled woman, as men in dark uniforms corralled girls and boys into a van which took them to a police station.

Bribes worth $50 or less often save well-off revellers from further scrutiny. But fending off the scrutineers that way is getting harder. Now more common is at least a night behind bars, an appearance before a judge, and a punishment consisting of the lash or a fine worth several hundred American dollars.

Before Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president in 2005, the morality police had loosened its grip. Its main activity was to enforce a suitably dowdy dress code, ensuring that women tucked their hair under a headscarf and that a garment fully covered their back. “Since Ahmadinejad was elected, it's been an unending nightmare,” says a Tehrani woman. Morality police had even told her not to paint her fingernails.

Especially for people under 30, the contrast between the constraints at home and the lives they read about on the internet and see on some of the 1,000-odd foreign satellite-channels beamed into their living rooms can be painful. Increasing numbers of young Iranians go abroad for their fun, to places such as Dubai, Singapore and China, not all of them models of freedom—unless compared with Iran.

A 28-year-old software engineer in Isfahan, one of 6,000-plus bright young Iranians applying for Canadian citizenship this year alone, says she has been unable to find a job for several years. But social constraints, she says, are her main reason for wanting to leave.