Contemporary Scholarship has long recognized that Iraj Mirza, in his famous poem Arefnameh, used satire to confront a number of socio-political issues in the Qajar Constitutional era society. However, scholars have rarely engaged with the aspects of Arefnameh’s language which are perceived and often dismissed as crude and vulgar expressions. This paper argues that Arefnameh is a powerful point of resistance against constructed gendered frameworks of “proper” not despite but because of Iraj Mirza’s use of bawdy language. The paper first examines Arefnameh in the context of some additional Constitutional era literature in order to demonstrate that Arefnameh, consistent with the examined literature, reproduces some of the expectations of “proper” Iranian men and women. The familiarity of the gendered norms pulls in the reader; but then, Iraj Mirza’s rich narratives and his unique use of bawdy language completely disrupts the established frameworks of power including that of Islamic religiosity and nationalism. In the past two hundred years, the people of Iran have been subject to the deployment of numerous state-instituted sexual traditions including normative monogamy and heterosexuality in order to regulate and control individuals. Throughout this period, Iran’s Islamic traditionalists did not oppose sexuality; instead, as Foucault stated in regards to Europe, they deployed it as a means to regulate and control individuals. More specifically, sexuality was deployed through what rightly should be considered “invented traditions.” We, as members of the Iranian collectives and as scholars, are still grappling with the “properness” and “improperness” of sexuality in the context of nationalism and what is often presented as an Islamicate culture; for example, whether the Iranian actress, Golshifteh Farahani’s nude photos on the cover of French Magazine Egoïste is a “proper” act for an “Iranian” woman or whether Masih Alinejad’s website “Women’s Stealthy Freedoms”, “Azadi-ye Yavashaki-ye Zanan” is a “real” act of resistance. Arefnameh remains powerfully relevant because it forces us as readers to examine our own perceptions of “proper” and “improper” gendered expectations. The scholarly engagement with Arefnameh, dispels the rigid often internalized regulatory mechanisms and forces us to examine our own notions of “proper” and “improper” in the context of Iran in an ever more interconnected globe.