When he visited Iran a couple of years ago, the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas said the next Iranian revolution would be a women's revolution - and we are now seeing signs of that, writes Hossein Derakhshan.
While young men have become ever more apathetic, partly because of the high rate of unemployment, young women have a vital social and political cause to fight for.
The battle is for equal gender rights and opportunities, from all-encompassing issues to smaller ones such as the right to watch matches in a football stadium.
There are no laws banning women from the football stadiums, but a ban is effectively enforced - maybe because it has not been challenged by enough women over the past two decades. Now some are trying to change all that.
Last week, nearly 50 women, using the medium of blogs, organised a visit to the Azadi (freedom) stadium in Tehran for the friendly between Iran and Costa Rica.
The attempt failed. After the women had bought tickets, police stopped them, broke the Iranian flag they were carrying and asked them to wait until the chief of police arrived.
He didn't turn up, but a security official from the Interior Ministry told them to get on a bus to another entrance to the stadium. They resisted - they didn't trust him - but he swore he was not lying.
When they got on the bus, they were taken to a distant square, where they were dropped off and warned not to come back.
"Once the bus started to get some distance from the stadium, everyone began screaming," one blogger wrote.
As Parastoo Dokouhaki, a popular blogger and one of the organisers of the event, put it: "Today, most of the group experienced their most serious example of gender discrimination. But we achieved something bigger than going to stadium - gender consciousness."
Dozens of blogs published the women's first-hand accounts of what happened, and some newspapers carried reports about it.
One photo, showing a police officer kicking a girl covered by Iranian flag, began to circulate. (See more photos here).
The women's ordeal brought many expressions of support, among them one from the Iranian film-maker Jafar Panahi. His award-winning film, Offside, tells the story of a group of young women who try to get into a stadium to watch a football match.
The conservative establishment is uniting a large segment of society against it by refusing to relax its attitude towards women's rights.
Young women, after all, were the group largely responsible for bringing the former reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, to office.
· Hossein Derakhshan is a Toronto-based blogging activist and freelance journalist. He writes the blog Editor:Myself
