The XX Factor: What women really think.

On Watching Neda's Death

Dana, Susannah: Like many Americans, I watched the “Neda video” yesterday. This is, of course, a horribly shorthand way of saying that I opened a video clip that captures a young Iranian woman dying after being shot. The movie is short. It is “graphic,” if by graphic we mean that we see blood, and the violence that can be done to a body. More subtly, and entirely fascinatingly (in the old, sober sense of the world), it captures the moment a person’s life drains out of her body. I have, in the past, always decided not to watch videos like this (Danny Pearl’s execution, say). This time I changed my mind, and it haunted me all last night.

Why has Neda become a symbol of Iranian freedom? Because we witness the sight of her death. That sight, even at a remove (or perhaps because at a remove), is so difficult to hold in mind that we have to transform it. Ironically...(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)