Iran outlaws water fights

In Iran, they have now outlawed water fights as yet another immoral mixing of the sexes.

A water fight in a Tehran park on Friday, thought to have been organized through social media websites, was broken up by police who arrested several of the revelers, the semi-official Mehr news agency reported on Sunday.

"Some of these by police on Friday," Ahmadreza Radan, Tehran's deputy police chief, told Mehr.

Mingling between sexes outside marriage is banned in Iran and conservatives in the Islamic Republic have been scandalized by scenes of dozens of youngsters spraying each other with water in public.

Various websites have posted photographs of girls and boys in wet clothes throwing water balloons, firing water guns and splashing each other with water from bottles after the first water fights were reported in the capital a few weeks ago.

The fights have since spread across the country despite warnings from authorities.

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Conservatives say the water fights must be stamped out to prevent what they say is the corruption of Iranian youths, much of which is blamed on a deliberate "soft war" by the West conducted through TV, films and pop music.

I don't particularly enjoy the water fights, and I recognize the potential for immodesty that comes with them (when I was a summer associate in law school, there were some firms that drew approbation by holding 'wet t-shirt contests'). But arresting the revelers seems a bit much. And blaming them on the West is paranoia.