last year has moved on to a doctorate in genome sciences and isn’t planning any more efforts to ridicule Iranian clerics.
In fact, she says she is bothered that her boobquake event became so popular in the Western world only because it targeted a Muslim.
In April of last year, Tehran Friday prayers leader Hojatol-eslam Kazem Sediqi asserted that provocatively dressed women cause earthquakes. The world took notice. And laughed.
Jennifer McCreight, then a 22-year-old senior majoring in genetics at Purdue University in Indiana, used Facebook and Twitter to challenge the cleric’s assertion. She posted calls for a satirical protest and science experiment on her blog, www.blaghag.com. She called on women worldwide to wear low-cut dresses that day to test Sediqi’s theory.
Her call drew worldwide news coverage and a lot of exposure—both kinds.
The Journal and Courier of Lafayette, Indiana, approached her and asked if she planned another Boobquake in the future.
Probably not, she said. “For one thing, I don’t want to forever be known for a silly Internet meme. I am a scientist, and I do have intellectual accomplishments. But also, Sediqi later clarified his original claim, basically saying you don’t know when or where God is going to punish us with natural disasters for our sins. Adultery in Indiana tomorrow could cause an earthquake in Iran 100 years from now. It’s not a testable hypothesis anymore.”
Last year, the self-proclaimed “geeky, perverted atheist feminist” acknowledged she started a ridiculous movement to mock a ridiculous claim; however, she also noted a more serious message. “Women should have the right to choose how they dress, and not be forced to cover up by men,” she said.
McCreight posted the quake report for her Boobquake Monday on her blog. She said the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) recorded 47 earthquakes that day, April 26, 2010. The number may sound like a lot, but McCreight assured her audience that 47 was actually slightly lower than the daily average over the previous two months. She said a statistically abnormal number would have been anything over 148, triple the average.
While Boobquake didn’t produce an earthquake, it did bring a lot of new readers and admirers to McCreight’s blog, along with some opportunities.
Since then, she has been named one of the “top new feminists” by More Magazine and flown to New York City for a photo shoot that ran in the magazine.
Now based in Seattle and studying genome sciences at the University of Washington, McCreight is attempting to keep 2011 in balance as her profile rises.
McCreight told the Journal and Courier that pseudo-scientific claims are made so often “that I don’t have the energy to get worked up about every one. There was an American Christian minister that said abortions caused the oil leak in the Gulf [of Mexico], a Russian businessman who was firing workers who were living with their partner before marriage because he thought it caused wildfires, a ministry in Samoa that said gays were to blame for climate change…. It’s all equally silly.”
Turning serious, she said, “Unfortunately, I think one reason why Boobquake was popular was because it happened to poke fun at a Muslim in the Middle East. I wish people realized just as many ridiculous things are said right here, and from their own religious beliefs.”
Hojatoleslam Sediqi, who delivers the sermon at Tehran Friday prayers every fourth week, has not backed away one iota from his contention that women in immodest clothing cause earthquakes. In fact, he even expanded on his theory in a later sermon.
The Iran Times has thus far only seen one other Friday prayer leader in Iran support Sediqi. Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, another of the four clerics who delivers Friday prayers in Tehran, endorsed Sediqi’s views in a sermon one week. Most clerics appear simply to have ignored the controversy.
Even in Iran, however, Sediqi has been subject to ridicule by citizens, with many people asking why Iran has so many earthquakes when its women are required by law to be fully covered except for their faces and hands.
Sediqi had a response to that. He theorized that God might be restraining natural disasters in the immodest West in order to tempt people to sin more and thus damn themselves to hell.
Sediqi told the congregation, “Some ask why more earthquakes and storms don’t occur in the Western worlds, which suffers from the slime of homosexuality, the slime of promiscuity and has plunged up to its neck in immorality,” he said.
“Who says they don’t occur?” he asked. “Storms take place in America and other parts of the world. We don’t say committing sin is the entire reason, but it’s one of the reasons [for natural calamities].”
Then he reversed gears. “Sometimes, God tests a nation,” he said. God says that “if believers sin, We slap them because We love them and give them a calamity in order to stop their bad deeds.
“But those who have provoked God’s wrath, He allows them [to sin] so that they go to the bottom of Hell,” Sediqi reasoned. That opened up a new theological line, suggesting that God does not really love all of mankind, but in truth hates some of them, such as Americans.
The theory that calamities are visited upon the sinful is not new. In fact, an American Christian preacher suggested that the 9/11 attacks were punishment for the sinfulness of New Yorkers and the deadly Haitian earthquake last January was proof of Haitian sinfulness. But the theory that God may withhold calamities in order to lure a people into sin appears to be an entirely new theological wrinkle.
