I was reading a thread in another forum about 19th century Iran, and one thing which struck alot of readers (including myself) was how...masculine many upper class women looked in photos and paintings. Later a poster gave an (unsourced) quotation explaining this phenomenon:

"In Iran, the concept of beauty was not viewed as intrinsically feminine, in fact, beauty was not exclusive to either sex, both male and female could perpetuate aesthetic and desirable ‘beauty’. However, Qajar society valued masculinity and the concept of beauty, amongst elite and upper class Iranians, was in consequence masculinized — women, most notably in the Shah’s harem, aimed to render their features more masculine by joining their eyebrows together and growing facial hair, they were considered so attractive that they were sometimes painted on or augmented with mascara, and young beardless men with slim waists and delicate features. In 19th century portraits of lovers, the genders are barely distinguishable, identified only by their headgear.

It was only until the the 20th century that Iran, with the coming in power of the Pahlavy dynasty with Reza Shah, ardent modernist, began taking from Western ideologies and concepts of sexuality and gender — as well as the intrusion of the Farangi, i.e. the European/Western gaze, upon the intimate world of Iranian homosociality between both men and women, and the Western gaze perceived this homosociality as something to be condemned and as a symbol of “backwardness” — that the idea of beauty became solely attributed to femininity, to direct the Iranian male gaze towards the sexualized female, and heterosexuality was normalized as Iranian modernity and patriotism, whereas before the 20th century, bi-romanticism and bisexuality were not uncommon — in fact, the daughter of Nasser al-Din Shah Qajar, Taj Al-Saltaneh, wrote in her memoirs about an affair she had with a young seamstress she knew. Before her, Sufi poetry also used implied or explicit reference to love and affection between men, normally of age difference, as a spiritual aspect of Sufism and recognition of the Divine, e.g. Rumi & Shams). The beauty standard also shifted to emulate the aesthetic of the European woman as the conventional image of what is desirable."

Is this really an accurate explanation of sexuality in the Qajar empire? Did this unique gender/beauty relationship exist among the lower classes, too, or was it mostly contained to the royal court?