Season One, Episode 10 of Game of Thrones, “Fire and Blood,” was one of the most memorable season finales in TV history. The long-suffering eternal victim Daenerys Targaryen emerges miraculously unharmed from the flames of her dead husband’s funeral pyre; the savage Dothraki, in an unprecedented moment for their culture, kneel before their new Khaleesi, a queen who rules over them in her own right; and a newly hatched dragon roars an announcement of the fiery rebirth of the Mother of Dragons. We realize this is the kind of story Game of Thrones is, one where even in the midst of wretched injustice and brutality sudden shifts are possible, the powerless becoming powerful, the victim becoming victor, and we thrill with hope and inspiration—at a white princess surrounded by kneeling, rapturous brown savage people.

Oh my, oh dear. Haven’t we seen this exact trope before, and, err, isn’t it supposed to be a bad thing now? Haven’t we condemned the idea of a white person installing themselves as the leader of a whole non-white civilization? Aren’t we supposed to have moved past this?

Well, apparently not. We repeatedly tell stories about a white protagonist who goes on a journey of self-discovery by mingling with exotic brown foreigners and becoming better at said foreigners’ culture than they themselves are. We eat it up in the form of faux-historical epics, splashy science-fiction special effects extravaganzas, and earnest nonfiction projects about writers paid by their publishers to take exotic vacations.

The frustrating thing about being annoyed by the Mighty Whitey trope—and there are a ton of people upset— is that it’s so frequently employed by the well-meaning “good guys.” The whole point of “going native” is that the familiar Western civilization is portrayed as inauthentic, ugly, broken, flawed. The “exotic” foreign civilization is somehow more natural, more primal, more sensual, the way people really ought to live. You know, hearing the wolf cry to the blue corn moon, painting with all the colors of the wind, like you do. Even though the Dothraki in Game of Thrones are painted in a decidedly uglier light than the noble savages of Dances with Wolves and Pocahontas, from the beginning they’re certainly more likable than the conniving, hypocritical Lannisters and Tyrells of the Seven Kingdoms.

What’s the root of this trope? Is it just that we get sick of living in modern society with McDonald’s and McMansions and mandatory vaccinations so we develop intricate fantasies about how much better life would be if we had to hunt our own food, build our own shelter, and develop our own resistance to dangerous microorganisms?

Sure, that’s part of it. But it’s less common that the “bad” Western civilization in these stories is something to be passively fled, a la Eat, Pray, Love. More often it’s an enemy to be actively resisted.

A movie like Avatar doesn’t just get people on the left wing rolling their eyes at the Mighty Whitey trope, it also gets the right wing freaking out about the fact that Mighty Whitey is leading the noble savages to kill the American military. Whether it’s John Smith turning against his fellow colonists in Pocahontas or the title character of Dances with Wolves taking up arms against the US military or Jake Sully in Avatar laying waste to the RDA mercenary forces—the most compelling, crowd-pleasing, and consistently award-winning form of this narrative requires a climactic explosion of white-on-white violence.

It’s hard to avoid the feeling that this repeated fantasy—of a white person shedding their whiteness, abandoning their home culture, joining the oppressed, and finally taking up arms against all the other, still-racist white people and killing them all—stems from a desire to be absolved of guilt. White guilt, that dreaded emotion that’s been inflicted on countless white Americans through social studies classes, Black History month TV specials, and lectures from left-wing non-white bloggers like myself at this very moment.

***

Here’s another question: Is it actually possible for men to be feminists?

Well, I have some personal stake in trying to answer that question “Yes.” I mean, the “male feminist” brand identity is what got my fading post-Jeopardy! 15 minutes of fame a second shot of life after I wrote that article with the Mario reference in the title that got shared like 400,000 times. “Male feminist” is what they called me when they pulled me onto a CNN panel . “Male feminist” is what I keep getting called in e-mails sent to me over the “Your Princess Is in Another Castle” piece, interviews about that piece, and (hopefully) ironic marriage proposals inspired by that piece.

But there’s a reason self-identified “male feminists” have gotten a bad rap.

When #YesAllWomen was trending in the wake of the Isla Vista shooting, there was another stir brewing in feminist Twitter-land over #StopClymer, a drive to get HuffPo and PolicyMic to stop paying prominent “male feminist” Charles Clymer to write about women’s issues for them. This seems to have less to do with the general idea that men shouldn’t be feminists and more specifically with Clymer being an abusive power-tripping control freak. Strip out all the context from Clymer’s posts and what you see is an angry, entitled man whose approach to talking to women seems to be demanding total agreement and obedience lest they face tongue-lashing and expulsion from society.

That’s, you know, the kind of behavior we call “patriarchy.” The whole point of feminism is theoretically to get men to stop doing that to women, on both the large scale and the small. But here’s Charles Clymer crowning himself a “leader” within feminism and utterly unaware of the irony.

But this isn’t a new conversation. Feeling entitled to power, leadership, and control is a general description of patriarchy. There are more specific and ugly things that we associate with the term, like men in positions of authority abusing their power to prey on their female students or subordinates sexually. Or men trying to murder their girlfriends because they can’t deal with the emotions they’re feeling. Or men earnestly attempting to persuade women that there’s nothing wrong with pornography’s obsession with guys ejaculating on girls’ faces because it’s just a way to make men feel validated and accepted. Well, prominent “male feminist” professor Hugo Schwyzer did all of those things and admitted all of it shortly before his explosive public breakdown last year.

It’s not hard to see why this kind of blatant hypocrisy and public self-immolation drives feminist women to despair while providing plentiful schadenfreude fodder for anti-feminist men on the sidelines. Plenty of dudes have used #StopClymer as an argument for why guys shouldn’t even try to be feminists at all and just sincerely, straightforwardly be sexist assholes instead of being all hypocritical and two-faced about it. And sure, Clymer and Schwyzer clearly both have their own issues as individual human beings that hopefully do not translate to all men (yes, I slipped a #NotAllMen in there).

But here’s the thing—sexism, like racism, is defined by actions, not beliefs. When you’re a girl you’re taught to sit down and when you’re a boy you’re taught to stand up—not just in restroom situations, but in all of life. Teachers call on boys more than girls and don’t even realize they’re doing it. Women are so routinely ignored that people, both men and women, perceive crowd scenes as having a balanced mix of the sexes when they’re in fact 83 percent male, 17 percent female. Men get so used to their opinion and expertise being deferred to that they will “mansplain” the content of a book to the woman who wrote it.

This doesn’t just happen on the axis of gender. Mansplaining, whitesplaining, richsplaining—the way you can tell someone who’s “privileged” is the unconscious belief that they naturally should take center stage, that whatever they have on their mind they have the right to speak up about, that everyone will listen to them. You know, the trait the Grim Reaper points out is endemic to Americans traveling abroad in Monty Python and the Meaning of Life in a scene that I too often cringingly identify with.

People of privilege making an effort to be better people face a difficult quandary. You get inundated by all these examples and studies and historical anecdotes and moral arguments about the tremendous destructiveness and evil of the sexist or racist system you grew up in. You really want to not be a horrible person.

At the same time, being used to being deferred to and having your opinion listened to and having your feelings matter is very pleasant. Actually giving that up and stepping aside to become the unimportant one for once is very unpleasant, even painful. When you’re used to being in charge you perceive any balancing of the scales as an attack, any leveling of the playing field as something being stolen from you.

And one critical, central thing to learn about human nature? Is that we will do anything to have our cake and eat it too.

***

Daenerys as Khaleesi is, in a way, an amplified version of this. Daenerys doesn’t just represent the white people of Westeros, vaguely analogous to medieval Europe, she represents the whitest of the white people of Westeros—the platinum-blonde Targaryen dynasty that oppressed everyone else with an iron fist, known for their effete decadence, corruption, and eventual descent into madness. The ultimate aristocrats, against whom red-blooded, dark-haired lesser nobles like Ned Stark and Robert Baratheon were ultimately pushed to rebel.

The slimy, childish, petulant Viserys starts off as a symbol of everything about Targaryen rule Westeros has rejected. He and his sister, at the beginning of the story, are the last people we should be sympathizing with, the polar opposite of the honest, unpretentious, unambitious Stark clan.

And what does Daenerys do? She turns it all around. She goes from being a helpless bargaining chip used to acquire barbarian soldiers to being a barbarian soldier-queen herself—as un-Targaryen as un-Targaryen can be, riding a galloping horse in the wilderness with no need of civilization. She reverses the Targaryen reputation for arrogance and cruelty, her own life experiences pulling her into a mission of liberating slaves.

The heir to the hated, overthrown Targaryen dynasty transforms into someone totally different, into a wild savage freed from the shackles of civilization and of her past, into someone that we can and do root for as an underdog standing up to oppression rather than a symbol of past oppression making a comeback.

And the best part? She doesn’t even have to stop being the heir to the Targaryen dynasty! She still is the rightful queen of Westeros! She even has the dragons to prove it!

Just like Jake Sully goes from what is, honestly, a pretty crappy life as a wheelchair-bound former Marine living in the cramped barracks of a human colony to an idyllic life as a Na’vi warrior. Becoming a Na’vi gives him back his legs, it gives him a hot girlfriend, and it even gives him greatly elevated social status—“Toruk Makto” is a way cooler job title than “Corporal.” And best of all, now he gets the self-righteousness of being the underdog!

Want to hold on to the power and privilege of being a pompous male academic with female undergrads holding onto your every word and willing to sleep with you for your prestige? But want to do it without feeling like a sexist jerk? Just be a feminist academic. Now you’re one of the good guys, and you’ll find it even easier to pressure younger women into sleeping with you. No downside!

Want to be a domineering jerk and take charge of things on the Internet and yell at people who disagree with you? Just form a Facebook organization called “Equality for Women” and say you’re doing it for feminism, and suddenly you’ll get people defending and protecting you for behavior that anywhere else would make you a sexist douchebag! No downside!

Like most other “have your cake and eat it too” no-downside choices, the choice to do this is founded on hypocrisy and bullshit, and you will eventually be found out and called out.

So is it possible for men to be feminists? Or for white people to be allies of non-whites? Is it possible to actually confront your privilege and set it aside, to try to be one of the “good guys”?

Well, I hope so. But it’s not going to be that easy.

Becoming one of the good guys should hurt. It should be painful. It should involve seeing uncomfortable and ugly things about yourself that you’d rather not see. It should involve changing your behavior in ways that you’d honestly rather not do.

One of the great injustices of the world is how much more money and attention Avatar got than District 9, a film that came out in the same year about the same themes but was pretty much better in every way. As reviewers at the time pointed out, the important thing District 9 focused on is that being a human in a world where aliens are oppressed is actually pretty awesome. Giving that up wouldn’t be an act of liberation, it would be painful and terrifying and humiliating. Wikus’s nightmare of being plunged into an unfamiliar challenge where he keeps screwing up and being confronted with his own guilt rings far truer to my experience of what being a male feminist is like than Jake Sully’s awesome-adventure wet dream.

Descending into the world of those who lack your privileges and seeing it from their perspective shouldn’t be like coming home, or discovering a beautiful new wonderland. If you’re honestly actually trying to see what the comfortable world you live in looks like from the perspective of one of the people that world shits on, you should feel like Gregor Samsa—you should feel like you woke up one day and realized you are in fact a giant bug. You should look at yourself in the mirror and at the world around you and feel sick. Your motivation to try to fix the world should not be the prestige, or the money, or the sense of satisfaction that Clymer admitted to chasing. It should be because the state of the world makes you feel sick and you want to stop being sick.

So no, even though I remain enormously glad I did write that article everyone shared and hopeful that it makes a difference, I don’t feel personally pleased or gratified that people liked it. I get worried when I catch myself feeling that way, because feeling gratified and validated and lapping up the praise—as Chris Rock would put it, eagerly accepting “cookies” for doing and saying shit everyone should be doing and saying—would be easy. And the easy path is the path to the Dark Side—male feminists who get off on female fans telling them how awesome they are should keep the horrible visage of Hugo Schwyzer in their mind to remind themselves where that path of temptation leads, the way Luke Skywalker does with Darth Vader’s mask or Frodo does with the Ringwraiths.

Because even though we applaud Daenerys successfully transforming from a mere scion of the hated, corrupt Targaryens into her own woman, champion of the oppressed, Breaker of Chains, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, those of us who’ve read the books know that it’s not that easy to stay on that path and there’s no guarantee that, in the end, she will succeed.

And remember how she got there. Remember what enabled her transformation to Mother of Dragons, why she succeeded where her brother, with all his schemes and plots and desperate desire, failed.

Because she walked into the fire, of her own free will. She went through Hell, and let herself be burned by the flames, and lived.

To all my fellow male feminists out there who feel the temptation to pull a Charles Clymer and deny that they are privileged, claim that they’re a “good guy,” post on the #NotAllMen hashtag, yell “But I do all the right things! I’ve written articles, I’ve posted supportive tweets, I’ve been a shoulder to cry on, I’ve donated money,” and then, quoting Clymer, quoting Jake Sully becoming Toruk Makto, “I’ve earned this!”:

Be honest. No bullshit. How much have you actually earned? Read the stories that have multiplied throughout the media these past few weeks in response to the #YesAllWomen hashtag. How much of that pain have you tasted, how much of that hurt have you swallowed? How much have you taken upon yourself—how much could you ever take upon yourself if you really had to?

How much fire have you walked through?

Fifty years after the Freedom Summer, black voters in Mississippi are expected to face challenges once again when they go to vote in the Republican Senate runoff between six-term incumbent Thad Cochran and Tea Party challenger Chris McDaniel. In a state with perhaps the most complex and ugliest history of racism in the union, one that has become a symbol of all that is wrong and backwards with the United States, African Americans still have to worry when they show up to vote Tuesday, but it’s much more complicated this time.

Some had thought that the campaign between Cochran and McDaniel had gotten weird when a McDaniel supporter broke into the nursing home of Cochran’s wife and videotaped her but that turned out to be just a precursor to what has turned out to be one of the strangest campaigns since Goat Glands Brinkley ran for Governor of Kansas in the 1930s. The runoff has turned into a macabre political sideshow filled with grotesque attacks and ugly accusations.

It has reached a pinnacle with the efforts by the Cochran campaign to woo Democrats, particularly African Americans, in the racially polarized Magnolia State to vote in the runoff.  The hope was that Democrats would prefer the establishment Republican who tries to bring federal money to the state rather than the small government zealot who, while he might be far more vulnerable to Democratic challenger Travis Childers, would still be likely to be elected if he receives the GOP nomination.

The problem is that Mississippi, which doesn’t have voter registration by party, has a statute that prohibits people from voting in a party primary if they don’t intend to vote for that party’s nominee. However, save an outright declaration of intent or the ability of an election judge to read minds, it’s hard to determine voter intent months in advance.

While the Cochran campaign is appealing to black voters, conservatives are on guard. J. Christian Adams, a former DOJ lawyer, has taken charge of “a poll observer program designed to bring transparency to the process” on behalf of outside conservative groups. Adams noted that, contrary to the claims of liberal observers, having poll watchers monitor for potential Democrats voting was not “voter intimidation” under the law. Adams noted that a federal court made a ruling upholding the constitutionality of this very statute in a case where he represented the federal government. In that nearly 10-year-old case, the Bush Justice Department was trying to go after a black political boss named Ike Brown who was publishing the names of whites whom he thought were Republicans in the local paper in Noxubee County, Mississippi. The idea was that publishing their names would discourage them from voting in the Democratic primary in the rural majority minority county. While Brown was eventually found guilty of systematic discrimination against white voters, the court found that publishing the names did not amount to voter intimidation under the law. Adams cited this as precedent for his efforts.

Rick Hasen, a professor at University of California, Irvine, dismissed the Mississippi statute as essentially unenforceable. He noted an opinion by a former Mississippi attorney general, echoed in a press release issued by the state attorney general and secretary of state on Monday, which said the only way that the statute could be enforced was if a voter proclaimed at the polls that he would vote for the other party’s candidate on Election Day. Hasen noted there seems to be “a long tradition” of a divide between “the law on the books and the law on the ground when you have statute that isn’t usually enforced.”

Hans Von Spakovsky, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation and former FEC member who is one of the most prominent conservative advocates of voter ID laws, told The Daily Beast that this is “one of those laws that’s on the books, it’s hard to enforce.” However, he made clear that while he thought the law was nigh on unenforceable, that “doesn’t mean campaigns should encourage people to break it.”

The problem is that Mississippi has long operated as a state that functionally had an open primary. The only limitation in case of a runoff is that a voter can’t participate if he has already cast a ballot in the other party’s primary. Thus, a voter who voted in the Democratic primary on June 3 can’t participate in Tuesday’s runoff.  But, with the exception of rogue operators like Brown, the law has long been more honored in the breach than the observance—-particularly in a state like Mississippi, where Democrats still dominate at the local level in many areas. Even a diehard Republican like McDaniel cast a ballot in the Democratic primary in 2003——his campaign has declined multiple requests for comment as to whether he voted for the incumbent Democratic governor, Ronnie Musgrove, in the general election that year and prodded Cochran spokesman Jordan Russell to note that, by the logic of McDaniel’s supporters, the conservative diehard either “broke the law or voted for Ronnie Musgrove that November in the general election.”

But this gamesmanship and manipulation is the type of maneuvering often seen in Northern states without the grisly history of Mississippi. While the statute may be unique, the idea of putting large numbers of observers at polling places and threatening legal action is not. As Hasen noted, “One person’s voter intimidation is another person’s voter observation.” What to conservatives can seem like earnest attempts to ensure election integrity is to liberals an attempt to further deter those already most wary of voting from showing up at the polls.

These are the type of issues that election lawyers fight about in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania during presidential elections, which are normally partisan. Democrats take one side and Republicans take the other. Now, they are smack dab in the middle of a GOP primary in Mississippi. Sadly and strangely, in a state where racial resentment still runs deep that is a sign of progress. It doesn’t mean Mississippi has solved most of its problems or even that the Magnolia State has come close. Instead, it simply means that, when it comes to elections, Mississippi’s problems are increasingly like those that the rest of the country faces.

Henry Ford used to say that customers could get the Model T in any color, so long as it was black. The lack of choice didn’t stop the cheap vehicle—the first car to really put Americans on wheels—from becoming popular. But in the 1920s, when rivals offered vehicles with more options (and more colors), Ford’s rigidity forced the Model T to lose market share.

Not too long ago, the market hybrid cars seemed similarly monotone. Customers could have hybrids in any variety they liked, so long as it was a Prius.

That may be only a slight exaggeration. For the last several years, Hybridcars.com has been tallying the number of hybrid vehicles sold every month. Back in May 2008, consumers had 15 models to choose from, the Toyota Prius, which came in a single model, accounted for about 42 percent of total hybrid sales.

Sales of hybrids dipped sharply in 2009, but they have come back strongly. This week, figures for May 2014 were reported. Total sales of hybrids (including plug-in hybrids) were over 59,000, more than double the May 2009 low of about 25,000. And the Prius is still a major player—with a significant change. In May 2014, there were four different versions of the Prius on the market—the traditional liftback, the Prius C, the Prius V, and the Prius Plug-in. Combined they sold about 27,000 units, accounting for about 45 percent of the total hybrid market.

And this speaks to a larger dynamic. Hybrids may still be a niche product—they account for less than 4 percent of car sales in any given month. But the number of models is proliferating rapidly, and that is helping to bring in new buyers. In 2007, consumers had about 12 hybrid models to choose from. In 2010, there were 25 different hybrids in the market, up from 20 in 2009. But last month, carbuyers could choose from well over 50 different types of hybrids, including seven plug-in hybrids.

The offerings now span the full spectrum of manufacturers, styles, and price points. While the Prius still dominates, several other types of hybrids have gained critical mass, like the Ford Fusion hybrid (4,461 units last month) and the Hyundai Sonata hybrid (2,094 units last month.) In all, some 16 different hybrid models sold more than 1,000 units in May 2014, which is a record. And members of this club include cars generally not thought of as highly fuel-efficient, like the Lincoln MKX.

It’s a simple reality that many of the venerable brands and nameplates consumers recognize now come in a hybrid model—the Buick Lacrosse and Chevrolet Malibu, for example. And many of these hybrids remain true novelties. So far this year, sales of the hybrid versions of the Cadillac Escalade and Chevrolet Silverado have been 20 and 12, respectively.

What accounts for the proliferation? Part of it can be chalked up to demand. At a time of high gas prices and concerns over emissions, car buyers are concerned about efficiency. The U.S. is a consumer-driven economy. And there’s nothing the Americans consumer loves—or demands—more than choices. By rolling out hybrid versions of popular models, carmakers are trying to offer greater choices. Offer more people more choices of a new type of product, and more people will be willing to experiment. Since May 2009, both the number of hybrid options and the number of hybrids sold has more than doubled.

Part of the increase in the number of offerings can be tied to public relations and marketing. For car makers, hybrids have become synonymous with forward —thinking and progress. And so it is good to be seen as having one and working on that technology.

But there’s something else happening. Even though hybrids account for less than four percent of the market, the technology behind them is becoming more mainstream. The idea of using more powerful and more intelligent electric-powered batteries to assist in the generation of power to drive vehicles has gained a great deal of traction. So-called hybrid lite systems, like Ford’s Ecoboost and General Motors’ eAssist, are integrating hybrid technologies into conventional cars that nobody would think of as a hybrid.

As recently as a few years ago, buying and driving a hybrid was an exercise in conspicuous consumption. With its distinctive design and huge market share, the Prius easily stood out. Today, seen from a distance, almost any vehicle on the road could be a hybrid.

ROME, Italy — The competition among Mafiosi-in-the-making can get pretty tough in Sicily.  So when a 28-year-old wannabe superboss named Domenico Palazzotto was looking for a way to better his position among the Cosa Nostra, he apparently started bragging about his pedigree by claiming his father’s uncle killed New York City police officer Giuseppe “Joe” Petrosino more than 100 years ago.

The news made headlines, not least in New York, where Petrosino is a sort of NYPD icon. He was one of the first Italians on the force, a favorite of Police Commissioner Teddy Roosevelt back in the hard-scrabble streets of the 1890s, and one tough cop. A New York alderman once said Petrosino “knocked out more teeth than a dentist.” He also worked effectively to infiltrate the underworld of the Mafia and the Black Hand—which is what took him to Italy the year he was killed.

But Italian police are skeptical of Domenico Palozzotto’s claims to the murderer’s bloodline. They say he isn’t even directly related to Paolo Palazzotto, the triggerman who allegedly killed the American hero.  In fact, Paolo Palazzotto was tried for the 1909 murder along with Cosa Nostra boss Vito Cascio Ferro, but both were absolved of the crime due to lack of evidence.

The younger Palazzotto was arrested on Monday for Mafia collusion and drug charges in a sting operation in Palermo called “Apocalypse” that netted 95 suspected Mafiosi. The operation had nothing to do with Petrosino’s murder per se, but when the documents supporting the arrests were made public, wiretap transcripts also were released to the press.  Domenico Palazzotto’s claim to fame was taped in February 2013, but Sicilian police dismissed it then as braggadocio.

According to the transcripts published in Italy’s La Stampa, the Palazzotto wannabe was reminding people of his supposed relative’s supposed place in history. “Petrosino? He was killed by my father’s uncle,” said Palazzotto, according the transcripts. “I’ll even show you the books.  Our family has been Mafiosi for a hundred years.  We killed the first cop in Palermo,” he said, using the word sbirro, which is Italian slang for a street cop.

According to additional transcripts published in Italy’s Corriere Della Sera, Palazzotto also went on to describe Petrosino as a prime target. “He dropped in from America to stir up shit here, to investigate the Mafia.”

Sicilian investigators have dismissed claims that the present-day Palazzotto in their custody has inside information into Petrosino’s murder.  Instead, police announcing the arrests told reporters in Palermo that the kid was just “trying to climb the ladder” by dropping names.  He also claimed that his family had been involved in the murder of anti-mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone, clearly hoping that would bolster his rep as a man with bad-guy DNA.

What makes this cold case so fascinating, in fact, is not wise-guy talking about it, it’s the cop who got shot.

Joe Petrosino was born near Salerno on the Italian mainland in 1860 and was sent to New York to live with his grandfather ahead of his parents in 1873, long before the wave of Italian immigrants came to America via Ellis Island.  His grandfather died and he and a cousin were sent to live with an Irish family who afforded him an education and opportunities many Italian immigrants only dreamed of.

Petrosino became a New York City police officer in 1883 and soon specialized in organized crime. According to Securing the City by The Daily Beast foreign editor Christopher Dickey, Petrosino sometimes “presented himself as a sharply dressed detective complete with bowler hat, but he often moved through the streets in the rags of a day laborer, easily blending in with other recent arrivals in this city of immigrants.” Sometimes just to taunt the Mafiosi he would stand on the stoop of his place near the old police headquarters—near what’s now called Petrosino Square—and play the violin. He knew no one would dare to touch him.

But in 1909 Petrosino went on a secret mission to investigate the Italian underworld on its home turf. A New York police captain leaked the news. The Italian and American press reported his undercover mission, effectively outing him, and he was killed with four shots to the head in Piazza Marina in Palermo.  A brass plaque marks the site of his murder.

Despite Palazzotto’s claims, the mystery of who really pulled the trigger is still just that, and unsolved. But one can hardly blame a young Mafioso for laying claim to what is essentially the holy grail of Mafia hits.

Nobel Peace Laureate Shirin Ebadi supported the Iranian revolution only to have it end her career as a judge. It was a pivotal moment in Iran’s turbulent transition and one she remembers well. Towards the end of that first year, the Khomeinist revolutionaries went after two objectives at once as they consolidated their power: the imposition of mandatory hejab for women, and the sharp curtailment of their rights to participate in society as equal citizens.

One day Ebadi arrived at the Ministry of Justice to congratulate the revolutionary officials who had taken power. But instead of thanking her for standing with the revolution, the provisional minister asked her to cover her hair, “out of respect for the return of our beloved Imam Khomeini.”

In her account of those days, Ebadi writes, “the head-scarf ‘invitation’ was the first warning that this revolution might eat its sisters.” Within days the same authorities demoted her to secretary of the court she had presided over, saying that women were “constantly distracted,” “disorganized” and “unmotivated.” The aim was to control what women could do, the professional heights they could reach, and the state chose a means that women would feel against their skin every single moment they stepped out their front doors: the hejab.

Three decades have passed since then, and the regime’s efforts to impose its religious norms on society through force have scarcely abated. Just last week 195 members of parliament issued a statement urging President Hassan Rouhani to redouble his attention to enforcing Islamic hejab, and warned of the “irremediable implications” of not taking the matter seriously. Parliament’s anxiety surrounding hejab enforcement comes in the wake of a Rouhani speech in which the president directed authorities not to interfere in citizens’ private lives, with his now famous insistence that “you can’t force people to heaven with whips and threats.”

Hardliners have also been infuriated by a social media campaign called “My Stealthy Freedom” that encourages women from across Iran to post pictures of themselves without their headscarves on an enormously popular Facebook page dedicated to that symbolic protest.

Many of this youngest generation of Iranian women may not realize that before the revolution mandated the heajb, thousands of women protested against the imposition. Great crowds gathered in central Tehran, bare-headed and veiled alike, and chanted that “freedom is universal, it's neither Eastern nor Western.” And while young Iranians have been remarkably inventive, transforming the required manteau and headscarf into highly individual fashion, what remains clear is that millions of women still chafe against the very principle of enforced veiling.

In the West, especially among progressive intellectual types, it has become popular to believe that hejab doesn’t matter, that there are more pressing questions to attend to, and that discussing hejab is somehow shallow or tangential. On panels that I’ve sat on from California to Italy, there is always some well-meaning individual who stands up and scolds me—or whatever Muslim woman I happen to be sitting beside—for talking about the hejab. But what Western liberals don’t get is that hejab is never simply about hejab, but about power; a government that imposes mandatory veiling is chiefly interested in controlling its women citizens, and whatever pushback that emerges is an act of resistance to that control.

Sometimes that resistance is not political in the grand sense, but in the American tradition of civil rights disobedience, flouting laws as a means of gaining very basic rights. That is what we see on the shores of the Caspian Sea, where Iranian women who live along the coast persist with the activity of swimming—not in swimsuits, but with layers of clothing clinging to their bodies. As the filmmaker and photographer Javad Montazeri poignantly shows in his film, Hejab as a Weapon of Islamic Iran, for those Iranian women who grow up and live along the Caspian Sea, staying outside the water is intolerable. The women in his film who challenge the regime’s codes by slipping into the sea are showing that they refuse to be controlled, in the most basic way.

The images we see every summer as young women across Iran’s cities fight back against morality police raids also underscore this same point. They wish to wear cooler clothes in the summer heat (Tehran can easily reach 110F, or 40C), but the state refuses to tolerate lighter fabrics and sandaled toes. Instead, the authorities invite state media to come and film the morality police swooping down on city squares, so that the message is displayed across national media: you must do as we say, exactly. Those restrictions may not be enforced at all times, but the anxiety the prospect creates serves its own function.

The control is about patriarchy, of course, and traditional gender roles, and the quest to ensure that men remain in charge, from the dinner table to the houses of parliament, despite more women than ever serving as family breadwinners. Thus a woman is a “pearl in a shell,” or in the most recent and unfortunately-phrased hejab propaganda, “a nut,” a being that should not challenge her husband at the dinner table, should not demand equal say over matters of household finance or child-rearing, should not complain at her in-laws’ incessant demands, or in any way upset the balance of the model Islamic family, in which the mother figure is worshipped but ultimately subordinate.

Legally, as we know, the state controls women through a discriminatory legal code that offers women a fraction of the rights male citizens enjoy in matters of marriage, divorce, inheritance, custody, and criminal law. A woman learns from the Iranian legal code that her testimony is worth half a man’s, that the domestic violence she might suffer at the hands of her husband has no legal definition, that her children can be taken her from her legally once they reach a proscribed age, that her adultery can be punished with stoning. Of course these are all far more grave realities for women, far more grave than a headscarf and a loose coat, but any dictatorship that wishes to control how its citizens live manages to enact that by sanctioning what they wear.

Control and premarital sex, extramarital sex, lesbian sex, it scarcely matters, the Iranian state wishes to be there under the bedcovers deciding whether what’s transpiring is moral. Some would argue it just wants the view, but what’s clear is that the state wants to govern how and when women have sex. There is no notion of "consensual" sexual relations. Adultery is criminalized, and young women who sleep with boyfriends before marriage can be lashed.

None of this is to say that the Iranian state doesn’t wish to also control men, as it most certainly does. But the bid to control women operates in a different psychological space, within the honor culture ethic that holds that whatever a woman does reflects on her kin group; the loss of her honor is a stain that everyone must bear. This obsession with namoos and sharm, honor and shame, elevated to the level of law, places the Islamic Republic on a peculiar path. It is the uber-patriarch, wishing to control all of its women, ensuring they do not embarrass the state, which claims before itself and the world to be divine in origin, an Islamic Republic that produces model Islamic citizens.

This overarching agenda of legal, cultural, and physical control is distilled into dress and the notion of hejab as the only honorable mode of dress. Interestingly the state even feels the need to persuade Iranians that other non-Islamic societies share its devotion to hejab, and by extension, to Islamic mores. That’s why Iran has even been known to doctor Hollywood films before distribution, as the scene in the film Death Race shown in Montazeri’s film, where the censors put a black wrap dress on Natalie Martinez and a floor-length fairy skirt on the animated Disney Tinkerbell. For those who are being controlled, witnessing the freedom of others is naturally painful, and this is something even the state understands.

In the minds of the men who run the Islamic Republic, a bare head is a gateway appearance, the first step in a sequence of stages (like the progression, in substance abuse theory, from cigarettes to cocaine) that will inevitably lead to naked women running south down Tehran’s Vali Asr Avenue. That is why the hejab, to them, is always much more than just the hejab. It is everything, the symbol of their virtue, their most cherished weapon of control, the thing they must impose in order to impose everything else.