The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls E-Book

Mona Eltahawy

• Herausgeber: Tramp Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls identifies seven sins women and girls are socialised to avoid anger, attention, profanity, ambition, power, violence and lust. With essays on each, Mona Eltahawy creates a stunning manifesto encouraging women worldwide to defy, disobey and disrupt the patriarchy. Drawing on her own life and the work of intersectional activists from around the world, #MeToo and the Arab Spring, Eltahawys work defines what it is to be a feminist now.

Leseprobe

THE SEVEN NECESSARY SINSFOR WOMENAND GIRLS

MONA ELTAHAWY

v

Make your heart too rebellious for patriarchy to plant itself within you. Make your mind too free for fascism to chain your imagination.

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGEDEDICATIONINTRODUCTION: DEFYING, DISOBEYING, AND DISRUPTING THE PATRIARCHY — ONE — ANGER— TWO — ATTENTION— THREE — PROFANITY— FOUR — AMBITION— FIVE — POWER— SIX — VIOLENCE— SEVEN — LUST CONCLUSIONACKNOWLEDGEMENTSALSO BY MONA ELTAHAWYCOPYRIGHT

THE SEVEN NECESSARY SINS FOR WOMEN AND GIRLS

3

INTRODUCTION

DEFYING, DISOBEYING, AND DISRUPTING THE PATRIARCHY

I wrote this book with enough rage to fuel a rocket. I knew I had to write it while I was still high on the glory of beating up a man who had sexually assaulted me. Who was this woman I had become, who looks men in the eye, seizing their gaze with my fury until their fear tells me they understand not to fuck with me? I wanted to figure her out. For years I had been shedding shame and gaining fury. For years I had been thumping away at patriarchy, like a piñata hanging tantalisingly just out of reach. It was stubborn, but my tenacity and ferocity became my ladder. This book is my instruction manual for smashing that piñata.

Once upon a time, in 1982, I was a fifteen-year-old girl sexually assaulted twice at Islam’s holiest site in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, as I performed hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage that is the 4 fifth pillar of Islam. I had never been sexually assaulted before, and I froze and burst into tears. I was ashamed and traumatised, and, most crucially, I was silent.

It took me years before I could tell anyone what had happened when I was on my first hajj. I did not know of the writer and poet Audre Lorde’s work when I was assaulted, but as my feminism grew, I began to understand what she meant when she said, ‘Your silence will not protect you.’1 And so I began to speak. The first time I shared my hajj story it was with an international group of women in Cairo. An Egyptian Muslim woman took me aside and warned me to stop sharing what had happened in front of foreigners because it would ‘make Muslims look bad’. I told her it was not I but the men who assaulted me who ‘make Muslims look bad’.

The next time I spoke publicly about my assault it was in Arabic on an Egyptian prime-time television show in 2013. The segment producer told me I was the first person who had ever shared a story like this on Egyptian television. It was such a taboo that he was lucky he still had a job after the backlash that followed. As I continued to quietly share with fellow Muslim women my experience of sexual assault during the hajj, the stories started to flow, with more and more women saying, ‘Me too!’ All those years of silence were for the same reason: we thought it was impossible that anyone else had gone through a violation at such a sacred place. I also had to mature into the understanding that the men who assaulted me had abused the sanctity of a sacred space to ensure the silence of their victim. They knew that no one would believe me.

5 I wanted a permanent record of what had happened to me, so I wrote about my sexual assault in my 2015 book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a SexualRevolution.2 Muslim women from all over the world wrote to tell me that reading about my experience made them cry. Two years later, as Muslims from around the world were again preparing to converge on Mecca for the hajj, I posted a series of tweets about being sexually assaulted during the pilgrimage because I wanted to warn fellow Muslim women. Until the Saudi authorities who administer the holy sites take concrete steps to ensure that female pilgrims can perform pilgrimage free from sexual harassment and assault, we must protect each other. And so there I was, at my computer in February 2018, sharing once again that I had been sexually assaulted twice during pilgrimage in 1982 to support Sabica Khan, a Pakistani woman who had shared on Facebook her own assault in Mecca. I asked fellow Muslim women who felt safe enough to share their own experience of sexual harassment or assault either while performing hajj or in a Muslim sacred place. I added a hashtag to my post: #MosqueMeToo. Over two days my Twitter thread was retweeted and liked thousands of times. It was shared in Indonesian, Arabic, Turkish, French, German, Spanish, and Farsi. I had never before seen such a response.

At first men demanded, ‘Why didn’t you make more of a fuss?’ Soon after, men went into full-gaslighting mode: anything to persuade me I had not experienced what I had experienced or else questioning my character as a way to 6 undermine my story. I could write a whole other book called ‘Things You Will Hear When You Say You’ve Been Sexually Assaulted’. Observe:

You are too ugly to be sexually assaulted.You are being paid to say this.You just want to be famous.You just want attention.You want to destroy Islam.You want to make Muslim men look bad.You are a whore.You imagined it; it was crowded.Why didn’t you report it?You waited all that time. Why?What do you expect? Sexual assault happens everywhere.Why aren’t you talking about sexual assault in New Zealand?You should have yelled and made a fuss.

For five days, women from around the world had shared with me their most harrowing experiences of sexual harassment and assault at pilgrimage or other sacred spaces. Reading their stories undid something that had broken in me as that young pilgrim in 1982 that I thought I had stitched together: I had not fully grasped the magnitude of being sexually assaulted at the site toward which Muslims pray five times a day. The experience of telling stories, and especially men’s refusal to believe them, was as if I were standing in pouring rain – I could feel it drenching every part of me, only to hear 7 the weather forecast on television confidently explaining that it was sunny and dry with not a drop of rain expected. Being forced to absorb the terrible violation of being sexually assaulted, but also to be robbed of a spiritual experience that so many long to experience, forced me to connect that violation with the many other violations I have been subjected to. How could all of that have happened to me? How have I absorbed it, been forced to accept it so that I could go on every day, and how had I learned to get on with my life?

For one night I wanted some respite from that reckoning, so, five days after I launched #MosqueMeToo, my beloved and I went to a club in Montreal to dance it off, to revel in the sensual delight of moving my body to music, in the hope that all those beats per minute would be a balm to my traumatised heart.

And there, in the middle of a crowded and sweaty dance floor, at age fifty, I felt a hand on my ass.

I had exactly two thoughts: ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me’ and ‘This is still happening?’ I remembered my fifteen-year-old self at hajj, covered from head to toe with just my face and hands showing. Now, on that dance floor in Montreal, I was wearing a tank top and jeans. It did not matter – hijab or tank top – a man’s hands still found me.

And I was done.

But unlike in 1982 when I could not turn around to find my assaulter, I immediately spotted my creep, who had started to walk away. As if on autopilot, I followed him and tugged so hard at the back of his shirt that he stumbled.

8 When he fell, I sat on top of him and I punched and punched and punched his face. Once was not enough. And each time I punched him, I yelled, ‘Don’t you ever touch a woman like that again!’ While I was punching the man who had assaulted me, I could see from my peripheral vision my beloved talking to two men who had been dancing when I started beating the man and who were now preparing to pull me off my assaulter. My beloved later told me the two men had wanted to stop me from punching the man who had groped me. ‘No, no, he assaulted her,’ he told the two men; let’s call them the chorus for patriarchy. ‘She’s got this.’

It had been a long time since I had experienced as much clarity as I did in those moments. I knew exactly what I was doing – defending myself – and exactly why I was doing it. I was done with men who gave themselves the right to do as they wished with my body. If at that most sacred of temples – the holiest site of my religion – I am not safe from predatory hands, where am I safe? If at that most secular of temples – a dance club – predatory men also insist on assaulting us, where are we safe?

My beloved and I went to the bar to get some water. A man who appeared to be from club management approached us and asked me to tell him what had happened. After I explained that I had beaten a man who had sexually assaulted me, he looked at my beloved and asked me, ‘Why didn’t you let your husband take care of it?’

At what age does my body belong just to me?

Patriarchy is so universal and normalised that it is like asking a fish What is water? It enables and protects men who 9 sexually assault women, and it demands that only other men ‘protect’ us. As long as we obey and behave in ways it approves, it will ‘protect’ us. And if we disobey, you can be sure that that protection will be revoked quicker than you can say ‘patriarchy’. But I don’t want to be protected. I just want patriarchy to stop protecting and enabling men. I don’t want to be protected. I want to be free.

Regardless of whether you live in an absolute monarchy like Saudi Arabia or in a liberal democracy like Canada or the United States, regardless of what your religion is or if you are atheist or secular, regardless of whether your country has been colonised or itself once colonised and exploited others, patriarchy lives everywhere. It controls how our society and institutions are organised and run, and it has legal implications for women, nonbinary people, and children, who have less power than men.

I was born in Egypt, moved to the United Kingdom when I was seven years old, moved to Saudi Arabia when I was fifteen, lived in Jerusalem for fourteen months as a reporter when I was in my thirties, and moved to the United States in 2000 after I married an American. My reporting and public speaking have taken me to Central and South America, Asia, Australia, Europe, and Africa. Patriarchy lives in every single one of those countries and on each continent. Whether you live in the best country to be a woman – Iceland and neighbouring Scandinavian countries usually top those lists – or the worst, patriarchy is clear: No country has achieved political equality. Many countries have never had a female head of state. 10 No country pays men and women equally for work they do. In every country it is fact that most acts of domestic, intimate-partner, and sexual violence pose significant threats to women and girls, and that the majority of such acts are perpetrated by men. Some religions still refuse to ordain women to holy orders. And men by and large control and are disproportionately represented in the media, the arts, and the cultural landscapes that shape our tastes and ideas.

Patriarchy is universal.

Feminism must be just as universal. I want patriarchy and all who benefit from it to have the same look of terror as that man in the Montreal club who, before he ran away, took a look at me so that he could see the woman who had dared strike back. I want patriarchy to know that feminism is rage unleashed against its centuries of crimes against women and girls around the world, crimes that are justified by ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’ and ‘it’s just the way things are’, all of which are euphemisms for ‘this world is run by men for the benefit of men’. We must declare a feminism that is robust, aggressive, and unapologetic. It is the only way to combat a patriarchy that is systemic.

I also want feminism to be led by the nonwhite and the queer, who don’t have the luxury of fighting only misogyny. We must fight the multiple systems of oppressions that patriarchy often intertwines itself with: racism, bigotry, homophobia, transphobia, classism, ableism, and ageism. There is much work to do.

After the fight at the club, and astonished at how my attempt to take care of myself after the intensity of #MosqueMeToo 11 had unfolded, I shared what had happened on Twitter under a new hashtag: #IBeatMyAssaulter. All that weekend I was icing my bruised knuckles and hearing from women around the world who sent me their #IBeatMyAssaulter experiences. As with #MosqueMeToo, so many women wrote to me and said, ‘Me too’: ‘I was in a club/at a bus stop/in school, here, there, and #IBeatMyAssaulter’. Much like with #MosqueMeToo, it was a global chorus of women who saw each other and recognised what it means to be done with the fuckery of patriarchy.

As women sent me examples of how they had beaten their assaulters, men were showing me how easily the goal posts can move. Under #MosqueMeToo men asked me, ‘Why didn’t you make more of a fuss?’ Under #IBeatMyAssaulter men said, ‘You made too much of a fuss. You were too violent. Don’t you think you overreacted?’ And more audaciously: some men asked, ‘What if the situation were reversed?’ As if women make a habit of groping men at clubs; as if centuries of patriarchy had not enabled and protected men’s entitlement to women’s bodies, and so therefore the situation cannot be reversed; as if the power of violence and assault had not historically always been and continues to be in the hands of men.

Whatever a woman does, she will always be victim-blamed. My message was clear: ‘Women, do whatever you need to at the moment.’ This is self-defence. This is putting patriarchy on notice that we will fight back. This is warning patriarchy that it should fear us.

All those women who shared their experiences under #MosqueMeToo and #IBeatMyAssaulter did so understanding 12 the power of saying ‘Me too’. And, more than likely not, they had heard of the now global movement called MeToo. Like many revolutionary moments, MeToo is the latest iteration of many years of work by activists. Black feminist Tarana Burke originated #MeToo in 2006 to show solidarity with survivors of sexual violence. When famous actresses began to use it in 2017 to expose sexual assault by powerful producers, MeToo gained exposure and a massive platform that has helped it resonate globally.

I am deeply grateful to Burke for supporting and amplifying voices of survivors, who are too often marginalised and silenced. I appreciate the courage of anyone who is able to expose her assaulters. But we cannot allow MeToo be conflated with powerful white men and the ways they abuse famous, privileged white women. We must make sure that MeToo breaks the race, class, gender, abilities and faith lines that make it so hard for marginalised people to be heard. MeToo is at its heart a movement that fights patriarchy and the ways it enables and protect men who abuse. When famous actresses began sharing their #MeToo stories, their courage and fame propelled MeToo into international headlines. But MeToo must not remain stuck in their rarefied world, otherwise we risk losing this revolutionary moment wherein we can see each other across the whole world, whether performing hajj in Mecca or dancing in Montreal. MeToo must remain a movement about justice, not about protecting power and the privileges it bestows.

This is a revolutionary moment in which we are connecting and exposing the ways patriarchy has enabled and protected so 13 many, daily, in every aspect of our lives: from Donald Trump, the president of the most powerful country in the world, who has been accused of sexual assault by more than a dozen women,3 and other politicians who shape policy and law; to filmmakers and other creatives who have shaped our culture and our music and our economies; to journalists who have shaped the news and the agendas that consume us; to the priests and pastors and clerics and religious scholars who shape our consciences and act as the gatekeepers of god; to the sports coaches who train our athletes; to the more everyday examples of what we are finally calling toxic masculinity and the ways it has socialised men and boys into believing they are entitled to women’s attention, affection, and more.

This is a revolutionary moment in which women from Egypt to the United States to Argentina to India to Ireland to China to South Korea and across the world are reading, sharing, and echoing stories of abuse, survival, and resilience. It is a revolutionary moment of women’s rage. Men cannot sit back and say, ‘Well, I’m not rich and powerful; that’s not me.’ It is you – if you are not actively dismantling the patriarchy, you are factually benefiting from it. Are you uncomfortable? Good. You should be. Discomfort is a reminder that privilege is being questioned, and this revolutionary moment is one in which we must defy, disobey, and disrupt the patriarchy, everywhere.

With #MosqueMeToo, I wanted to end the silencing and shaming of women who have been exposed to violence and abuse in sacred spaces and to say, ‘My body is sacred too.’ With #IBeatMyAssaulter, I wanted to fight back, to say, ‘If you grope 14 me, I will beat the fuck out of you.’ It is my right to be free of sexual assault, and it is my right to fight back if I am assaulted. Ultimately it is my right to defy, disobey, and disrupt.

Thirty-five years separate me at fifteen and me at fifty. But one week in Montreal collapsed that distance and reminded me that regardless of age or location, sacred or secular, patriarchy socialises men to believe they are entitled to women’s bodies. And patriarchy not only fails to teach us how to fight back, but it actively encourages our acquiescence and fear.

I made a list of milestones, from #MosqueMeToo to #IBeatMyAssaulter, partly as my way of acknowledging events that had shaped my evolution from fifteen to fifty, and partly honouring what I had learned and survived.

For example, in March 2011, less than a month after the Egyptian revolution forced Hosni Mubarak, our dictator of more than thirty years, to step down, the Egyptian military subjected at least seventeen female activists to ‘virginity tests’, a form of sexual assault. I wrote in the Guardian at the time that Egypt needed another revolution, a feminist one that placed gender equality front and centre, as a form of protest against those violations.4 It didn’t happen and still hasn’t happened, although we sorely need it in Egypt. Eight months later, in November 2011, during a protest I joined against the police and army near Tahrir Square, Egyptian riot police beat me, broke my left arm and right hand, sexually assaulted me, and threatened me with gang rape. I was detained incommunicado for six hours by the Interior Ministry and another six by military intelligence during which I was blindfolded and interrogated. 15 I was denied medical attention for my fractures during my twelve hours in detention. I required surgery to help align the fractured bone in my left arm, and I spent three months with a cast on each arm, unable to perform many simple tasks such as washing and brushing my own hair. The head of Egyptian military intelligence at the time of the ‘virginity tests’ and my assault and detention was a man called Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi. He is now the president of my country of birth.

Sisi has a great ally in Donald Trump, who was elected US president in November 2016. Trump has called Sisi a ‘fantastic guy’.5 After Trump’s inauguration, in January 2017, I wrote in the New York Times that the nationalism and authoritarianism evident in Trump’s ceremony rendered him the American Sisi. A month later, an Egyptian newspaper ran a banner headline about my column on its front page above a picture of me from the days when I had a cast on both of my arms. The caption called me a ‘sex activist’, and the editor in chief of the newspaper devoted the entire second page – this is a broadsheet newspaper – to denouncing me, complete with a picture of my tattoos and an allegation that I was a spy. The message was clear: we broke your arms and we can do that again. ‘Sex activist’ was code for ‘whore’, a way to use my feminist work for women’s sexual rights to discredit and shame me.

In 2016 I was invited to speak at a literary festival in Sarajevo. I spent my last day in Bosnia paying respect to victims of that country’s war. A feminist journalist took me to Višegrad, where a hotel and spa that had been used as a rape concentration camp now boasts ‘healing spa waters’. There is no mention 16 at all of the horrors that were perpetrated against the two hundred Bosnian Muslim women and girls who were sexually enslaved there. My journalist friend also took me to Srebrenica, where a genocide committed by the Serbs killed 8000 Muslim men and boys. There is a memorial there, as there should be, with the names of the more than 6000 victims already identified. But there is no memorial for the women and girls in Višegrad. Men and boys get memorials, women and girls get nothing – no plaque, no sign of remorse, and no accountability. Neither the Serbian militia nor any of its soldiers have been held accountable for the atrocities they committed there.

The next year, in 2017, I joined a group of France-based antiracist activists in Rwanda for a commemoration of the genocide against the Tutsis. The Bosnian War and the genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda happened at around the same time. I was a journalist at Reuters News Agency in Cairo then and never imagined I would one day go to either of those countries about which I read news as it came across the wires. Those two wars shamed the international community so deeply, because the atrocities committed there were so clear and known and yet nothing was done to prevent them. And those wars were reminders that sexual violence against women was an integral part. Rape has always been used as a weapon of war; expected and too often accepted as such. The brave women who survived and spoke out about it forced us to reckon with horrors that too many prefer not to see.

My visits to sites of horrific violence in Bosnia and Rwanda shattered my heart. The sexual violence in Bosnia 17 and Rwanda were extreme versions of the systemic nature of patriarchy, but they must be connected to the violence inflicted on female activists in Egypt soon after our revolution, as well as what happened to me in Cairo on Mohamed Mahmoud Street in 2011. Sexual violence is an extreme manifestation of patriarchy, but women and girls around the world are subjected to more quotidian forms, of course. There aren’t enough pages to list all the ‘less extreme’ examples of patriarchy I or other women and girls experience daily.

For a story that starts at pilgrimage, it was ‘sin’ that brought fifteen-year-old me full circle: the sin of blaspheming against the god of Patriarchy. Christianity preaches the Seven Deadly Sins. The Gospel of Mona presents instead the seven necessary sins women and girls need to employ to defy, disobey, and disrupt the patriarchy: anger, attention, profanity, ambition, power, violence, and lust.

I call them ‘sins’, but of course they are not. They are what women and girls are not supposed to be or do or want. They are condemned as ‘sins’ by a patriarchy that demands we acquiesce to, not destroy, its dictates.

In the chapter on anger, I ask what the world would look like if girls were taught that they were volcanoes that could and should erupt to disrupt patriarchy. I examine how anger and rage are discouraged and broken out of girls and the ways in which that anger and rage are important in the fight against patriarchy. I also ask who is allowed to be angry, and I analyse how, depending on their race and class, some girls are punished for behaviour that is tolerated in others.

18 In my examination of attention, I insist that women and girls demand attention because we deserve it and must not shy away from it. The quickest and laziest way to discredit a woman is to accuse her of ‘attention seeking’. I explain the importance of defiantly declaring that we deserve attention, and why such a declaration is a powerful tool for disrupting patriarchy’s demands that we remain ‘modest’ and ‘humble’.

We must say ‘Fuck’. In the chapter on profanity, I insist on the power of profanity as a force in disrupting, disobeying, and defying patriarchy and its rules. In understanding why profanity is off-limits to women, I unpack the ways that girls are socialised into the straitjacket of being ‘nice’ and ‘polite’, and recognise the absurdity of patriarchy’s claim that our profane words are worse than the violence it subjects us to.

Why is ambition considered a ‘dirty’ word for women? Why does patriarchy teach girls and women that it is wrong to openly declare they want to be better than everybody else at something? And why – when they are better, when they are recognised as experts who are better than everybody else, must women play down or diminish their expertise and the ambition that propelled them to those levels?

What is a powerful woman? In the chapter on power, I insist on differentiating between power that dismantles patriarchy from power that is used in the service of patriarchy. Patriarchy has often thrown women crumbs in return for a limited form of power that often replicates the hierarchies that patriarchy has created. We must refuse those crumbs. We must bake our own cake. And we must define power in a way that liberates us from patriarchy’s hierarchies.

19 In the chapter on violence, I examine the right of women and girls to fight back against the crimes of patriarchy. Violence is a legitimate form of resistance in struggles against colonisation and occupation; it has long been accepted as just and necessary in such struggles. What about the struggle against a form of oppression that hurts half the world’s population? This book is not a road map for making peace with patriarchy. It is a manifesto to dismantle patriarchy and to end its crimes.

And finally, in examining lust, I emphasise the importance of a deceptively simple but revolutionary insistence: I own my body. Nobody else owns it: not the state, the street, or the home, not the church, mosque, or temple. I examine the importance and the power of expressing and insisting on desire, pleasure, and sex on our own terms. Wanting sex and expressing sexuality outside the teachings of heteronormativity are about a chaos and liberation that deeply threatens patriarchy. I examine the centrality of consent and agency to challenging patriarchy’s stranglehold over our bodies, and how queerness upends patriarchy’s insistence that it alone dictates not only who can have sex and how they can have it, but who can express desire and lust.

This is a moment for those who are not rich, white, or famous to be heard. It is a moment in which we must have a reckoning with patriarchy and in which we recognise how normalised its crimes are, as well as a reckoning with how it intersects with other forms of oppression like racism, classism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and bigotry. I am from many worlds, and I travel between many places. Throughout this book I will share voices and stories from across the world 20 about the ways women and queer people yell a big fuck-you to the patriarchy. We must listen and learn when women in South Korea hold monthly protests against ‘molka’ or spycam videos, which involve men secretly filming women in schools, offices, trains, toilets, and changing rooms. Those protests became the biggest ever women’s protest in South Korea, and we must listen and learn, especially to their placards that affirm ‘Angry women will change the world.’6 We must listen and learn when Argentinian women hold a general strike to protest violence against women, which has spread across Latin America and connects our right to be free from all forms of violence as well as our right to autonomy over our bodies, whether in sexual desire or access to safe and legal abortions. We must listen and learn when feminists and queer activists in Uganda march against murder and abduction. We must listen and learn when Irish feminists spark a revolution against the Catholic Church in their country by galvanising a nation to vote for abortion rights, and we must listen and learn when LGBTQ activists in India work across religious, ethnic, and caste lines to push their supreme court to finally decriminalise homosexuality by overturning an article in their penal code that was a legacy from the British colonial era.

We must listen and learn, and we must connect all these struggles as part of the global feminist revolution – what Argentinian activists call feminist internationalism.7

My work is about dismantling patriarchy everywhere. We must not waste this revolutionary moment fighting with each other about whose men are the worst or allowing bigots, 21 racists, or misogynists of any side to silence women. It has been good to see #ChurchToo expose sexual harassment and abuse in Christian sacred spaces in the United States. There have been similar exposés under #AidToo of men who work in the aid sector and also in the music and media industries, academia, and other fields.

I am not naive. I know too well that Muslim women are caught between a rock and a hard place. On one side are Islamophobes and racists who are all too willing to demonise Muslim men by weaponising my testimony of sexual assault. On the other side is the ‘community’ of fellow Muslims who are all too willing to defend all Muslim men – they would rather I shut up about being sexually assaulted during the hajj than make Muslims look bad. Neither side cares about the well-being of Muslim women.

In a world in which the president of the United States of America is a man who has boasted that when you are famous, women let you ‘grab them by the pussy’, and who maintains the support of white Evangelical Christians, it is dangerously delusional for his supporters to write to me – as they do – that Islam is to blame for the sexual assault I expose as part of #MosqueMeToo. They refuse to recognise that Donald Trump’s misogyny and the misogyny of Evangelical pastors whose abuse has been outed by #ChurchToo is the same misogyny women all around the world face each day. That misogyny is one and the same, and it is enabled and protected by patriarchy. We must make those connections so that our defiance, disobedience, and disruption of patriarchy can be as global as patriarchy.

22 Words like ‘feminism’ and ‘resistance’ are being drained of their meaning when we offer them up as band-aids that offer temporary relief to women and girls against the vagaries of patriarchy. I have had enough of giving women and girls ways simply to survive rather than tools to fight back. The danger and fear that should emanate from feminism and resistance must not be stamped out. Feminism should terrify the patriarchy. It should put patriarchy on notice that we demand nothing short of its destruction. We need fewer road maps toward a peace treaty with patriarchy and more manifestos on how to destroy it. The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls is my manifesto.

NOTES

1. Audre Lorde, ‘The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action’, in Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007).

2. Mona Eltahawy, Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015).

3. Libby Nelson and Sarah Frostenson, ‘A Brief Guide to the 17 Women Trump Has Allegedly Assaulted, Groped or Harassed’, Vox, 20 October 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/10/13/13269448/trump-sexual-assault-allegations.

4. Mona Eltahawy, ‘These “Virginity Tests” Will Spark Egypt’s Next Revolution’, Guardian, 2 June 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/jun/02/egypt-next-revolution-virginity-tests.

5. Mona Eltahawy, ‘The American Sisi’, New York Times, 20 January 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/presidential-inauguration-2017/the-american-sisi.

6. Jung Hawon, ‘“Spycam Porn” Sparks Record Protests in South Korea’, Agence France Presse, 4 August 2018, https://sg.news.yahoo.com/spycam-porn-sparks-record-protests-south-korea-063841341.html. 286

7. Ni Una Menos, ‘The Fire Is Ours: A Statement from Ni Una Menos’, Verso blog, 7 August 2018, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3966-the-fire-is-ours-a-statement-from-ni-una-menos.

23

— ONE —

ANGER

i will raise my voice / & scream & holler / & break things & race the engine / & tell all yr secrets bout yrself to yr face.

—ntozake shange,for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf1

One day when I was four years old, a man stopped his car on the street under my family’s balcony in Cairo, pulled his penis out of his pants and beckoned for me to come down. He did the same to my friend who had been talking to me from her family’s balcony across the street. I was so small that I needed a stool to see my friend from above the balcony railing.

I was enraged at that man, even though I was a child. How dare he ruin our reverie; two little girls, happy, oblivious to the street below, which was mostly quiet and therefore perfect for our cross-balcony afternoon conversations. It was our time together. How dare he interrupt us? 24

I waved my slipper at him to frighten him away. I believed I could shoo him away with just my anger. I absolutely believed in my rage, convinced that it could frighten away a grown man who had decided to stop his car underneath my balcony and wave his penis at two little girls. Who does that? In what world is that acceptable?

I honour that angry four-year-old girl. I honour her belief that she deserved to be free of molestation, free of interruption, free of a man who believed he deserved her time and attention. She was born with a pilot light of anger, tenacious and sure of its right to flare whenever treated unjustly. I believe all girls are born with that pilot light of anger. What happens to it as they grow into women?

What would the world look like if girls were taught they were volcanoes, whose eruptions were a thing of beauty, a power to behold and a force not to be trifled with? What if instead of breaking their wildness like a rancher tames a bronco, we taught girls the importance and power of being dangerous?

What if we nurtured and encouraged the expression of anger in girls the same way we encourage reading skills: as necessary for their navigation of the world? What if we believed that, just as reading and writing help a girl to understand the world around her and to express herself within it, expressing her anger was also a necessary tool for a girl making her way through life? Imagine a girl justifiably enraged at her mistreatment. Imagine if we acknowledged her justifiable anger so that a girl understood she would be heard if anyone abused her and that her anger was just as important a trait as honesty. 25And imagine if we taught a girl that injustice anywhere and against anyone was also worthy of anger, so that she developed a keen sense of compassion and justice and understood that injustice, whether personal or affecting others, was wrong?

What kind of woman would such a girl grow up to be?

We must teach girls that their anger is a valuable weapon in defying, disobeying, and disrupting patriarchy, which pummels and kills the anger out of girls. It socialises them to acquiesce and to be compliant, because obedient girls grow up to become obedient foot-soldiers of the patriarchy. They grow up to internalise its rules, which are used to police other women who disobey. We should not let patriarchy hammer girls into passivity. Well-behaved, quiet, acquiescent, and calm: no more.

From a very young age, girls are socialised, taught, and have it hammered into their consciousness that men and boys have a right to our attention, our affection, our time, and more. The child who demands her mother’s or an adult’s attention, barging into their conversations and turning the adults’ heads to see the child, is taught not to interrupt the grown-ups. But the courtesy is rarely returned, especially to girls. I was as angry at that man’s interruption of my time with my friend as I was at his exhibitionism.

One of the reasons I loved to stand on my stool and look out over the balcony was to see a grown-up who lived in my little friend’s building across our quiet street. The woman’s name was Mona (an adult who had the same name as mine!). My mother reminds me that every day a jeep would arrive 26to take Mona to her administrative job with the military at a nearby facility. I would watch Mona in her meticulous beige uniform in awe. My awe for military garb began and ended with adult Mona, because as an adult myself I am antimilitarism, but for four-year-old me, Mona the adult across the street was a woman with the same name as mine who looked like the most important person in the world. A jeep came to pick her up for goodness’ sake! I imagined that no one interrupted her as rudely and in such a predatory way as that man flashing his penis had to us girls. Just as I would grow up to understand the danger of military garb of any kind, I would also grow out of the naivete that had me imagining that the world afforded women an uninterrupted and assault-free life.