Sensual and sexual imagery in the many folktales of Iran hides under layers of colorful clothes and camouflage among flowering trees, but as long as there is the gentry who rules, there are the folk who tell tales about elite heroes and heroines embarking on imaginary quests down spiral stairs, behind locked doors, in the darkest chambers, on the highest towers, in the farthest lands, and in the farthest times. In many of Iran's folktales the heroic quest starts with the enchanted problematic of sex. If the tale is about a princess, she endures displacement, alienation, hunger, imprisonment, and even death because of sex. The prince of such tales must overcome even more obstacles caused by sex and sexual desire to make a full circle of the quest and return home. In many such tales the reaffirmation of the noble son to the royal household happens only after a series of unfortunate sexual episodes and carnal mishaps; with the royal daughter, however, the sexual lapse is rarely forgiven. The revenge of the folk in many folktales of Iran revolves around sex, and sexual desire drives the protagonists to embark on magical quests and uncanny deaths. Fairy dust and charmed interventions, the metonyms of most niche European fairytales that add a layer of decorum to an otherwise vulgar narrative, hardly show up in Persian folktales. Hence most Persian oral tales are neither moral nor proper, and sexual desire as a direct or indirect initiator of heroic quests is not only present in the stories, but also front and center on the tip of the oral teller's tongue.

Orality, an essential element of the folktale genre, presupposes illiteracy. Yet orality is also an agency that shifts folktales to the outskirts of postcolonial theories with autonomy from, and skepticism about, the conventional wisdom of hegemonic narratives that distribute ethnic, national, and social roles within a populace and presuppose their political destiny. The oral structure of folktales transcends words to obtain a quasi-autonomous status which, in Jack Goody's ‘autonomous’ view of literacy, may ‘encourage skepticism, in the sense of doubt about, and disagreement with, the established, communal wisdoms of a culture’.