A female visitor to Iran

As a female visitor to Iran, your sins are both expected and forgiven. Nobody bat an eyelid when I walked into the male toilets in Tehran airport. Later that day, when I delved deep into the mosque before realising I was the only woman, I got a few strange looks, but the most animated reaction was a guy cracking up when he saw the look on my face as a I realised my faux pas. You'd think the guy taking my shoes at the entrance might have mentioned I was banned from going in. Or one of the 10 or so men I passed in the entrance hall.

As a worldly western woman, often in Iran the men will treat you like an honorary man. This means there's not much fuss when you start wandering around the male section of the mosque, yes, but also it means men will approach you and talk to you in the street and you won't be scorned by talking back. (Lucky, because did I mention the men are HOT?)

'Hello, hello,' you hear wherever you walk. And you smile and say, 'Hello' or 'Salaam' and it's OK and it's basically flirting but it feels so much more outrageous because it feels dangerous!

What surprised us was how eager men were to tell us how they hated the hejab and Ahmadinejad. Invariably, five things happen when men approach.

1. They say hello in English and we reply.

2. They ask us where we're from and we say, 'Australia'. When they know where it is, they comment on how far we've come, and we don't go through the drama of telling them we've only come from London.

3. They ask us if we like Iran and we tell them we love it.

4. They apologise for the hejab and sometimes they tell us how different it is inside the home – how you don't need to wear it there. They tell us in their own way they hate it.

5. They tell us they hate the government and how it must go.

We tell them it's the same everywhere, and we don't really like our governments all the time either. But they know it's not the same thing and so do we. Really, they just want us to know it doesn't represent them; that Iranians are not all represented by the rules and rants of Ahmadinejad or Ayatollah Khamenei.

But by far the most interesting and moving reward of being here is how you are treated by the women. Many just want to stare. Some want to practise their English. Others want to hear about where you're from and your family and what you do. We have been approached by so many women, everywhere we go, every day, women stare at us, smile at us, look at us. Really look at us. I think they laugh, sometimes, at what dorks we are, having failed to totally nail the look just yet. But in some of their eyes, I see a yearning. It's more than curiosity, it's an eagerness, a wonderment. They don't mind coming right up to you and just staring at you – they don't try to hide it. They look into your eyes and smile and many also say 'hello' and you can tell you've made their day by just being there and smiling at them. By just being in their country, you've given them hope.

Because even though they can drink wine at home and dance and sing and wave their hair around like Beyoncé – they can do all of this at their home and the homes of their friends – they still want to be able to walk down the street without a piece of meaningless material sitting on top of their beautifully coiffured hair.