The campaign of Tehran’s residents in the 1940s and 1950s to have prostitutes removed from their neighborhoods resulted in the literal walling off of Shahr-i-Now, Tehran’s red-light district, and over time contributed to the solidification of the official policy of regulating prostitution and containing female sex workers within the red-light district. Despite these efforts, all across Iran bodies continued to be bought and sold. However, over time, what was once a moderate and selective policy of regulation developed into a stringent policing of prostitutes within and outside of red-light districts, with a gradually more strict focus on medical surveillance and inspection. Regulation was part and parcel of a social ideology that deemed prostitution a necessary evil. It accepted heterosexual sex outside of marriage for men, but not for women, deemed women, girls, and at times young boys, vulnerable to the temptations of prostitution, and regarded the state responsible for making sex outside of marriage safe and healthy for men. Simultaneously, the predominant social view sympathized with female prostitutes who were commonly seen as forced or deceived into prostitution, which was part of the larger sexual ideology that depicted women as asexual and pure. Prostitution was a moral problem if and when it became visible, and it was the undesired visibility of prostitution that shaped the interaction of prostitutes with the larger community and the state. This presentation is an attempt to situate the women who sold their bodies in Iran between 1940s-1970s within their societies and to highlight their engagement with the state, their communities and the structural forces that shaped their behavior. Using archival documents, it takes a closer look at the gradual move to systematic regulation that culminated in Tehran’s Shahr-i Now. In addition, borrowing from insights of subaltern studies, it illustrates how collective actions and local politics shaped national policy over time in Iran. In the process, it hopes to reveal some sexual habits of the men who frequented prostitutes and exhibit some of the ways in which these women practiced forms of autonomy over their lives.