Reporter and writer. I cover energy, climate change and geopolitics. Contact me via my website www.alexanderckaufman.com and subscribe to kaufman.nyc.

These are actual images from Iran before the revolution. 

I want to be clear to everyone -- a roomful of East Asian women in bathing suits is clearly not from this era. It was a screenshot of a crass joke satirizing how critics of the regime or of the government in Afghanistan pass around images from the past of women dressed in ways that wouldn't be tolerated by Islamist governments today. I'm surprised by how many of you took it seriously, and I'm sorry if that caused any offense; I thought it was obvious parody.

I was tempted to delete the original cast but I decided not to because:

1. I’d rather take responsibility by explaining it, especially since there are plenty of confused replies that would remain up and 
2. there’s something wrong to me about censoring a joke about something like this given that it is ultimately poking fun at the discourse that surrounds a censorious, authoritarian regime.