Dispatch #11: Women

Read about fertility politics in Italy, a radical act of defiance in Iran, women challenging gender roles in rural Spain and the legacy of post-communist Romania's first sex magazine.

Hello! For Dispatch #11, we’re looking at women’s experiences around the world, with four powerful stories exploring the body, cultural reinvention and resistance across continents.

An Italian journalist takes a critical look at the ambient religious and political culture around “natural” methodologies of fertility management. In Iran, the legacy of Dr. Homa Darabi’s final act of defiance continues to resonate in the women’s movement today.

In rural Spain, women are building alternative communities that challenge gendered traditions of land and labour. And post-communist Romania’s first sex magazine offers a lens into 1990s desires, fantasies and the politics of representation.

Happy reading !

P.S.: In the meantime, tell us what you like and dislike, themes you’d like to see explored from the perspective of different linguistic media landscapes. And, as ever, feel free to recommend specific pieces we should summarise for our Dispatches, or translate for the magazine.

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Body control

An Italian journalist takes a critical look at the ambient religious and political culture around “natural” methodologies of fertility management.

On its website, the secular sounding Italian Confederation of Centres for the Natural Regulation of Fertility has a startling graphic of an iceberg. 

According to the accompanying text, the graphic symbolises the grim reality of Italy’s annual “massacre of the innocents” (an emotive term taken from the Bible, though this isn’t specified). The tip of the iceberg represents the 80,000 or so “voluntary abortions” carried out in Italy each year. The much larger part of the iceberg, hidden below water, represents all those lives the Confederation believes to have been prevented in other ways: through the use of the contraceptive pill, IUDs or even IVF (on the basis that IVF involves the creation and destruction of human embryos, outside the body). 

By the Confederation’s gruesome mathematics, if you add all these numbers together, the true number of annual abortions in Italy is nearly 1.5 million. Its solution? To count the days and observe the symptoms of ovulation so as to better predict when a woman is more or less likely to conceive. In place of a woman’s basic right to choose, the Confederation offers a toolkit for self-monitoring. Not exactly hidden on its website, but also very far from advertised, is the religious component to all this: the teachings of the Catholic Church, repackaged as public health. 

In an article for Internazionale entitled ‘Un altro modo per controllare il corpo delle donne’ (‘Another way to control women’s bodies’) feminist writer Jennifer Guerra investigates the problematic histories and present of “natural” methods of managing fertility, at a time when women’s bodies are once more political battlefields around the world.  

In the United States, the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 has been accompanied by a conservative Supreme Court Justice declaring a desire to look at the availability of the pill next, Elon Musk declaring that it contributes to suicide, and the reduced practical availability of contraception due to the wider chilling effect of the ruling.  

Deeper than this, Guerra sees the emergence of an amorphous anti-feminist nexus in the growth of the menstrual cycle app 28 (funded partly by Peter Thiel) and the popular emergence of tradwives on TikTok. (Guerra takes the case of the conservative lifestyle magazine Evie, and its feature of the wildly popular Hannah Neeleman, aka Ballerina Farm, who herself rejects the tradwife label). The app 28 may appear to be a female self-empowering health app, with a somewhat horoscope-y vibe to its website and a strong emphasis on being in tune with your body (“Let’s introduce you to you”, it says). But Guerra quotes data journalist Donata Columbro’s warning that data from the app can serve a different purpose: “you expect to receive wellness advice, and instead this data is used to promote an agenda that limits reproductive health”. 

Although natural methods for the management of fertility have their origins in observations made by Japanese doctor Kyusaku Ogino and the Austrian physician Hermann Knaus in the 1920s, it was Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, which gave the Catholic church’s imprimatur to these methods (largely in response to the pill). Guerra notes that the Italian Confederation of Centres for the Natural Regulation of Fertility – with 770 volunteers in 22 centres across Italy – is a continuation of the logic of Humanae Vitae, mixing science and a strongly Catholic-inflected precepts of what human relationships should look like, and the behaviours within them. 

People who don’t fully subscribe to all aspects of this cultural outlook can find themselves excluded from the supposedly scientific and educational aspects of the Confederation’s work (some of which receives indirect public financial support). Guerra cites the case of Laura, a menstrual educator. The fact that she was an unmarried woman in her forties raised suspicions, Laura says. Then she went a step further, questioning some of the teachings, such as the injunction against masturbation beyond adolescence. “I was turned away”, Laura tells Internazionale. 

If it isn’t always obvious who is behind the Confederation, Anna Buzzoni, an educator for menstrual health suggests people should be able to read between the lines: “if the course is free or the cost is minimal, you have to ask yourself: who’s paying for this?” She recommends explicitly asking whether provision is secular or religious. 

In Italy, this feels part of a wider campaign. Guerra notes attempts to change the legislation around advice given to women to help prioritise “natural” methodologies, and the TeenStar project, linked to a doctor opposed to hormonal contraception. 

One way and another, the female body remains inescapably a subject of religious and political agendas, hidden or not.

CEM

This article by Jennifer Guerra first appeared in Internazionale in Italian under the title ‘Un altro modo per controllare il corpo delle donne’ on 10 January 2025. 

It is available here. 

Jennifer Guerra is a feminist writer and journalist in Italy. 

Internazionale is a weekly Italian news magazine founded in 1993 which, amongst other things, translates articles from around the world into Italian.

The Body As A Battlefield

In Iran, one woman’s final act of defiance exposed the violence of erasure and the radical power of being seen.

Self-immolation is among the most harrowing forms of political resistance, it's a final act of defiance meant to bypass censorship, force public attention, and provoke moral reckoning. Throughout history, such protests have often been male-dominated: in 1963, Vietnamese monk Thích Quảng Đức set himself ablaze in Saigon to protest religious persecution. In 1969, Jan Palach burned himself alive in Prague to oppose Soviet occupation. And most recently, in 2024, Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old U.S. Air Force member, immolated himself outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., declaring he would “no longer be complicit in genocide.”

These acts, while extreme, are often met with solemnity. The men who burn are eulogised as heroes and their deaths are immortalised in photos, monuments, and memory. But when Dr. Homa Darabi set herself on fire in Tehran, on February 21, 1994, the world looked away, Hamid Namjoo suggests in this piece for the Farsi language website PeCritique.  

Born in 1940 in Tehran, Darabi came of age during a time of great political upheaval. She was arrested in the 1950s as a student activist under the Shah’s regime, and later became one of the few Iranian women to study medicine abroad. She completed her psychiatry training in the United States before returning to Iran, determined to contribute to her country’s future.

But following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, that future became a nightmare, especially for women. The regime imposed strict dress codes, curtailed freedoms, and systematically excluded women from public life. Darabi, by then a respected professor and psychiatrist, found herself under constant pressure. Her refusal to enforce mandatory hijab policies on her students led to her suspension and eventual expulsion from Tehran University. The cost of integrity was isolation.

For years, she battled the psychological toll of living in a society that punished truth and visibility. Her daughter, Parastou, later recalled how Darabi’s depression deepened, her sense of purpose eroding in the face of daily humiliation and institutional cruelty. Her final words, before setting herself ablaze in Tajrish Square, were a cry against the forced hijab but also against everything that came with it: coercion, shame, silencing.

What sets Darabi’s act apart is not only its gendered context, but its gendered defiance. In a country where the female body is criminalised unless veiled, Darabi’s unveiled burning body became the protest itself. It was not just her political message. It was her message made flesh.

Unlike many male self-immolators, she was not granted the dignity of martyrdom. According to Namjoo, her story was quickly buried, distorted, or ignored. Where male protestors are framed as tragic heroes, Darabi was pathologised. Even in death, she was made to disappear. But her act remains one of the most radical in Iran’s recent history, not only because it challenged the regime, but because it confronted the culture that enabled it. 

Dr. Homa Darabi’s legacy survives largely outside official narratives — in feminist writings, in the whispered recollections of dissidents, in the fire she passed on to generations of Iranian women who refuse to be silenced. Her story was never meant to be remembered, but it was never quite forgotten either.

In 2022, the death of Mahsa Jina Amini sparked a wave of protests across Iran, led by women who removed their headscarves in public and chanted “Woman, Life, Freedom.” It was a movement Darabi would have recognised and perhaps dreamed of. Her life and death were not in vain; they were a warning and a promise. She did not vanish. She became a flame, carried forward by every woman who dares to own their own body.

ZN

The original article (‘هما دارابی؛ حجابی که در آتش سوخت’) by Hamid Namjoo was published in Farsi on March 5, 2025.

It is available here.

PeCritique is a Farsi online platform focusing on political thought, cultural criticism, and social reflection.

Feminising the rural idyll

In Spain, women are challenging the traditionally gendered norms of rural life.

Since time immemorial, life in the countryside has depended on sharply defined gender roles. The gruelling labour of farm life has typically been seen as a masculine domain. For women, it has been more about the pressure to conform to the gendered roles of wife, mother, and homemaker. Historically, rural areas have often had more limited opportunities for women to seek education and employment. It is the city which has represented freedom and possibility. But ageing populations and mass urban migration are threatening traditional ways of rural life. Things are changing.  

A recent case in point, explored in an article by journalist Cristina García Casado for infoLibre, has been the example of women in Spain revitalising remote villages by taking on the masculine roles associated with farm life. One important source for her is the work of Ángel Poveda Polo, a writer living in rural Spain who has chronicled these women’s experiences in a blog called Pobladoras, in order to provide “a window to discover the difficulties rural women entrepreneurs have endured to carry out their projects”. The infoLibre article looks at the example of three very different women, who through very different circumstances have all settled in the Spanish countryside. 

The first is Hiromi Sato, who immigrated from Japan with her husband to the remote village of La Alberca. This charming historical village in the province of Salamanca is home to just under a thousand inhabitants. Her husband died 13 years ago, but rather than return to her country she decided to stay. She tells infoLibre: “when he died, I had doubts about whether to continue living in Spain or not, and about where to do so. It would have been easier for me to return to Japan, but then I thought about my children. They were already settled in school, and couldn’t speak Japanese that well. I thought it was better not to subject them to such a drastic change.” Her son was the only non-Albercan child in his school. Classed as outsiders, things were difficult for her children – until they entered secondary school, where they were joined by more children from all over the region.

These days, Sato is very much integrated into rural life, helping her local area to flourish in the face of depopulation. She’s part of a local textile crafts association, sings in the local choir, and grows her own garden. She hosts workshops which have helped revitalise local wool crafts. Her story is certainly not typical, but provides a great example of the varied ways women are taking on traditional masculine roles, and providing a lifeline to struggling rural areas. 

Another independent woman taking on masculine roles is Luz Bella González Gómez. She had to relearn how to live a rural life when her husband died almost three decades ago. She now runs her livestock farm alone near the town of Zamora. Many tasks that were once her husband’s domain, are now her own. She never thought of leaving: “I have the village in my soul”, she tells infoLibre. Aged 69, she wakes up at the crack of dawn to go to the mountains to gather fodder for her cows who graze nearby her home, then goes to do the housework. “This is very hard. Working and living here is hard. You have to like it; it's not for everyone”, she notes.

Unlike the other women in the article, Violeta Serrano is much younger. She grew up in a small village in the area of La Maragatería, in the province of Castilla y León, home to less than a hundred people. At 17 she moved to the city in search of opportunities not available in her hometown. An ambitious writer, she has since become very accomplished, authoring books and earning multiple degrees and public recognition. After living in the urban centres of Madrid, Barcelona, and even abroad in Buenos Aires, at 36 Serrano decided to return to her village. She has built her own house there, a distant dream for those living in the city. She explains to infoLibre: “I never thought I'd come back here for anything more than visiting my parents from time to time. But things have changed a lot since I left. When I moved back to Spain, I thought it was absurd to go to a city where all the income I could generate would be absorbed by rent . So I made a virtue out of necessity.”

Though she understands her story is inspiring, like the others, she is hesitant to over-idealise country life. “There’s no work here”, she tells infoLibre, young professionals would have to either start their own business or establish remote working arrangements with their employer. Serrano’s own venture has been creating the Escuela Savia, a space that fosters creativity through connecting with nature and writing. With Mount Teleno as a backdrop, she shares with others how to sync their life to the cycles of nature, enjoying the peaceful routine of rising with the sun, seasonal gardening, and spending as much time as possible outdoors. 

“The peace we have here cannot be bought with money”, she tells infoLibre.

Translator is packing its bags.

TMH

The original article by Cristina García Casado was published in Spanish on this year’s International Women’s Day (8 March) under the title ‘Mujeres que eligen el campo: un entorno masculinizado acoge ahora nuevos proyectos de vida’. 

It is available here. 

infolibre is a Spanish general news website created in March 2013, with a team of former journalists from El Pais and Público, including its former director Jesús Maraña, who is now director of infolibre. According to his editorial vision, the website aims to practise “journalism the old-fashioned way: rigorous, analytical, accurate and independent.”

Dark fantasies in 1990s Romania

An investigation into the legacy of post-communist Romania’s first sex mag.

Self-proclaimed misogynist and far-right influencer Andrew Tate moved to Romania in 2017 partly inspired by the country’s reputation amongst his political tribe for the laxness of law enforcement and the submissiveness of its women. “Romania is a beautiful place”, he told his followers, in praise of its ‘resistance’ to the ‘woke’ West: “there’s no feminists, there’s no open homosexuality”. 

In 2023, contrary to their expectations, the Tate Brothers were formally indicted on a number of charges relating to sexual exploitation of women and human trafficking (which they denied). The case, which has gone through several twists and turns since, and been added to by allegations in the US and UK, has become a cause célèbre in the global right-wing ‘manosphere’. Tate has become the emblem of toxic masculinity. Romania has found itself in the crosshairs: did it turn out to be the soft touch for sexual predators that the Tates seemed to think it was?  

Romania's reputation as a playground for wealthy sexpats takes us right back to its wild ‘90s. In the decade after Ceauşescu’s execution, post-socialist Romania underwent neoliberal shock therapy. Radu Jude and Christian Ferencz-Flatz’s recent film Eight Postcards from Utopia (2024) captures the surreal chaos of capitalist transition, where desires long suppressed violently erupted and were turned into commercial products, while reinforcing gender stereotypes.

Oana Filip’s article for Scena9, with collages by Oana Barbonie, dives into the grimy world of Romania’s first sex mag. It unravels the story of Infractoarea Mov (The Purple Offender) and its confusing legacy of balancing satirical humour with trivialising violence against women. (Coming with a trigger warning, the article pulls no punches—but rest assured, Dear Reader, Translator will spare you of the worst.) 

Filip, born in 1994, recalls small-town kiosks selling porn magazines—Playboy and Hustler—but not Infractoarea, a once-popular weekly with a print run of 800,000, now largely forgotten. The author follows its seedy trail, expecting a funny, maybe cringe-worthy story. She finds herself instead grappling with Romanian society and its deep-seated misogyny. While the subject of sex had been taboo under socialism, Infractoarea (the feminine form of “criminal” or “offender”) centres around the sexist fantasy of a man-eating, nymphomaniac femme fatale.

Infractoarea’s seductive formula—blood and guts, naked women, dark humour—hit a nerve. Its appeal was a “crazy combination of sex, humour, violence, chaos, and cynicism.” Filip suggests the brutal sexualisation is both entertaining and unsettling, reflecting the anarchic spirit of the time. Infractoarea published articles like ‘The Sadistic Confession: A Slave for the Peace of the Vulva’ and ‘Genital Melancholy, the Scream of Ejaculation’. 

One provocative text is illustrated with a blonde with her legs spread. A glued-on post-it barely serves as a fig leaf, next to a cartoon cowboy with a penis-shaped lasso. Another caricature portrays a man having sex with multiple inflatable dolls under the pretence he wants to buy one. It gets darker: graphic scenes of rape, murder, incest, and paedophilia, encapsulated with the slogan: ‘Smile! Tomorrow will be worse.’ Racist, anti-Romani and homophobic jokes follow.

The mastermind behind the magazine was the playwright Denis Dinulescu who wrote its dating column and gave advice to readers as agony aunt Gabriela. Another character, Immanuela, named after his cat, wrote dating ads. The editors ended up receiving thousands of letters, and later wedding invitations. According to the son of the first editor-in-chief, Infractoarea’s office was a dingy basement full of cigarette smoke, like a set from a movie by Cristi Puiu.

Though the journalists used pseudonyms, Filip managed to track some down. Cristina Topolski created the visual design, collaging cut-outs and scans from other publications. She said gender was irrelevant at Infractoarea—she was just doing her job, feminism was never discussed. Early critics condemned the magazine’s exploitative portrayal of women as both victim and vamp, simultaneously sexualised and subjected to extreme violence.

Infractoarea did of course not exist in a vacuum. In a patriarchal and traditional society, misogyny and sexual violence are often trivialised. As one interviewee put it, rape is framed as the woman’s fault, “because look at how she dresses, aaah, well then that means she asked for it.” Headlines like “The bitch, until she raises her tail, the dog won’t go to her!” reflect such sentiments. 

Writing the story of Infractoarea, the author was in a constant “mental ping-pong”. Catching herself smiling at the story ‘The Killer Omelette’ about a man who kills his wife because she made omelette instead of steak, “I wondered how ethical that was, what that says about me as a person.” Is Infractoarea an amusing relic from another universe or a misogynist mouthpiece? Difficult to say.

It’s quick to get desensitised to Infractoarea’s violence and porn, maybe even captivated by it. But it was also a breath of fresh air after decades of sexual repression and heavily censored public discourse. In many ways, Infractoarea normalised talking about sex for many Romanians.

The author even glimpses sparks of female emancipation in its pages. In the column ‘Modern Lexicon of the Happy Couple’ we find the “little bud”—the clitoris. There’s also helpful advice: “Flirtation is an important part of emancipation, through which the woman wants to express: ‘My body belongs to me entirely. I decide what to do with it.’” A story about a horny mum is titled: ‘Screw the kids, I have my life!’

So what is Infractoarea’s legacy today? While printed magazines have mostly disappeared, pornography has moved to the internet which, as Filip states, can make Infractoarea look like a retirement magazine. The “women only” weekly is long gone but its digital offspring is one click away. Less loony perhaps.

IJ

Original article by Oana Filip, ‘Femei dezbrăcate și cadavre la chioșcul de ziare. Infractoarea, o revistă cum n-o să mai vezi’ (Naked Women and Corpses at the Newsstand: "Infractoarea," a Magazine Like No Other) was first published at Scena9 on 18 March 2025.

It is available here. 

Oana Filip is a Romanian reporter passionate about rural life, cats, and existential questions.

Scena9 is an independent outlet about cultural life in Romania and beyond.

That’s all for now — we hope you’ve enjoyed this slight tweak in our publication schedule! Keep an eye out for our next Dispatch of translated summaries this time next week!

The Translator team