FEMINIST GIANT

Become a Sinner: Turning the 7 Necessary Sins into Action

Mona Eltahawy — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 16:25:26 GMT

FEMINIST GIANT Presents: The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls

Right wing movements and fascist regimes around the world increasingly target women and gender expansive people. Join award-winning feminist author and activist Mona Eltahawy for an eight-part course on ways to fight back by turning her groundbreaking feminist manifesto The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls, into Feminism in 3D: a day-to-day practise of Defying, Disobeying, and Disrupting patriarchy.

The Sins: Anger. Attention. Profanity. Ambition. Power. Violence. Lust.

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Become a sinner with Mona as she guides you on ways to create your roadmap of feminist resistance. Her seven necessary sins--The Gospel of Mona--will be your stepping stones, and the work of global feminist activists will be your signposts along the way. Her ability to connect feminist victories and challenges from around the world make her feminism an especially powerful way to resist right wing movements and fascist regimes

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Mona has reported and written on feminist movements and issues from around the world, including Egypt, China, Saudi Arabia, Bosnia, Mexico, Syria, Malaysia, and the USA, and has published three books so far, with more on the way. Her ability to connect feminist victories and challenges from around the world make her feminism especially pertinent today as right wing movements and fascist regimes increasingly target women and gender expansive people.

From “What is patriarchy?” to “How can I destroy it?” this course will inspire and incite you with the power of Feminism in 3D: Defy, Disobey, Disrupt.

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Using her own work, as well as feminist texts old and new, Mona will show you how to turn her manifesto into a movement, and to make feminism a daily and powerful form of resistance.

Eight 90-minute sessions starting on June 9, 2026. Sssions will start at 7:00 PM EDT. There are four tiers of tickets as well as a course workbook available with some tiers of tickets and for sale separately

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Thanks for reading FEMINIST GIANT! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. Her latest book is an anthology on menopause she edited called Bloody Hell!: Adventures in Menopause from Around the World. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.

I appreciate your support. If you like this piece and you want to further support my writing, you can like/comment below, forward this article to others, or send a gift subscription to someone else today.

Excerpt: How Many Rapists Must We Kill?

Mona Eltahawy — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 17:47:02 GMT

Via Beacon Press

Become a Sinner with Mona: The Course

This is an excerpt from the Violence chapter, The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls, Mona Eltahawy (Beacon Press, 2019)

Obviously, the most oppressed of any oppressed group will be its women … Obviously, since women, period, are oppressed in society, and if you’ve got an oppressed group, they're twice oppressed. So I should imagine that they react accordingly: as oppression makes people more militant … then twice militant, because they’re twice oppressed.

-- LORRAINE HANSBERRY, from “An Interview with Lorraine Hansberry by Studs Terkel,” May 12, 1959

Imagine if we declared war.

Imagine if we fuck-this-shit-snapped en masse, and systematically killed men for no reason at all other than for being men. Imagine this culling starting in one country with five men a week. Then each week, this imaginary scenario would add more countries and kill more men in each of them. Fifty a week, then one hundred men, then five hundred.

Imagine an underground movement called Fuck the Patriarchy (FTP), which would claim responsibility and warn that it was putting the world on notice that it would keep killing more and more men until the patriarchy sent a representative to talk. We do not want money, it would say. We do not want a new president or prime minister to replace the current one, this imaginary claimant of responsibility would say. We do not want a few more seats in parliament. We do not want a pay raise. We do not want men to promise to do the laundry or to promise to babysit their own children. We do not want a few more crumbs. So send your representative, patriarchy, this imaginary claimant of responsibility would demand (I can imagine the infighting that would ensue).

Its ultimatum: begin dismantling patriarchy or we will continue killing more and more men every week.

How many men would have to be killed -- for absolutely no reason whatsoever other than they were men -- for the world to wonder: “What the fuck is going on? Who is behind this madness? Who do we talk to so that this savagery can stop? Who do we invade, who should we bomb? What did men ever do to deserve this barbarity?”

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How many do you think must be killed before patriarchy begins to be disbanded? One thousand? Ten thousand? One million? Is it barbaric? Is it savage? Many millions of men have been killed in wars begun by men against other men. Imagine this our declaration of war against patriarchy.

How long would it take for the world to pay attention to the killings of men? When would it become a global emergency? A month? Five months? How many men would have to be killed -- for absolutely no reason whatsoever other than they were men -- for the world to wonder: “What the fuck is going on? Who is behind this madness? Who do we talk to so that this savagery can stop? Who do we invade, who should we bomb? What did men ever do to deserve this barbarity?” How many men would have to be killed before the representatives of patriarchy called an emergency summit to bring to a halt the senseless murders of their own? How many men must we kill until we get patriarchy to the table?

Violence -- daily acts of violence against women simply for being women -- benefits men. Patriarchy’s copyright over violence has terrorized us into fear and submission.

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How would men feel when they saw so many of their fellow men, murdered simply for being, like them, men? Would they change their behavior -- walk together for safety, avoid certain areas of town, make sure they were not out beyond a certain time? How would boys feel, knowing that their gender made them walking targets? How would it make their parents feel? Would it change the way they raised or treated their sons? Would it change the way the boys behaved?

That is an intentionally disturbing scenario, I know. But we are long overdue a fuck-this-shit snapping. It is as if men have hoarded the operating manual for violence, and from boyhood, have been taught the language of that manual, while girls and women are kept illiterate. Violence -- daily acts of violence against women simply for being women -- benefits men. Patriarchy’s copyright over violence has terrorized us into fear and submission. If every act of violence against women were reported on the news, it would be recognized for the epidemic -- the war -- that it is. Instead, only “especially” violent attacks are reported and not even all of those, which tells you that society does not care and/or is immune to them. A daily war is carried out against women, and yet it is not called “barbaric” or “savage.” We are supposed to learn to live with it, accommodate it, never fight it.

Well, enough. Why shouldn’t we declare war?

7 Necessary Sins (Ireland & UK)

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It is time for women to claim that same right to launch wars -- not between countries but against patriarchy.

7 Necessary Sins: The Course

Unless we impose on societal consciousness just how rife violence against women is and how it is ordinary men who commit it -- and not psychopaths -- it will continue to benefit ordinary men. Denial of that enables men to distance themselves from the violence. Whether any individual man has ever beaten up or raped a woman is beside the point, because such violence, which is enabled and protected by patriarchy, helps maintain a social construct that privileges all men. They are beneficiaries of that violence because that violence upholds patriarchy. It is the foundation of patriarchy.

Women’s violence is considered acceptable when it furthers the cause of patriarchy. The “nurturing” and “motherly” attributes that women are burdened with are essentially propaganda wrought by the patriarchy to keep things exactly as they are. When women rule in the name of patriarchy -- remember British prime minister Margaret Thatcher -- they are allowed to forgo “nurturing” and “motherly” reductionism and launch wars and pass into effect policy that benefits patriarchy. Countries boast when women begin serving in combat roles in their armed forces. They proudly announce when a woman makes it to a senior position, leading divisions and large numbers of troops. But the wars female combatants will fight are done so in the name of patriarchy; they promote a violence that only the patriarchal state claims a right to. It is time for women to claim that same right to launch wars -- not between countries but against patriarchy.

I stand in the disturbance and discomfort caused by the questions I've posted. I insist you do too, because women, girls, and nonbinary and queer people face more than disturbance and discomfort than we can imagine -- they are dying, and patriarchy shows little concern.

Not only are women socialized into submission, but we are told, essentially, not to be violent even as a form of self-defense but to wait until men can stop being violent toward us. When that would happen exactly is unclear and quite unrealistic, seeing as patriarchy has been using violence to keep us in line for centuries. We are told again and again that it is in man’s nature to be violent -- surely that should disturb and make those men who refuse violence understand that patriarchal constructs of masculinity confine them too. We are told that women are weak, passive, emotional, submissive, etc. Which women are those things, and which women are excluded from those stereotypes? It matters because race, class and gender all impact the ways women’s violence is punished. We have been socialized into acquiescence ostensibly for our own good.

So, again, how many men would need to be killed in that imaginary scenario for patriarchy to take us seriously? And for how long would we have to wage battle before patriarchy begins to be dismantled?

Are my questions absurd? Yes, deliberately so. But we all must ask the absurd questions to fully take in the scale of violence that women consistently endure. How many women must be killed, raped, beaten, and emotionally abused until we do? And is self-defense the only form of violence allowed to women -- if at all? These are disturbing questions I know. I stand in the disturbance and discomfort caused by the questions I've posted. I insist you do too, because women, girls, and nonbinary and queer people face more than disturbance and discomfort than we can imagine -- they are dying, and patriarchy shows little concern.

And that's how we must consider patriarchy: as a form of occupation, an oppressive force against which we have a right to use force to liberate ourselves. Is there an older form of occupation?

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Consider that many liberatory movements -- from the anticolonial to the anti occupation -- have used violence as a means to overturn systems of oppression and injustice. People have a right to resist. But which people? It is usually groups and movements led by men and including a few women whose roles are too often erased and conveniently forgotten after the revolution or liberation has succeeded, lest women remember that they, too, can use violence. We can’t have women thinking that they, too, know how to use weapons against oppressors! They might turn those weapons used against the foreign occupiers on their local patriarchal occupiers instead. And that's how we must consider patriarchy: as a form of occupation, an oppressive force against which we have a right to use force to liberate ourselves. Is there an older form of occupation?

If violence is the language that patriarchy understands, isn’t it time more women speak it, if only for their own safety?

“men do not fear retaliation for violence against women, whereas women do fear retaliation for their use of violence against men,” Mary Anne Franks

“Society would be better off as a whole if more women were willing to engage in justified violence against men, and fewer men were willing to engage in unjustified violence against women. To that end, women’s justified violence against men should be encouraged, protected, and publicized.” Those words, from the University of Miami School of Law professor Mary Anne Franks in a 2016 law review article, should be enshrined in our declaration of war against patriarchy.

In a necessarily honest and sharp appraisal of what she calls the asymmetry of violence between men and women, Franks explains, “While both men and women can, and do, use violence against each other, men’s violence against women is far more common, less justified, and more destructive than women’s violence against men.”

One of the reasons for that asymmetry is because “men do not fear retaliation for violence against women, whereas women do fear retaliation for their use of violence against men,” Franks explains.

EXACTLY THIS!

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I wanted him to remember that this average-height woman, whose ass he believed he could just reach out and grab without fear of retaliation, beat the fuck out of him. I wanted him to wonder -- if he ever dared again to want to grope a woman -- if she too, would beat the fuck out of him.

After I beat the fuck out of the man who groped me in a club in Montreal, I went home on a high. It was glorious. On Twitter, I described what happened under #IBeatMyAssaulter My tweets were soon shared thousands of times around the world. Women sent me not just support for what I’d done but also stories of the various times they, too, had beaten their assaulter. Years of rage fueled those punches I aimed at that man’s face. Like so many women, I knew -- because I had been subjected to it for years -- that men believe they can do as they like to our bodies without consequences. That was why I did not want to stop punching that man.

Each time I punched him I yelled, “Don’t you ever touch a woman like that again! Don’t you ever touch a woman!” I wanted him to know consequence. I wanted him to remember that this average-height woman, whose ass he believed he could just reach out and grab without fear of retaliation, beat the fuck out of him. I wanted him to wonder -- if he ever dared again to want to grope a woman -- if she too, would beat the fuck out of him. We must stop socializing women and girls not to fight back. Stop sending girls only to ballet class. Send them to class to learn to fight, too. I am not victim blaming. I am not placing the responsibility of being free from violence on women. I simply want men to know that women can dole out consequences. Patriarchy does not want us to be as fluent in violence as men are. And when we do dare to fight back, women feel patriarchy’s full and brutal punishment. And, as always, the more a woman falls between an intersection of oppressions, the worse her punishment.

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Women are the fastest-growing segment of the incarcerated population in the United States. According to the ACLU, as many as 90 percent of the women who are incarcerated for killing a man were battered by that same person and 79 percent of those in prison have suffered physical abuse before their arrest.

The national U.S. average prison sentence of men who kill their female partners is two to six years, while women who kill their partners are sentenced on average to fifteen years, despite the fact that most women who kill their partners do so to protect themselves from violence initiated by their partners.

“For a lot of women who do ultimately kill their abusive partners, it’s a last-gasp effort,” Robert Knechtel, chief operating officer of the Arizona-based Sojourner Center, one of the largest domestic violence shelters in the country. “Many women at the shelter don’t have the financial means to move out of the state and have an either neutral or negative relationship with the police.” That sentiment is echoed by Rita Smith, executive director of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence: “When a woman or minority is claiming they are defending themselves, they don’t get the benefit of the doubt. Most battered women who kill in self-defense end up in prison. There is a well-documented bias against women [in these cases].”

“The legal system is designed to protect men from the superior power of the state but not to protect women or children from the superior power of men,” Judith Herman

Women are the fastest-growing segment of the incarcerated population in the United States. According to the ACLU, as many as 90 percent of the women who are incarcerated for killing a man were battered by that same person and 79 percent of those in prison have suffered physical abuse before their arrest. Two-thirds of the women in jail are of color, and the majority of that population is also low-income, according to a 2016 Vera Institute of Justice report, Overlooked: Women and Jails in an Era of Reform. Further, according to the report, women represented just 13 percent of the jail population between 2009 and 2011, yet they represented 67 percent of the victims of staff-on-inmate sexual victimization.

“The legal system is designed to protect men from the superior power of the state but not to protect women or children from the superior power of men,” wrote the feminist psychiatrist Judith Herman in her book Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence -- from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror.

It is a never-ending vicious cycle of violence. We can’t win. So when are we going to terrify the fuck out of patriarchy and those who benefit from the rotten structures it has created?

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I don't want the state to protect me … I want to be free of patriarchy, not at its mercy.

How much longer are we going to wait?

How many rapists must women kill before rape is erased? Imagine if fifty, one hundred, five hundred women killed their rapists. What would the world look like if women openly declared that we would kill any man who raped us? How long would it take before men stopped raping us? How many rapists would need to be killed in order for men to stop raping women? How many rapists must be killed before a man thinks twice before raping or sexually assaulting women and girls? And I am not talking here of state-imposed death penalties. I am talking about the end of rape because men are sufficiently scared of women that they would never dare to rape or try to rape them. Again, this is not victim blaming. I insist we push the conversation until we get to the part where men fear women enough that rape becomes an anomaly. I don't want the state to protect me, because as I have stated several times already, protection from the patriarchy is conditional. I want to be free of patriarchy, not at its mercy.

Footnotes:

Women in Prison: An Overview

https://www.aclu.org/other/words-prison-did-you-know?redirect=words-prison-did-you-know#_edn43

When Battered Women Are Punished with Prison

http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/09/24/battered-women-prison/

Angela Corey’s Overzealous Prosecution of Marissa Alexander

https://www.thedailybeast.com/angela-coreys-overzealous-prosecution-of-marissa-alexander

Overlooked: Women and Jails in an era of Reform

https://storage.googleapis.com/vera-web-assets/downloads/Publications/overlooked-women-and-jails-report/legacy_downloads/overlooked-women-and-jails-fact-sheet.pdf

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Excerpted from The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls by Mona Eltahawy, (Beacon Press, 2019). Now available in paperback.

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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. Her latest book is an anthology on menopause she edited called Bloody Hell!: Adventures in Menopause from Around the World. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.

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Course: Sinning with Mona

Mona Eltahawy — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 18:28:39 GMT

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I wrote The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls as a manifesto to defy, destroy, and disrupt the patriarchy. My online course on turning that manifesto into action will arm you with your own roadmap for defiance, destruction, and defiance.

I am launching multiple ways to take courses with me. This intake form will help us figure out best ways to work together.

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Essay: What Does a Rapist Look Like?

Mona Eltahawy — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 13:25:12 GMT

Gisêle Pelicot, centre left, leaves the Avignon courthouse with her sons, David, left, Florian centre background, and her lawyer Stephane Babonneau, right, in Avignon, southern France, Sept. 5, 2024. (AP photo: Lewis Joly)

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First published on October 29, 2024

tw: rape

What does a rapist look like?

One of the most harrowing rape scenes I’ve seen in a television show lasted just a few minutes. The rape of Dr. Melfi in The Sopranos was in the stairwell of a parking lot. We did not see what her rapist looked like and the anonymity, speed and efficiency with which he attacked her made his violence even more horrific.

The bruises on her face and her hypervigilance during a session with Tony made clear what a victim of rape looks like. But her rapist was anonymous perp in a stairwell.

We know what a victim/survivor looks like. A popular refrain to counter men’s violence–be it verbal sexual harassment or sexual assault–asks “What if it was your mother/sister/daughter?” It’s an appeal to men that’s meant to kick in their protective instinct. And it makes it easy to see that the victim can be any woman you know. She is everywoman.

We joke that men discover feminism when they have a daughter. But why do I need to establish my relation to a man in order to be safe from another man?

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It’s an appeal to men’s sense of protection for their female relatives as a way of reminding them their victim is someone else’s mother/sister/daughter. We joke that men discover feminism when they have a daughter. But why do I need to establish my relation to a man in order to be safe from another man?

What we should be doing instead is remind everyone that a rapist could be your father/brother/son. That would make it easy to see that a rapist could be any man they know. He is everyman.

And that is what Gisèle Pelicot has done by insisting on a public trial for her now ex-husband Dominique and 50 men he invited to rape her after he had drugged her “almost to a state of coma.”

What we should be doing is remind everyone that a rapist could be your father/brother/son. That would make it easy to see that a rapist could be any man they know. He is everyman.

7 Necessary Sins for Women & Girls

Dominique had no trouble finding those men online. Between 2011 and 2020 they came to rape his wife and he filmed them. Those men on trial are grandfathers, fathers, brothers, partners. In fact, one of them missed the birth of his child because he was raping Gisèle at the time.

Who chooses rape over being at the birth of his child?

Someone’s father, brother, husband.

Over the past seven weeks since the trial began, Giséle–who has attended the sessions–has taken the stand twice. She insisted on a public trial because, as one of her lawyers Stephane Babonneau said at the start of the trial, “Shame must change sides.”

What she is doing is rare and brave. The world would be a better place if victims/survivors of rape did not have to remain anyonymous because of the shame and stigma associated, still, with sexual assault. It is difficult enough to report rape, be taken seriously by the police, and then go through a trial. Feminist psychiatrist Judith Herman accurately likens the trial to being sexually assaulted again.

“The legal system is designed to protect men from the superior power of the state but not to protect women or children from the superior power of men,” she writes in Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror.

Until that changes, we should hope, as Giséle said, that more victims/survivors of rape look to her as an inspiration, but we should not demand it.

“I wanted all woman victims of rape – not just when they have been drugged, rape exists at all levels – I want those women to say: Mrs Pelicot did it, we can do it too, Giséle said. “When you’re raped there is shame, and it’s not for us to have shame, it’s for them.”

We should listen to her words carefully. We should accept them for the rare gift that they are–an awful, ugly, terrifying gift. A gift that forces us to sit–as she has over the past seven weeks of horrific evidence–in the horror wrought by her husband and the men—fathers/brothers/sons—he invited to rape her.

A rapist is not just “someone met in a car park late at night” but “can also be in the family, among our friends,” Giséle said.

As she heard the evidence against one of her rapists after another, Giséle connected the mother/sister/daughter to the father/brother/son/partner, moving the former from the foreground to the background, because shame must change sides.

“When I saw one of the accused on the stand last week, who came into my bedroom and house without consent,” she said. “This man, who came to rape an unconscious, 57-year-old woman – I am also a mother and grandmother ... I could have been his grandmother.”

We should listen to her words carefully. We should accept them for the rare gift that they are–an awful, ugly, terrifying gift. A gift that forces us to sit–as she has over the past seven weeks of horrific evidence–in the horror wrought by her husband and the men—fathers/brothers/sons—he invited to rape her.

7 Necessary Sins for Women and Girls

The reality of rape beyond what films and television shows portray is far more horrific than that of the anonymous, efficient in his violence rapist of Dr. Melfi. The reality of rape, in the U.S. for example, is that 8 out of 10 rapes are committed by someone known to the victim, according to RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network), the largest anti-sexual violence organization in the U.S.

And the horror of knowing it is our fathers/brothers/sons/partner raping means a reckoning, long overdue, with how ordinary rapists are. As I write in every essay, it is in the interests of patriarchy and the ways it enables and protects male violence to portray rapists as monsters or psychopaths, rather than the ordinary men that they are.

The more men can distance themselves from the reality of what a rapist looks like, the more they benefit from the violence that patriarchy enables and protects. All men benefit from some men’s violence against women.

A rapist is not just “someone met in a car park late at night” but “can also be in the family, among our friends,” Giséle Pelicot

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Whether any individual man has ever raped a woman is besides the point at this stage because such violence--enabled and protected by patriarchy--helps maintain a social construct (women’s fear of men, and subservience to them) that privileges all men.

They are beneficiaries of that violence because that violence upholds patriarchy. It is foundational to patriarchy.

Women’s fear of that violence demands her constant deference, to all men. Not all men might be rapists, but enough are to fuel women’s constant deference and fear.

The more men can distance themselves from the reality of what a rapist looks like, the more they benefit from the violence that patriarchy enables and protects. All men benefit from some men’s violence against women.

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Reporting from the trial in Avignon for The Guardian, Angelique Chrisafis has done an outstanding job profiling many of the men accused of raping Giséle. It is chilling and horrifying to read how the men who readily accepted Dominique’s invitation to rape his drugged-out-of-her-mind wife were perfectly ordinary, aged between 26 and 74. They include a nurse, a journalist, a prison warden, a local councillor, a soldier, lorry drivers and farm workers.

They are not anonymous perp of the parking lot, pouncing on Dr. Melfi. It is chilling to read about their occupations and hobbies, mundane details that sharpen the horror of what they did. It is chilling to read that they are loved, that the women in their lives showed up to defend fathers/brothers/sons/partners.

Take Cyril B, 47, whose tearful older sister told the court: “It’s my brother, I love him. He’s not a mean person.” His partner insisted that he isn’t “macho” and that he had never forced her to do anything sexually that she wasn’t comfortable with.

Cyril B’s sister and partner were among the women–mothers, sisters, partners–who told the court–despite video evidence to the contrary–that their men were not capable of rape. Again, because it has been hammered into our minds that rapists are monsters, not the ordinary men we live with.

Just as shame must change sides, a shift must take place in the profile of the rapist that women are taught to fear and be wary of.

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Take Patrice N,

“A longtime female friend, who worked as an education expert, told the court that Patrice N had always been a ‘teddy bear’, ‘wasn’t even a skirt-chaser’ and wasn’t the type to rape,” Angelique Chrisafis wrote. “A care-worker, who 16 months ago became Patrice N’s girlfriend despite knowing he was charged with rape in the Pelicot case, said: ‘He treats me like a princess.’”

Beyond her refusal to accept the shame that patriarchy hangs around the neck of rape victims, beyond her bravery on insisting on a public trial and sitting in a courtroom where she is traumatised again and again by evidence of her rapes by men who in their majority deny they raped her, despite video evidence, Giséle Pelicot’s biggest gift to us is the unmasking of what a rapist looks like.

Just as shame must change sides, a shift must take place in the profile of the rapist that women are taught to fear and be wary of.

The profile of a rapist is long overdue an update.

He is not the anonymous rapist of Dr. Melfi in a stairwell, efficient in his speed and violence, faceless, unknown.

He is somebody’s father/brother/son/partner. He is the face we see every day across from us at our breakfast table, next to us in our beds, sitting next to us on the couch watching television. He is Everyman.

And he will treat you like a princess.

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Essay: In Appreciation of Vulvas and Vaginas

Mona Eltahawy — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 16:10:40 GMT

Vulva casts by artist Lydia Reeves via Instagram

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First published on April 23, 2022

The Arabic version of In Appreciation of Vulvas and Vaginas

Not only does patriarchy use the words used to describe our genitals as curse words, it punishes if we then use those curse words (that describe our body parts, remember) but even if we just use those words as they were intended, as anatomical words.

Headscarves and Hymens

Patriarchy wants to control vaginas, but it also wants to control who has the right to even say the word “vagina.” Not only that, patriarchy screams “decorum” when we dare to fight back. And exactly what was “so offensive” that Callton could not repeat it in mixed company? The word “vagina”? Or that an owner of a vagina was telling men trying to establish control over vaginas that she was fighting back? Was it the “no” of autonomy and agency that so offended? How dare a woman declare autonomy! How dare a woman demand agency over her own body! Or was it the suggestion of sex implicit in Brown’s “Mr. Speaker, I’m flattered that you’re all so interested in my vagina, but ‘no’ means ‘no’”? Is sex profane? Why is it profane? Or was it that by her allusion to sex, Lisa Brown was reminding everyone that the conservative opposition to abortion has less to do with a professed concern over fetuses and more to do with controlling and punishing women’s desire and sexual agency?

It is all of the above. And that’s why I insist on saying, “Fuck the patriarchy.”

Also 10 years ago, the Russian feminist collective and rock group Pussy Riot collective performed a renegade “punk prayer” inside Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour that eviscerated a host of patriarchs and their excesses, including but not limited to Patriarch Kirill I of the Orthodox Church and President Vladimir Putin and his authoritarian regime. Three of the performers were sentenced to two years in a penal colony as punishment. In a documentary made about Pussy Riot, several men interviewed made clear that the “offense” was not just profane lyrics that “insulted” Putin and the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, but also the word “pussy” itself in the name of the collective.

How dare women connect the patriarchy of their country’s authoritarian president to the authoritarianism of the patriarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church who support him; how dare they use a word that calls to mind vaginas and chaos? How dare they use a word that forces men to imagine not only a vagina but a vagina that rises up against patriarchy?! How dare women use a word that belongs to patriarchy—because, of course, pussies belong to patriarchy—as part of the name of their punk feminist collective that demands freedom for the pussy from patriarchy?!

Remember that when the patriarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church unites with the patriarchy of Putin, women, children, and LGBTQ people are hurt.

How dare women use a word that belongs to patriarchy—because, of course, pussies belong to patriarchy—as part of the name of their punk feminist collective that demands freedom for the pussy from patriarchy?!

7 Necessary Sins for Women and Girls

And just last year, let us remember on this World Vagina Appreciation Day, that as FEMINIST GIANT contributor Samiha Hossain pointed out in her Global Roundups, in at least two different countries, vulvas and vaginas were considered obscene and reasons for punishment. In Malaysia, the menstrual hygiene brand Libresse had to withdraw an ad featuring a vulva flower design after it was deemed a “dishonour to women” by religious conservatives. And in Russia, LGBTQ artist and activist Yulia Tsvetkova’s vagina-themed art online landed her in court on charges of “pornography.”

And it is not just cis-heternormative patriarchy that robs us of words for our gentials, uses those words as profanities against us, and punishes us simply for using the actual noun given to part of our genitals. As Myriam Gurba incisevely writes, white supremacy too lays claim to our pussies: from the “vanilla cream inner thighs (that) always led to bubblegum pink labia,” in the pornography she first encountered at an elementary school friend’s house, to the pink pussy hats of the Women’s March.

Remember that not all pussies are pink.

And if you think the older we get the more comfortable we are with talking about our vulvas, vaginas, pussies and cunts, you have not heard the silence about what happens to our genitals as we age, and specifically as we go through the menopausal transition. It is a silence that is compounded by ageism, and the shame and stigma that still surrounds talking about menopause and the ways it affects our bodies, especially our vulvas and vaginas.

It is why I wrote Moisturize Your Vagina, and why I opened and closed my essay with the reminder: When you are shameless, you cannot be shamed.

“It’s 2022, there are billionaires in space, yet 73% of women still don’t know the difference between the vagina and the vulva.”

Bloody Hell: Menopause Anthology

What, if not shame and ignorance of our genitals compounded by ageism, are the reasons that 68 percent of menopausal women surveyed by Bonafide have never used over-the-counter vaginal treatments, even though vaginal moisturizer can treat vaginal dryness and painful sex? Of the 58,703 people who have taken Kindra’s assessment quiz, 70 percent reported vaginal dryness as their top menopause concern, while 49 percent said painful sex was their top menopause concern.

“It’s 2022, there are billionaires in space, yet 73% of women still don’t know the difference between the vagina and the vulva,” Kindra said in a statement launching its Know Yourself, #VYourself campaign to destigmatize the use of the proper words that refer to our genitals. It said it was using the letter “V” in the name of a new product for sensitive vulvar and vaginal tissue in older bodies instead of “Vagina” or “Vulva” because “we face rejection and censorship when we use those anatomical words, even in a caption” on social media.

The vaginal moisturizers I use. RepaGyn is available in Canada and Revaree via Bonafide in the US.

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I am a big fan of products from both Bonafide and Kindra, including vaginal moisturizing suppositories by the former and a moisturizing lotion for my vulva by the latter. I have not accepted payment, free products, or reductions for mentioning any of the supplements I use. I mention them because they work for me and they do not contain hormones.

A cheaper alternative to these products is Kooch Quench by Fat and the Moon, which was recommended by a kind person on Twitter whose handle I can’t find.

The vulvar moisturizers I use by Kindra (L) and Fat and the Moon (R)

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On this World Vagina Appreciation Day, insist on using the proper words for your genitals. Claim the words and use them without shame. Do so with the understanding that it is revolutionary to insist on ownership of your body, it is revolutionary to refuse stigma and shame and to demand instead that the proper words are used to refer to your genitals.

Patriarchy insists on controlling our mouths and vaginas and, by extension, everything that enters and exits those orifices. Patriarchy insists that it and it alone can police those orifices. Patriarchy reserves for itself the power to offend, the power to be obscene, the power to name bits of our bodies when it wants and to determine their gender, to use them against us, and to punish us for daring to think that those parts of our bodies are ours, whether by name or in fact.

On this World Vagina Appreciation Day, my message to patriarchy is clear: stay out of my vagina, unless I want you in there.

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Essay: Home is Where the Hurt is

Mona Eltahawy — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 22:18:52 GMT

Dylan Martinez | Credit: REUTERS

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First published Sept. 6, 2024

CW: femicide, rape

Home is where the hurt is.

Private, hidden, that space cleaned and cared for by women, that space headed and ruled by men, that space where women are most endangered. And it is men they know, love or once loved, men they are related to, who most endanger women–not stranger danger but men they know.

Home is where Ugandan Olympic athlete Rebecca Cheptegei was set on fire by her partner (some news reports describe him as an ex-partner) Dickson Ndiema, during a disagreement on Sunday. He bought a can of gasoline, poured it all over her and set her ablaze. She was taken to hospital with 80 percent burns. She died there on Thursday. Her murder began at home on Sunday—three weeks to the day after she finished 44th at the Paris Summer Olympics.

Some call it “domestic violence.” But “domestic” is important only when it hurts men and the State--as in Domestic Terrorism.

Otherwise “domestic”--as in domestic violence--is not taken seriously. It is private, it is hidden, it happens in the realm of the home, that space cleaned and cared for by women, that space headed and ruled by men, that space where women are most endangered. Home is where the hurt is.

So we call it Intimate Partner Violence instead to shake off the air of privacy and denial, but even that is not enough to convey the horror.

So let’s call it what it is: terrorism. It is femicide: the killing of a woman or a girl by a man because of her gender, a killing which would not happen, but for her gender

If terrorism means politically-motivated violence intended to scare us into changing the way we behave, then surely femicide is terrorism. Patriarchy is the ideology; cis men are the terrorists.

Home is where the hurt is because home is where patriarchy has made cis gender men safe from scrutiny and secure that “domestic violence” remain private, hidden, in that space cleaned and cared for by women, that space headed and ruled by men, that space where women are most endangered.

The 7 Necessary Sins for Women & Girls

Home is the most dangerous place for a woman. Not the bush with a stranger waiting to pounce or a dark alley or whatever menacing place (Menacing for who? Menacing because of whom?) patriarchy threatens us with so that we can be good girls who stay home and safe. (Safe for who? Safe from whom?)

Home is where the hurt is because home is where patriarchy has made cis gender men safe from scrutiny and secure that “domestic violence” remain private, hidden, in that space cleaned and cared for by women, that space headed and ruled by men, that space where women are most endangered. Home is where the hurt is because home is where patriarchy has given cis gender men freedom to mete out whatever violence they wish on their possessions: furniture, women, or children.

Home is where Dominique Pélicot drugged his wife Gisèle, “almost to a state of coma,” and invited men to rape her. So comfortable was Pélicot in exercising his power over his wife of 50 years, his possession, that he filmed it - the 100 times that those other men raped her over a period of 10 years. So secure in Pélicot’s ownership of the body being offered to them, some of the rapists have denied the rape charges, arguing that they had the husband’s permission and thought that was sufficient.

Pélicot and 50 of those rapists are now on trial in France.

We only know about the rapes because Pélicot was arrested after a security guard caught him filming up the skirts of women in the local supermarket. Police found a file labelled “abuses” on a USB drive connected to his computer that contained 20,000 images and films of his wife being raped almost 100 times.

If terrorism means politically-motivated violence intended to scare us into changing the way we behave, then surely femicide is terrorism. Patriarchy is the ideology; cis men are the terrorists.

7 Necessary Sins (Ireland & UK)

Gisèle, who divorced Pélicot after he was arrested, wanted us to know all of this horror because she knows the ways that keeping the hurt that happens at home private and hidden only maintains patriarchy’s lie that home is where we are safe and sound.

The public prosecutor and the defendants' lawyers had asked for the trial to take place behind closed doors for reasons of “decency” and to protect all parties. Decency! Imagine! Protect? Who?

“She wants people to know what happened to her and believes that she has no reason to hide. No one can imagine that my client will find any satisfaction in exposing what she has suffered. She wants this hearing to be open so that justice can be done in public,” Gisèle Pélicot’s lawyer Stéphane Babonneau said. “Whether one likes it or not, this trial goes beyond the limits of this courtroom. And going behind closed doors also means asking my client to be locked in a place with those who attacked her.”

If terrorism means politically-motivated violence intended to scare us into changing the way we behave, then surely femicide is terrorism. Patriarchy is the ideology; cis men are the terrorists.

Every 11 minutes on average, during the time that it will take you to read this essay, a woman or girl is killed by an intimate partner or family member somewhere in the world, according to figures from UN Women, the agency promoting gender equality, and the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.

Clearly, the daily terrorism of girls and women is akin to the air we breathe – we take it as granted and we rarely think about it.

If every act of violence against women were reported on the news, it would be recognized for the epidemic -- the war -- that it is. Instead, only “especially” violent attacks are reported and not even all of those, which tells you that society does not care, or is immune and innured to them. A daily war is carried out against women, and yet it is not called “barbaric” or “savage.” We are supposed to learn to live with it, accommodate it, never fight it.

All men benefit from some men’s violence against women. They are beneficiaries of that violence because that violence upholds patriarchy. It is foundational to patriarchy.

Unless we impose on societal consciousness just how quotidian violence against women is and how it is ordinary men who commit it – and not some rare Minotaurian beast or a “psychopath” i.e. any other man but me– it will continue to benefit ordinary men. It does.

Dominique Pélicot “seemed like a classic man next door. He was a trained electrician, an entrepreneur and an avid cyclist.” The 50 men on trial with him include a local councillor, nurses, a journalist, a former police officer, a prison guard, soldier, firefighter and civil servant, aged between 26 and 73 at the time of their arrests.

Say it. Violence against women is everyday; ordinary men commit it.

Denial of that, enables men to distance themselves from the violence. Whether any individual man has ever beaten up or raped a woman is besides the point at this stage because such violence--enabled and protected by patriarchy--helps maintain a social construct (women’s fear of men, and subservience to them) that privileges all men.

All men benefit from some men’s violence against women.

They are beneficiaries of that violence because that violence upholds patriarchy. It is foundational to patriarchy.

Women’s fear of that violence demands her constant deference, to all men. Not all men might be rapists or abusers, but enough are to fuel women’s constant deference and fear.

I do not want to be protected from the violence of cis men. Keep your protection. Answer me this instead: How long must we wait for men and boys to stop murdering us, to stop beating us and to stop raping us? How many rapists must we kill?

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If we stand a chance of ending femicide the very destruction of that patriarchy must be acknowledged as the way to end the terrorism of cis men against women.

The ways patriarchy enables and protects cis men’s violence against women must be recognized for the ways it undergirds their violence.

Again, I do not want to be protected from the violence of cis men. Keep your protection. Answer me this instead: How long must we wait for men and boys to stop murdering us, to stop beating us and to stop raping us? How many rapists must we kill?

I want patriarchy to stop protecting violent cis men. I want an end to patriarchy.

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Essay: Hatred of Women as Policy

Mona Eltahawy — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 20:17:04 GMT

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks during a news conference at the Pentagon on June 22, 2025. Photo: Andrew Harnik.

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First published on Aug 24, 2025

In 2019, a researcher into the impact of digital cultures on anti-feminism and the far right told the New York Times that she had noticed a worrying trend in the online white supremacist subcultures she studies.

“What’s gaining more of a foothold is the idea of reversing a woman’s right to vote,” Annie Kelly said. “That was something I used to see in the overtly neo-Nazi spaces, but now I’m seeing it introduced in less extremist spaces. First introduced as a joke, of course, then as an acceptable policy that maybe not all users agree with but is worth discussing.”

On August 7, 11 days before the 105th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that granted women the right to vote, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reposted a video about a Christian nationalist church that included various pastors saying women should no longer be allowed to vote. One of the pastors argued that only men should cast household votes, and another said he supported scrapping the 19th Amendment altogether.

From neo-Nazi spaces to the man who is sixth in the succession line to the Presidency and runs the nation’s military, what was once considered inconceivable is nudging its way into the mainstream. This, in a country where the federally protected right to abortion has been reversed; and a major theme of the 2024 Presidential election (that gave Donald Trump his second term in office), was the fear of white women–the nation's largest voting bloc–that their husbands could find out who they voted for.

When asked about her boss’ position on women’s right to vote, Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson went into full lady who doth protest too much mode.

“Of course, the secretary thinks that women should have the right to vote. That’s a stupid question,” said Wilson, who has used her social media posts to spread antisemitic views and the far-right “replacement theory.”

Understand, these are not Hitler’s Nazis, rooted in 1940s Germany; they are the U.S. - baseball, hot dogs, apple-pie and Pete Hegseth.

7 Necessary Sins for Women & Girls

Today’s neo-Nazis are not just calling from within the (White) house; they are not only in the (White) house; they are running the White House and this administration. Understand, these are not Hitler’s Nazis, rooted in 1940s Germany; they are the U.S. - baseball, hot dogs, apple-pie and Pete Hegseth.

The 19th Amendment prohibited the denial or abridgment of the right to vote on the basis of sex. It wasn’t until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 which banned racial discrimination in voting that the promise of the 19th Amendment for Black and women of colour was made real.

In the U.S. today, both the 19th Amendment and the Voting Rights Act are in the crosshairs of the white supremacist Christian zealots who ushered Trump and Hegseth et al to power.

The center of the Venn diagram for all of this of course is Black and women of colour who have never taken for granted any right. Unlike the majority of white women, Black and women of colour have always always been at the crosshairs of the white supremacist patriarchy that is the beating heart of this country.

Hegseth’s endorsement of disenfranchising women is happening at a time when the “manosphere” delivered victory for Trump, and the right wing is now pushing the “womanosphere” to target young female audiences and deliver that demographic to the Republicans.

That is all happening at a time when Democrats are increasingly setting their sights on young men and how they can wrestle them away from the GOP.

Again, the center of the Venn diagram of harm here is specifically Black women, who are the most reliable bloc of voters for the Democratic Party.

It is they who Hegseth is targeting. White women voters vote Republican in their majority and have done so for decades. Hegseth knows that.

When he supports calls to disenfranchise women voters, he pushes forward on right-wing aims: the submission of white women to their husbands in the name of zealotry, recruiting white women’s wombs for the white supremacist obsession with declining birth rates, and disempowering Black women.

The majority of people in the U.S. don’t take seriously any of those aims. But Black women know very well the vicious gendered racism–misogynoir–that targets them.

So successful has white supremacist patriarchy been at convincing white women that they’re lucky to live in the U.S. and not Saudi Arabia or Iran, that so many of them did not pay enough attention to the theocracy that white supremacy was building right here, at home.

It was being built by men right here in the U.S. - white men who look like their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons–men who look like Pete Hegseth–not the scary brown men with beards.

And it was being built by white women who are your mothers, aunts, and sisters; white women like Pam Bondi, Karolyn Leavitt, Amy Coney Barrett, Kristi Noem et al, who are all too willing to foot-soldier for the patriarchy in return for its crumbs. Those same white women who helped destroy the right to abortion and who continue to do Trump’s bidding.

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White supremacist patriarchy so successfully lulled them into a delusion of “Be grateful you don’t live over there” that they sleep walked their way into the disaster that is now and over here.

The Associated Press said that Hegseth’s repost of a report by CNN examining Doug Wilson, cofounder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC) “illustrates his deep and personal connection to a Christian nationalist pastor with extreme views on the role of religion and women.”

Pentagon chief spokesman Sean Parnell told AP that Hegseth is “a proud member of a church” that is affiliated with CREC and he “very much appreciates many of Mr. Wilson’s writings and teachings.”

“Wilson’s church and wider denomination practice complementarianism, the patriarchal idea that men and women have different God-given roles. Women within CREC churches cannot hold church leadership positions, and married women are to submit to their husbands,” AP reported.

Since assuming the helm of the Defense Department, Hegseth has fired or moved to largely invisible roles at least five senior female service members, including Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Lisa Franchetti, Admiral Linda Fagan, commandant of the Coast Guard, and Vice Admiral Yvette Davids from her post as the first female head of the U.S. Naval Academy.

They are part of a growing list of women and Black and people of colour who served in top military roles who have been ousted as Trump and top officials conduct a purge of so-called "wokeness" in the military.

Hegseth has also stripped the name of a U.S. Navy veteran and gay rights activist from a ship and moved to return the last names of Confederate generals to U.S. Army bases.

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As an anarchist, I oppose the military everywhere, especially in the wealthiest and most powerful country in the history of the world. Being from a region of the world that has long felt the brute force of that military, I am aware of the crimes of that military in a way that many in the U.S. rarely pay attention to. Add to that a feminism that refuses to celebrate the patriarchal violence of war, regardless of the gender or race of the soldier fighting that war. That patriarchal violence is the reason that the biggest threat for many women in the military comes from sexual predators among their own ranks rather than the threat of enemy forces.

Hegseth shares none of those concerns with me. His opposition to women’s combat role in the military and his removal and reassignment of top military women is not due to concern over the alarming rates of “friendly fire” in the form of sexual assault from fellow servicemen and officers.

The man who runs the military of the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world is purging women and Black and people of colour from top military positions–and possibly the force in its entirety (who knows with Trump’s bootlickers) because he is a white Christian nationalist who believes in the supremacy of white people, specifically white men.

The Defense Secretary’s misogyny and racism predate his tenure. From his fetishisation of the Crusades to his violent history with women, that includes an accusation of rape that almost derailed his nomination, and an opposition to their combat roles in the military; nobody expected the former Fox and Friends host and Trump’s nominee to run the military to be progressive.

Combined with his ultra-conservative Christian nationalism, it has long been clear that Hegseth, like many of Trump’s Cabinet and hangers-on, is an enforcer of a white supremacist zealotry that is increasingly unabashed in the direction it insists on taking the United States. Just as the once marginal view that women should not be able to vote has moved from neo-Nazi outliers to support from the heart of the Trump administration, it is a reminder that when the right wing says it will do something, they do it, even though so many white people–the last to be hurt by those dangers–dminish or dismiss them.

Trump doesn’t always chicken out.

Many white people in the U.S. fail to see the danger of Hegseth et al because–as I have said in countless essays–it is difficult to see a zealot when he looks like you. It is also easy to overlook that danger when the zealot looks like you and you believe that your whiteness will save you from his harm.

Who is safe from Hegseth’s zealotry?

He has called for an “American Crusade” against the “internal” and “domestic enemies” of the U.S. and Israel. In his book, called American Crusade, he “describes leftists, progressives and Democrats as ‘enemies’ of freedom, the US constitution and America.”

That same Hegseth signed the order this week putting service rifles into the hands of National Guards soldiers now occupying the U.S. Capitol. Hegseth gave literal crosshairs to the military which has put figurative crosshairs onto women and Black and people of color.

I have written that if Hegseth were a Muslim, the U.S. would’ve invaded his country to save the “free world” from his jihad. Instead, he is re-forging and stamping the Pentagon with his zealotry.

Hegseth gave literal crosshairs to the military which has put figurative crosshairs onto women and Black and people of color.

7 Necessary Sins for Women and Girls

Days after Hegseth reposted to his personal X account the CNN segment on Doug Wilson (the pastor who says women should not have the right to vote and who counts Hegseth as a congregant at one of his churches), the Pentagon posted a recruitment ad showing paratroopers and soldiers in full tactical gear aiming rifles at an enemy in a desert meant to resemble one in the Middle East, complete with a Biblical verse.

U.S. Veterans say that Hegseth’s religiosity, and the ways it has influenced new recruitment ads and official US Department of Defense social media activities, was dividing the ranks and doing untold damage to the future of the U.S. military.

Hegseth’s sexism and racism are doing untold damage to an entire country that has never reckoned fully with the legacy of either forms of discrimination.

Pete Hegseth is a moseeba.

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This August marks the 105th anniversary of the 19th Amendment and the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), which the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) calls “the crown jewel of civil rights legislation.”

“In the past year alone, the ACLU was in federal court wielding this very law to ensure that Black voters have an equal opportunity to participate in the political process in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi,” the ACLU said. “These two realities capture where we are: celebrating the VRA's legacy, while fighting desperately to save it from destruction … increasingly, we’re fighting to save the act itself.”

Add to that the growing danger to women’s right to vote, as espoused most recently by a man who believes white men are superior to women and white people are superior to the rest of us.

The theocracy is here. It is now. Are you paying attention?

In Arabic, a language richer and more evocative than English, we have a word–Moseeba–that would require the marriage of disaster, chaos, catastrophe, mayhem, and the synonyms they would give birth to.

Pete Hegseth is a moseeba.

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Essay: If Pete Hegseth Was a Muslim

Mona Eltahawy — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 13:53:40 GMT

On his chest, Hegseth has a tattoo of the Jerusalem Cross. “That cross has a long history in Christianity but has lately been co-opted by some far-right groups as a symbol of the fight for Western civilization,” says Reuters. Photo:Instagram/Peter Hegseth

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First published on January 29, 2025

This is the latest in a series. Read also:

If Amy Coney Barrett Was a Muslim

If Marjorie Taylor Greene Was a Muslim

If Harrison Butker Was a Muslim

If Pete Hegseth was a Muslim, the U.S. would’ve invaded his country to save the “free world” from the Hegseth jihad. Instead, this white supremacist extremist crusader, rapist, drunkard, and abusive husband will be second in command running the most powerful and lethal military in history.

What will he do with it?

Hegseth, who has called for an “American Crusade” against the “internal” and “domestic enemies” of the U.S. and Israel, was nominated to his position by a President and Commander-in-Chief who is publicly itching to deploy that military throughout the United States. Who will save the people of the U.S. from an internal crusade of a military that already has an extremism problem?

Hegseth is a Christian zealot who believes that Islam is a natural, historic enemy to the West and has lamented growing numbers of American Muslims.

With white supremacist, sexual predator Donald Trump – a conduit for Christian zealots in the U.S. –in command of that military, who will save the world from the United States’ external fascist crusade?

The West lost the Crusades, by the way.

But you wouldn’t know it from the way Hegseth and other white Christian supremacists fetishise those atrocity-filled missions launched by Western Europe to take control of Jerusalem and other areas that Muslims ruled.

Those same white supremacists who love to call Islam and Muslims violent, whitewash the bloodthirsty history of their own religion. And more often than not, their anti-Muslim and Islamophobic diatribes are barely disguised envy at what they accuse Muslims of doing and being that they wish they could do and be.

In a review of his books by The Guardian, the newspaper says that Hegseth, who has the crusader motto “deus vult” tattooed on his arm, “has put bigoted anti-Muslim rhetoric at the center of several of his published books,” and “especially in 2020’s American Crusade, depicts Islam as a natural, historic enemy of the west; presents distorted versions of Muslim doctrine in ‘great replacement’-style racist conspiracy theories; treats leftists and Muslims as bound together in their efforts to subvert the US; and idolises medieval crusaders.”

“‘Deus Vult’ is a Latin phrase meaning "God Wills It," a rallying cry for Christian crusaders in the Middle Ages,” says Reuters. Photo: Instagram/Peter Hegseth

Refer a friend

The New Yorker has reported that a complaint filed during his time leading he veterans group Concerned Veterans for America says that during the CVA’s Defend Freedom Tour, Hegseth and someone traveling with the group were in a bar when they started chanting “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!” in what the complaint described as “a drunk and a violent manner.”

Far right white Christian zealots like Hegseth hate Muslims and want to be as zealous as they imagine Muslims to be. As per the popular proverb: every accusation is a confession.

“At times he seems to admire what he imagines to be the thoroughgoing religious zealotry of Muslims compared with an increasingly secular west,” says The Guardian.

The newspaper highlights this quote from Hegseth’s American Crusade: “Almost every single Muslim child grows up listening to, and learning to read from, the Quran…Contrast this with our secular American schools – in which the Bible is nowhere to be found – and you’ll understand why Muslims’ worldview is more coherent than ours.”

Whether Hegseth and his white Christian Crusaders or ISIS and other jihadis, the control of women is another thing they can see reflected in each other.

Headscarves and Hymens

It gets worse. See this from Jasper Craven’s profile for Politico, headlined Pete Hegseth’s Crusade to Turn the Military into a Christian Weapon.

“In his 2016 memoir, In the Arena, Hegseth says he relates to an online image of a triumphant ISIS fighter — a Quran in one hand, an AK-47 in the other: ‘With God on his side and the wind at his back, he is a conquering warrior,’ Hegseth writes. ‘He is fighting for something greater than himself. He is fighting for his God.’”

Craven continues.

“In this photo, Hegseth sees a warped version of himself. ‘I recognize that fighter, even though I’ve never met him. I am drawn to him because I relate to him,’ he writes. ‘I deplore what he stands for, what he does and how he does it. He is a soldier of hate, subjugation and sheer evil. But I understand his passions.’”

I can assure you that most people who’ve been subjected to the brute force of the U.S. military’s forever wars and invasions, believe that Hegseth and others who’ve fought and killed for that military are “soldier(s) of hate, subjugation and sheer evil.”

White people in the U.S. are able to see zealotry and its dangers only when it doesn’t look like them. Hegseth has one upped that. He sees the dangers of an ISIS fighter’s zealotry and says “Kudos! But he’s a savage and I’m God’s warrior.”

7 Necessary Sins for Women & Girls

And whether Hegseth and his white Christian Crusaders or ISIS and other jihadis, the control of women is another thing they can see reflected in each other. With a dangerous twist.

Far right white supremacists, including Hegseth, are obsessed with the racist and sexist conspiracy “replacement theory” that “is predicated on the notion that white women are not having enough children and that falling birthrates will lead to white people around the world being replaced by nonwhite people.”

“In their minds, in this clash of civilization, white men are in a weaker position because their women are not doing the work of reproducing,” Arun Kundnani, a professor at New York University, told the New York Times.

“They are saying, ‘Look, Muslims have got their women where they need to be, and we’re not doing a good job at that,’” Kundnani, author of “The Muslims Are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism and the Domestic War on Terror,” said.

Someone call Vice President “I want more babies in the U.S.” Vance.

In the U.S. the majority of white voters–men and women–voted for Trump and the white christian crusader fascism he is unleashing.

7 Necessary Sins (Ireland & UK)

I’ve written often about why white people in the U.S. are able to see zealotry and its dangers only when it doesn’t look like them. Hegseth has one upped that. He sees the dangers of an ISIS fighter’s zealotry and says “Kudos! But he’s a savage and I’m God’s warrior.”

Hegseth and his fellow crusaders are the recruitment material of the very jihadis that they themselves use to recruit for their own fascist hate groups, with this major difference: No Muslim voted for Osama Bin Laden or his al-Qaeda jihadis, no Muslim voted for the Taliban, no Muslim voted for ISIS.

But here in the U.S. the majority of white voters–men and women–voted for Trump and the white christian crusader fascism he is unleashing–not creating, because he is the fruition, not an aberration or a sudden appearance. The majority of white voters chose Trump knowing exactly what he was and would bring.

Just as Donald Trump is not an aberration, but rather a fruition of decades of white supremacist, misogynist, bigoted rot, so too is Hegseth a product of those hatreds and tacit approval that white, Christian zealots get in this country. You might think his pass was revoked when he was reported as an “insider threat” for his Crusades and Jerusalem Cross tattoos and withdrawn from Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration, but Trump, and Congress in confirming him, rewarded his hate and zealotry.

The ISIS warrior that Hegseth admires and hates at the same time, targeted more Muslims than western targets. And you would be foolish to think Hegseth–who “has written in a book that he could imagine a scenario in which the US armed forces would be used violently in American domestic politics”–is any different.

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And for those white people who didn’t vote for Trump–they know a Hegseth, or a Vance, in a father, brother, husband, uncle, or name the relative they tolerate, barely; they know the daily patriarchy of those fathers, uncles, brothers, boyfriends, and husbands. But they have not confronted them.

Those white people who didn’t vote for Trump should understand that those Hegseths in their lives are more than willing to confront those white Americans who do not take their threat seriously. What was January 6, after all?

And for more context, that even Crusader Peter would understand: the ISIS warrior that he admires and hates at the same time, targeted more Muslims than western targets. And you would be foolish to think Hegseth–who “has written in a book that he could imagine a scenario in which the US armed forces would be used violently in American domestic politics”–is any different.

“Throughout his work, and especially in 2020’s American Crusade, Hegseth paints an apocalyptic picture of American politics, and encourages his fellow rightwingers to see their opponents as an existential threat,” says The Guardian.

In American Crusade, Hegseth “describes leftists, progressives and Democrats as ‘enemies’ of freedom, the US constitution and America, and counts Israel among the ‘international allies’ who can help defeat such ‘domestic enemies,’” The Guardian continues.

White conservative men just want to control their women the way they think Muslim men do. White liberal men think they’re better than that, but scratch the surface, and find a subterranean sexist.

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When you only see the dangers of zealotry of those who don’t look like you, the danger right here right now of the zealots who look like you–the ones who will storm your capital, try to overturn an election, and in the case of Pete Hegseth, redraw an ahistorical version and mashup of the Crusades and the U.S. Civil War to justify their violence against enemies over there and here–will go unnoticed and unchallenged for so long because that danger looks like you, your father, brother, husband and son.

White conservative men just want to control their women the way they think Muslim men do. White liberal men think they’re better than that, but scratch the surface, and find a subterranean sexist, and white liberal men are rarely in anyone’s crosshairs.

And now Crusader Pete’s American Crusade is coming for you too. Not just Muslims but anyone not a fascist zealot like him.

Refer a friend

I used to say that unless the United States develops the stomach for a long-overdue reckoning with the white supremacist Christian theocracy that has been unabashed in its destruction of Roe v Wade, abortion rights will not be the only rights it destroyed. And now, it is too late.

The U.S. is a deeply conservative country that is in denial over the power and influence that Christianity exerts. And that power and influence, along with racism and misogyny are at the core of the ascendancy of Trump et al.

The same arrogance and naiveté that made so many white Americans think Trump would never become president the first time around let alone again is that same arrogance and naiveté that made so many think "it would never happen here" about abortion bans, is the same arrogance and naiveté that made so many of you point to your uncles in Georgia, or grandparents in Florida to blame, the same arrogance and naiveté that convinced you fascism would never come for you too.

And now Crusader Pete’s American Crusade is coming for you too. Not just Muslims but anyone not a fascist zealot like him.

So successful has white supremacist patriarchy been at convincing white women especially that they’re lucky to live in the U.S. and not Saudi Arabia or Iran, that so many white women did not pay enough attention to the theocracy that white supremacy was building right here at home.

It was being built by white men who look like their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons, not the scary brown Muslim men with beards, right? It was being built by mediocre white men who look like Pete Hegseth, whose zealotry is a smug shield against accountability.

Because after all, he’s a religious, godly man - how dangerous could he be? they think.

And now a man who is a rapist and a drunk will run a military that already suffers a sexual assault epidemic. Women in the U.S. armed forces comprise only 16.5 percent and yet nearly one in four U.S. servicewomen reports being sexually assaulted, and more than half report experiencing harassment.

Every white person in the U.S. knows a version of Crusader Pete in their family or workplace. He is the fascist that looks like them and the zealot who is right here. And he will turn the military on you unless you develop that stomach and spine needed to fight him, to see the fascist who looks like you for the danger that they are.

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Essay: Fuck Fascism

Mona Eltahawy — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 14:27:25 GMT

Rep. Al Green disrupting Trump’s address to Congress. Win McNamee/ Andrew Harnik/ Getty Images

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First published on March 07, 2025

Also read: Why Trump Won

And: Dear White Democrats

Fascism is not polite. Fascism is not civil. Fascism cares little for decorum.

When Rep. Al Green disrupted Donald Trump’s address to Congress, he issued a challenge that many lawmakers in that chamber failed. This is not business as usual, Green’s protest declared, as Trump spewed one lie after another. Instead of following Green’s lead, the majority of that chamber’s legislators–who collectively represent one of the three branches of power in the United States–acquiesced instead to applause, if they were Republican, and decorum, if they were Democrats. The Republicans in the chamber fell into a loud chant of “USA! USA! USA!” to suggest that Green’s protest was less American, less patriotic than their parroting chant.

Whether we are urged to be civil to racists, polite to patriarchy, or obedient to decorum when opposing a fascist, the goal is the same: to maintain the power of the racist, to maintain the power of patriarchy, to maintain the power of fascism.

Not only was Rep. Green kicked out of Congress for his protest of Trump, but he was censured the next day for “a breach of proper conduct.” It is telling that there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that describes lies as a “breach of proper conduct,” nor does it lay out a way to punish a fascist for targeting Black and people of colour, transgender people, and women as he dismantles a country for the benefit of oligarchs.

Unsurprisingly, the majority of those who voted to punish Green were Republicans, Shamefully, ten Democrats signed on to humiliate Green, only the 26th representative to be censured in U.S. history.

Whether we are urged to be civil to racists, polite to patriarchy, or obedient to decorum when opposing a fascist, the goal is the same: to maintain the power of the racist, to maintain the power of patriarchy, to maintain the power of fascism.

7 Necessary Sins for Women & Girls

Demanding we stay within the confines of decorum even as a fascist fuck occupies the White House is the height of white privilege—the privilege of those least hurt by that fascist fuck. The obsession with civility and decorum in the United States is bipartisan and white.

Rep. Green is a Black man. And the few Democrats who, subsequent to his protest walked out of Trump’s speech, were mostly Black and people of colour. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a Black woman who like Green represents Texas, was among those who walked out. Unlike the white women Democrats who wore pink ostensibly in protest during Trump’s speech but to decided to stay put, Crockett and those who walked out wore black t-shirts with messages such as “Good Trouble,” “Resist,” and in Crockett’s case, a t-shirt honouring Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman in Congress, along with Chisholm’s famous catchline, "unbought and unbossed."

"He's up there, he's spewing all kinds of nonsense and bullshit, let me just be real, and we weren't just going to sit for that shit," Crockett told her followers in an Instagram reel.

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Rep. Crockett has been profoundly and powerfully profane when addressing the danger of Trump and his oligarch BFF, Elon Musk.

Over the past few weeks, she has told Musk to “Fuck off,” and refused the forced deference of civility when dealing with the incivility of fascism in the U.S.

Dictators, authoritarians, patriarchs demand obedience, despise disruption, and are especially angered by disrespect. In fact, they consider any form of accountability itself a form of disrespect. How dare we question them? How dare we expect justice? How dare we dare to be anything but quivering and fearful? How dare we tell them to fuck off, for any reason at all.

We are not obligated to show respect to those in power.

Fascism isn’t an “idea” to be debated. We--whose lives are directly threatened by that fascist fuck in the White House—are expected to behave and play along. Profanity is an essential tool in disrupting racism, patriarchy, and fascism, and the “rules” and “codes of conduct” that those systems of oppressions delineate. Profanity, which includes defiance, disobedience, and disruption, is the verbal equivalent of civil disobedience.

Fuck decorum at a time of fascism.

Dictators, authoritarians, patriarchs demand obedience, despise disruption, and are especially angered by disrespect.

7 Necessary Sins (Ireland & UK)

When Donald Trump was first elected, many truths that white Americans were oblivious to - willingly or naively - were forced onto their consciousness. It was impossible to deny that racism and white supremacy were a driving force behind his election and yet analysts and pundits insisted it was the “suffering working class” and “economic anxiety,” as if Black and people of colour who were working class were immune from suffering or economic anxiety.

Those of us who called out his fascism when he was first elected in 2016 were mocked or scolded as over-exaggerating a threat that was clear for all who wanted to see it, if they accepted removing (white) blinkers.

Many white people in the U.S. exclaimed “This is not the America I know” precisely because they had refused to or had never had to come face to face with that racism and white supremacy. Those of us who are not white and who have experienced that racism and white supremacy all too well have long known that America.

Gaslighting - a form of psychological abuse that aims to make someone doubt their own thoughts, beliefs and perceptions - and denial went on full throttle as talking heads, politicians, media, etc went out of their way to blame everything but racism for the success of Trump at the polls. Moreover, we - those of us who insisted on calling racism and white supremacy what it was rather than a series of euphemisms - were urged not to call a racist a racist and we were instructed to be civil when arguing with Trump supporters. Even Trump’s lies were described with euphemisms by mainstream U.S. media. For the sake of a host of concerns - unity, free speech, healing, etc - civility was held up as paramount.

But paramount to whom? Who does “civility" serve?

And now Trump has been reelected–again thanks to racists and white supremacists–and his fascism is unmasked and unfettered while those still wearing their (white) blinkers are stubbornly wedded to decorum and civility.

Cowards. Capitulators. Quislings.

And now Trump has been reelected–again thanks to racists and white supremacists–and his fascism is unmasked and unfettered while those still wearing their (white) blinkers are stubbornly wedded to decorum and civility.

Bloody Hell! Adventures in Menopuase

Clearly, those who insist on decorum and civility in the face of its very opposite, are those least affected by the incivility that Trump represents. They have power and they have privilege, both of which cushions them from that incivility. It is imperative to recognize that we are not playing on a level playing field. I refuse to be civil or to play by decorum with someone who refuses to fully acknowledge my humanity.

Who determines what is “civil” and what is “rude”? Who benefits from upholding those social codes that insist on decorum? In a time of fascism, politeness is capitulation.

In my book The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls, I devote a chapter to Profanity. A large chunk of that chapter is devoted to Dr. Stella Nyanzi, a Ugandan scholar, poet, and human rights activist whose glorious insistence on profanity in the face of authoritarianism offers a masterclass for those of us willing to defy, disobey, and disrupt.

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Nyanzi is currently in Munich as part of a writer-in-exile programme run by PEN Germany. Before she left Uganda, that country’s dictator had imprisoned her twice for essentially telling him to fuck off. During her sentencing, she famously yelled “Fuck you fuck you fuck you” and bared and jiggled her breasts.

Pause for a minute and reflect: how does one woman and her Facebook posts and poetry threaten a man who has ruled for over three decades? Nyanzi is a writer whose language is deliberate. She understands the agility of words and their ability to disturb the powerful and their networks of wealth and privilege.

And she comes from a tradition of “radical rudeness” that serves a historical reminder of who determines what is “civil” and what is “rude” and who benefits from upholding those social codes that insist on decorum.

White Christian Victorian values imposed on colonized people with the spread of the British and other empires a narrow set of values, of what is and is not “decent” and “respectable.” It was against that set of values that “radical rudeness” was used by activists in colonial Uganda.

In an article in the Journal of Social History, published by Oxford University Press, historian Carol Summers explains that activists in 1940s colonial Uganda, especially in the kingdom of Buganda, defied, disobeyed and disrupted power - both of the British colonizers and their local allies - via “a rude, publicly celebrated strategy of insults, scandal mongering, disruption, and disorderliness that broke conventions of colonial friendship, partnership, and mutual benefit.”

In the 1940s, it was British colonizers - the white supremacists, fascist, patriarchs of their day - and the networks of power they facilitated.

To place Nyanzi’s deliberate profanity within the historical Ugandan context - and to understand the disruptive power of rudeness then and now - it is instructive that what made the rudeness of the “disorderly, intemperate and obnoxious” Buganda rebels “more than just adolescent immaturity … was that it was rooted in an understanding of the significance of social rituals, constituted a strategy to disrupt them, and was tied to an effort to build new sorts of public sociability to replace the older elite private networks.”

Stella Nyanzi leaving court in February after her release. She donned a tiara and a sash that read “FUCK OPPRESSION” and began to address crowdsPhotograph: Sumy Sadurni/AFP via Getty Images.

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In other words, it is imperative to understand how civility, decorum, manners, etc are used to uphold authority - patriarchy, racism, fascism, other forms of privilege - and that we are urged to acquiesce as a form of maintaining that authority.

“People have said to me: perhaps radical rudeness will not oust Museveni. And I say: perhaps the intention is not to use rude poetry and big breasts in public to oust Museveni; perhaps the idea is to invite others to be able to poke holes in this huge over-glorification of a mighty, untouchable demigod and, if many of us are poking small holes, perhaps the mighty trunk of the tree will fall. I don’t know,” Nyanzi told The Guardian. “Many do not approve. But I’m not looking for approval.”

Whether we are urged to be civil to racists or polite to patriarchy or to obey decorum, the goal is the same: to maintain the power of the racist, to maintain the power of patriarchy, to maintain the power of the fascist.

Fuck that shit.

Defy, disobey, and disrupt like Rep. Green. In a time of fascism, choose radical rudeness.

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Essay: What the Fuck is Wrong With Men?

Mona Eltahawy — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 16:32:30 GMT

Adrien Brody and Kieran Culkin at The Oscars. Photo: Frank Micelotta/Disney via Getty (2)

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First published on March 11, 2025

What the fuck is wrong with men?

I know that’s a bizarre question coming from Ms. Fuck the Patriarchy, but twice in two days I’ve had run-ins with misogynist fucks, and when I’ve told female friends about them, they’ve shared their own “What the fuck is wrong with men?” encounters. I know this is anecdotal, but I also know the answer to my own question.

Donald Trump.

When the most powerful man in the country is a sexual predator who mainlines misogyny and whose hiring criteria for his cabinet requires the assault of women as the primary if not the only skill of the men he surrounds himself with, then he gives a blaring, glaring greenlight to men everywhere that they can treat us like shit and face no accountability. Worse–that they can treat us like shit and be rewarded for it.

Misogyny wins!

When Vice President Childless Cat Ladies posits women’s happiness firmly within the confines of a heterosexual marriage that she cannot leave (J.D. Vance wants to end no-fault divorce), where she is financially dependent on her husband (Vance believes working outside the home brings women misery) for whom she pops out one baby after another (the destruction of Roe v Wade and a possible abortion ban will usher in forced births as a national norm), he gives a blaring, glaring greenlight to men everywhere that women are the walking incubator property of men.

Misogyny wins!

When during the apex of the U.S. cultural elite known as the Oscars not one but three Oscar winners treated women like walking incubators for their progeny (Kieran Culkin channeled Vance by reminding his wife that she promised him babies as rewards for an Emmy and an Oscar), a trash can for their used gum (Adrien Brody literally took the gum out of his mouth and tossed it to his partner to catch before he accepted his speech and bloviated forever while saying nothing), and hapless and incapable ditzes and not the Oscar winning animators they are (Hossein Molayemi literally grabbed his wife and co-director Shirin Sohani’s smartphone out of her hand to read word for word what she had just said already) then it gives a blaring, glaring greenlight to men everywhere that women ain’t shit.

Misogyny wins!

And while misogyny got a repeat performance at the Oscars, not a single person at that apex of the U.S. cultural elite said a peep about the fungus that is fascism seeping into every crevice of U.S. life.

When the big men all repeat the same message–Misogyny wins!--it is no wonder that ordinary little men not only listen but flex their misogyny muscles on women they encounter in their day-to-day lives in a desperate attempt at power and relevance.

When sexual predators and sex traffickers aka the Tate Brothers are released from Romanian jail at the behest of President Grab Them By the Pussy (game recognises game, hey?), and are welcomed “home” to the U.S., it gives a blaring, glaring greenlight to men everywhere that this country is the United States of Rapists.

Misogyny wins!

It’s like Nick Fucking Fuentes’s “Your body, my choice,” has cloned itself into these walking specimen of women haters–the “manosphere” on legs and in 3D, not just trolls online.

Both my run-ins with misogynist fucks were with white men in New York City.

And while Black and men of colour who vote for Trump allow their gender to trump their race, in an attempt to align with and benefit from proximity to white men’s misogyny, it is white men who can most confidently strut their hatred of women in the country unscathed

7 Necessary Sins for Women and Girls

The majority of men voted for Trump in 2016 (52 percent) and 2024 (55 percent). While a minority of Black men voted for Trump in 2024, more voted for him in 2024 than in 2016. Trump’s appeal to Black men has only increased. In 2024, over half of Latino men voters chose Trump, a significantly greater number than in 2016.

And while Black and men of colour who vote for Trump allow their gender to trump their race, in an attempt to align with and benefit from proximity to white men’s misogyny, it is white men who can most confidently strut their hatred of women in the country unscathed–nay, not just unscathed, but also to be heaped with rewards.

Clearly, Trump the rapist and racist, President “protector of women, whether they like it or not.” appeals to more than just white people, and that is alarming, even if the men of those marginalised groups comprise a minority of voters in the U.S.

When the big men from the president and his deputy, to Oscar winning actors and directors, to influencers with massive followings all repeat the same message–Misogyny wins!--it is no wonder that ordinary little men not only listen but flex their misogyny muscles on women they encounter in their day-to-day lives in a desperate attempt at power and relevance.

This is a time for and about conservative cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied white men. The world those men want is a world that benefits only them. Anyone else–even the cisgender Black and men of colour who voted for Trump–will inevitably fail to be whitewashed or fail upwards.

7 Necessary Sins (Ireland & UK)

Trump and the circus around him whipped up a fervour of misogyny, not just against Kamala Harris but against women generally, cisgender and trans, that was breathtaking in its boldness and shamelessness. Add to that a fevered Christian fundamentalism that targeted LGBTQ communities and anyone who didn’t belong in the patriarchal hellscape of President Grab Them by the Pussy and his Vice President Childless Cat Ladies.

But as all the examples above show, this is a time for and about conservative cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied white men. The world those men want is a world that benefits only them.

Anyone else–even the cisgender Black and men of colour who voted for Trump–will inevitably fail to be whitewashed or fail upwards.

When the State effectively tells you that you are a walking incubator, the men you live with at Home, treat you as one.

Signed copies of Bloody Hell!

It is why I always say pay attention to the Trifecta of Patriarchy–State, Street, and Home. I coined the phrase while writing about the revolutions across the Middle East/South West Asia and North Africa. I found that whenever I mentioned the importance of women’s liberation, men often told me “This isn’t the time.” As if our liberation is a distraction or a sideshow to the main attraction aka men.”And besides, the State oppresses us all,” those men would tell me. To which I would always reply that while the State oppresses everyone, men and women, the State, the Street, and the Home together oppress women, creating a Trifecta of Patriarchy.

When the highest institutions in the land such as the Supreme Court and Congress are controlling women—cis, trans, and effectively everyone who is not a wealthy, able-bodied, conservative Christian, cisgender, heterosexual white man—reining them in, and putting them in their place through laws that curb and control our bodily autonomy, it gives a blaring, glaring greenlight to men that they too can curb and control us.

When the State effectively tells you that you are a walking incubator, the men you live with at Home, treat you as one. When the president and the men who surround him are sexual predators who faced little to no consequence for their violence against women, the men who walk our Streets expect a similar impunity for their violence towards us. When right-wing politicians–from the president to the Texas legislature–target and punish transgender people, especially trans women, that hatred is echoed, often violently, in the Street and the Home.

Men try to control women every day. That is not new. Men treat women like shit every day, That is not new. But when the blaring, glaring greenlight comes from the highest echelons in society, understand that it turbocharges the day-to-day misogyny with a brazenness that is new.

Headscarves and Hymens

Women’s bodies are vectors; the canvas upon which patriarchy encourages men to engrave their stories. When the most powerful men in the country and their institutions show you how little regard they have for our autonomy, even the weakest of men will reap those rewards.

Men try to control women every day. That is not new. Men treat women like shit every day, That is not new. But when the blaring, glaring greenlight comes from the highest echelons in society, understand that it turbocharges the day-to-day misogyny with a brazenness that is new. Trickle-down misogyny.

And be ready to fight.

Fight any way you can. Yell. Punch. Shove. Lift heavy weights and get strong enough to pick up a misogynist and fling him across a sidewalk.

Put those misogynist fucks on notice.

Fuck the patriarchy.

And: Why Trump Won

And: Who Will Fix Men

And: The 4Y Movement

Thank you for reading my essay. You can support my work by:

Hitting the heart button so that others can be intrigued and read
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Event: FEMINIST GIANT & The Strand Present Halal Sex

Mona Eltahawy — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 13:17:16 GMT

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FEMINIST GIANT and The Strand Book Store feminist book club returns on March 16 for a discussion on notable journalist and media professional Sheima Benembarek’s book Halal Sex: The Intimate Lives of Muslim Women in North America. I wish I had books like this when I was younger. It is for that reason that I am thrilled to have written a forward to this necessary book that I know will be a great and much-needed companion to many..

This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store’s 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.

Can’t make the event? Purchase a signed copy of Halal Sex here.

ACCESSIBILITY:

Strand Book Store is an ADA compliant venue. The event space is accessible via elevator.

ASL interpretation is available for this event by request only. Please reach out to our events team at events@strandbooks.com by Mar. 2 to request.

Please ask a Strand employee upon arrival for directions to accessible seating if preferred.

For further information on accessibility in this space, or to make a request, please contact events@strandbooks.com

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Tickets for the event

An unprecedented glimpse into the sex lives of female and gender-expansive Muslims living across Canada and the United States.

In the Muslim world, sex is permissible (or halal) only within the confines of marriage. Outside of wedlock, the act is considered haram, a sin of the faith. Girls are taught to protect their virginity; their mothers, if not forgoing “the talk” altogether, obscure the facts with elliptical language and metaphors.

So, what happens when immigrants and the children of immigrants set about pursuing an open and active sex life on a more sexually liberated continent, amid western peers and attitudes? The six deeply personal stories in Halal Sex attempt to answer this question, bringing a hushed conversation out into the open.

Within these pages you’ll meet Azar, a non-binary trans Sufi; Bunmi, a Nigerian navigating shame and Tinder; Eman, a lesbian stand-up comic in an interfaith marriage; Taslim, a virgin in her forties struggling to erect healthy boundaries; and Khadijah, an exotic dancer and sex worker.
With great empathy, Sheima Benembarek makes space for the honesty and vulnerability of each participant and handles their stories with gentleness and care. What emerges is a tapestry of a diverse Islam—encompassing a wide variety of cultural and religious and socioeconomic backgrounds—and a frank, feminist contribution to the advancement of Muslim sexual education and pleasure.

Sheima Benembarek is a Moroccan Canadian journalist and media professional. She writes about social justice, immigrant narratives and intersectional feminism for a variety of publications including The Walrus, Maisonneuve, Literary Review of Canada, Chatelaine, Broadview and Vogue Arabia. In 2020, she was named one of the five RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Writers. In the fall of 2024, she was the Asper Fellow in Media at Western University’s Faculty of Information and Media Studies where she taught ethical journalistic interviewing techniques for racialized sources. Currently, she works as the culture and society editor at The Conversation Canada. Her nonfiction book Halal Sex: The Intimate Lives of Muslim Women in North America was released on March 21, 2023 by Penguin Random House, Viking Canada, and was shortlisted for the QWF Concordia University First Book Prize and appeared on bestselling lists.

Essay: Patriarchy and the Women Who Love It

Mona Eltahawy — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 13:05:58 GMT

Andrea Skinner. Photo by Steve Russell Toronto Star

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First published on July 12, 2024

tw: child sexual abuse, sexual asssault

Author and Nobel Laureate Alice Munro chose her husband over the daughter he sexually abused. Munro knew about and believed the abuse had happened. But she chose to stay with and protect the abuser.

This is not an essay about how to be a good mother or one that insists that mothers subsume and sacrifice their lives for their children. It is an essay on how easily women become footsoldiers of the patriarchy, fame and wealth notwithstanding.

Alice Munro was famous and wealthy and chose to stay with a sexual predator. In so many narratives of abuse, including child sexual abuse, we know that mothers stay with an abuser not out of choice but because they cannot afford to leave or because they are coerced to stay.

Some mothers simply do not believe their children when they disclose they’ve been sexually abused by an adult, be it the mother’s husband or partner, a brother or another male relative. It is more often than not a male abuser.

Alice Munro was famous and wealthy and believed that her husband, Gerald Fremlin, had sexually abused her daughter, Andrea Skinner, and still chose to stay with him.

This is not an essay about how to be a good mother or one that insists that mothers subsume and sacrifice their lives for their children. It is an essay on how easily women become footsoldiers of the patriarchy, fame and wealth notwithstanding.

Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls

In an essay she wrote last weekend detailing the abuse, Skinner said that Fremlin had sexually abused her in 1976, when she was 9. Skinner told her biological father, Jim Munro at the time (with whom she lived) and he chose not to tell Alice Munro.

Worse, he continued sending Skinner to spend time with Munro and Fremlin.

Jim Munro knew he was sending his daughter to a house where she had been sexually assaulted. He was complicit. He enabled abuse.

Again and again, the adults betrayed Andrea.

And she was not the only girl that Fremlin abused.

In fact, and worse still–there are so many instances of “And worse still…” long before Skinner had told her mother of what Fremlin had done to her, Fremlin himself had shown Munro who he was and still she stayed with him.

“When I was 11, former friends of Fremlin’s told my mother he’d exposed himself to their 14-year-old daughter. He denied it, and when my mother asked about me, he “reassured” her that I was not his type,” Skinner wrote.”In front of my mother, he told me that many cultures in the past weren’t as ‘prudish’ as ours, and it used to be considered normal for children to learn about sex by engaging in sex with adults. My mother said nothing.”

Worse still, was Munro’s reaction when Skinner–who was by then in her 20s–told her mother in a letter what Fremlin had done to her.

“She reacted exactly as I had feared she would, as if she had learned of an infidelity," Skinner wrote.

Worse still, was Fremlin’s reaction.

“He told my mother he would kill me if I ever went to the police, and wrote letters to my family, blaming me for the abuse. He described my nine-year-old self as a “homewrecker,” and said my family’s failure to intervene suggested they agreed with him. He also threatened retribution,” Skinner wrote.

Fremlin said Skinner, had “invaded (his) bedroom for sexual adventure.” Skinner had asked him if she could sleep in the spare bed in the room he shared with her mother, who was traveling at the time.

Remember: Skinner was nine.

In spite of the letters and his threats, Munro–who had briefly moved out of the house she shared with Fremlin after Skinner had told her what he had done to her daughter–returned to Fremlin and stayed with him until he died in 2013.

Worse still–I told you there are so many–Munro said that she had been “‘told too late,; she loved (Fremlin) too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children, and make up for the failings of men,” Skinner wrote. “She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.”

Patriarchy is not men. Patriarchy is a system of oppressions that privileges male dominance. And there are some women who benefit from it and become its footsoldiers to continue to benefit from it, including famous and wealthy women, like Alice Munro.

Refer a friend

I know how patriarchy socializes women to police other women who expose sexual assault. They silence you because you’re “making us look bad,”–us being the family, the community, etc.

The first time a man sexually assaulted me, I was 15. And it was two different men, one of them a policeman, minutes apart as I performed the rituals of the Haj, the pilgrimage that is the fifth pillar of Islam. I didn’t–couldn’t, actually–tell anyone for years, because I was so ashamed that something so awful and dirty had happened to me during such a sacred ritual and at such a holy site, Makkah–the holiest site for Muslims and the place towards which Muslim pray five times a day.

It broke me and began what I can only describe as my years-long attempt to hide my body from men. And a years-long hatred for them.

I didn’t–couldn’t–tell anyone for years because I didn’t think anyone would believe me.

“I have been afraid all my life that you would blame me for what happened,” Skinner wrote in the letter.

When I finally strung the words together to describe what I had been subjected to, a fellow Egyptian and Muslim woman took me aside to chide me for doing so in front of non-Muslims.

I’d made us look bad.

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I know how patriarchy socializes women to police other women who expose sexual assault. They judge you for “allowing” it to happen to you.

In November, 2011, at triage in the ER after 12 hours of incommunicado detention, first by police at the Interior Ministry and then by military intelligence, where I was blindfolded and interrogated, I explained to a nurse that riot police had beaten me and sexually assaulted me and that I needed my arms to be x-rayed.

“How could you let them do that to you? Why didn’t you resist” she asked me in disgust.

I had a fracture in my left arm (the eventually required surgery) and two fractures in my right hand and needed casts from my wrist to my shoulders in both arms.

Again and again, in the wake of MeToo, we saw women who refused to believe that a man who was their friend, who for them was a good guy, could be for other women a predator. Because he was “good” to them, they tried to dismiss and silence the women who had exposed how bad he could also be by showing how much harm he had caused

Patriarchy is not men, Patriarchy is a system of oppressions that privileges male dominance. And there are some women who benefit from it and become its footsoldiers to continue to benefit from it, including famous and wealthy women, like Alice Munro.

Headscarves and Hymens

Again and again, Alice Munro saw how much harm her husband Gerald Fremlin had caused and continued to choose him. This is not an essay about how to be a good mother, it is an essay about how easily some women, including famous and wealthy ones, footsoldier for the patriarchy.

I have read perhaps just one short story by Munro. Her "legacy" means nothing to me. And it should mean nothing to anyone now learning of her complicity in the sexual abuse of her daughter and other girls.

In fact, her “legacy,” protected the most powerful–Munro–the enabler–and Fremlin–the predator.

“My mother’s fame meant the silence continued,” Skinner says.

I didn’t–couldn’t–tell anyone for years about being sexually assaulted during Haj because I was so ashamed that something so awful and dirty had happened to me during such a sacred ritual and at such a holy site. That shame was never mine to hold. It belongs wholly to the men who assaulted me.

“For so long I’d been telling myself that holding my pain alone had at least helped my family, that I had done the moral thing, contributing to the greatest good for the greatest number,” Andrea Skinner wrote. “Now, I was claiming my right to a full life, taking the burden of abuse and handing it back to Fremlin.”

I told the footsoldier of the patriarchy who had chided me for finally speaking about what had been done to me that I was not the one who was “making us look bad.” It was the men who had sexually assaulted me.

Fuck the patriarchy and fuck its footsoldiers.

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Essay: I Beat My Assaulter, And It Was Fucking Glorious

Mona Eltahawy — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 15:13:21 GMT

Photo: Robert E. Rutledge

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First published on February 13, 2021

cw: sexual asssault.

Three years ago this week, I beat up a man who groped me in a club. It was fucking glorious. Celebrate that anniversary with me!

I was 50 years old, dancing with my Beloved, my heart lost in the joy of movement and freedom that are now like phantom limbs from the Before Time, itching in longing.

And then a hand on my ass.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been sexually assaulted throughout my life and I know that my reactions have spanned a spectrum, all of them valid. That night it was: Are you fucking kidding me? And my body went into autodrive; it knew exactly what to do.

I found my groper--he was the only one walking as we all danced. I marched up to him and tugged at the back of his shirt so hard that he fell.

And I sat on top of him and I punched, and I punched, and I punched his face.

And as I punched I yelled at him “Don’t you ever touch a woman like that again!”

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 and their fucking hands.

It did not matter: hijab or tank top, a man’s hands still found me. And I was fucking done.

7 Necessary Sins for Women & Girls

Earlier that week, I had launched #MosqueMeToo to support a young Pakistani woman who had posted on Facebook that she had been sexually assaulted while performing pilgrimage at Islam’s holiest site in Makkah. I too had been sexually assaulted during pilgrimage--Haj--in 1982 when I was 15 years old. I write more about it here.

My #MosqueMeToo tweets went viral and for five days, I was flooded with both the stories of Muslim women who had been sexually assaulted during pilgrimage and Muslim men telling me I was too ugly to be assaulted--as if sexual assault was a fucking compliment--or demanding to know why I hadn’t “made a fuss” and fought back.

For one night, I wanted some respite, so my Beloved and I went to a club to give my traumatized heart the joy of dancing.

And then that hand on my ass. My 15-year-old self at Haj had been covered from head-to-toe with just my face and hands showing. And now here I was, at age 50, wearing a tank top and jeans on a dance floor in Montreal, Canada.

It did not matter: hijab or tank top, a man’s hands still found me. And I was fucking done.

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?

I wanted him to know that next time he thought he could assault a woman, she too could beat the fuck out of him.I looked him in the eye and smacked him across his jaw so hard I worried I had broken my fingers. And that’s when he ran away.

Bloody Hell! Adventures in Menopause

Unlike in 1982, when I had frozen and burst into tears, I found my assaulter and I punched and I punched. And when I stopped, the fucking asshole stood up, adjusted the cap he was wearing and turned to look at me. I looked right back at him. I wanted him to see the average height woman whose ass he thought he was entitled to just reach out and grab. And I wanted him to remember her as the harbinger of more rage and more punches to come. I wanted him to know that next time he thought he could assault a woman, she too could beat the fuck out of him.

I looked him in the eye and smacked him across his jaw so hard I worried I had broken my fingers. And that’s when he ran away.

High on what I had just done, Robert my Beloved and I went to the bar to get some water. He told me two men had wanted to intervene to stop me from beating up my assaulter but that he had stopped them, telling them “No, no. He assaulted her first. She’s got this.” Bless!

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.

Refer a friend

If I wasn’t already enraged at the fuckery of two men who wanted to save a man from my fists and my fury, enter a club manager from Stage Left to place the cherry on the patriarchal cake.

After I explained to him what had happened, the manager looked at my Beloved and asked me “Why didn’t you let your husband take care of it?”

Reader: I almost beat him up too.

“First of all, he’s not my husband,” I replied. “Also, this is my body, I take care of it.”

Patriarchy is so universal and normalized that asking cis men to see it is like asking a fish “What is water?” It enables and protects cis men who sexually assault women, and it demands that only other cis men “protect” us. As long as we obey and behave in ways it approves of, of course. That “protection,” you must remember, is conditional. Because if we disobey, ha!

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.

After the fight at the club, I shared what had happened on Twitter under a new hashtag: #IBeatMyAssaulter.

#MosqueMeToo that asshole got every iota of rage that has been building up inside me. The whole time I was yelling at him “Don’t you touch a woman again!” @rerutled saw it all.","username":"monaeltahawy","name":"Mona Eltahawy","profile_image_url":"","date":"Sat Feb 10 08:12:40 +0000 2018","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":926,"like_count":3733,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM">

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All that weekend I was icing my bruised knuckles and hearing from women around the world who sent me their #IBeatMyAssaulter experiences; a global chorus of women who saw each other and recognized what it means to be done with the fuckery of patriarchy.

Photo: Robert E. Rutledge

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And 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?”

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-defense. This is putting patriarchy on notice that we will fight back. This is warning patriarchy that it should fear us.

I know that we can’t always fight back. My priority is to survive. I never want what I have shared here to make anyone feel guilty for not beating up her assaulter.

I also know that we are not socialized to fight back. We are not taught to fight back.

Cis men are not socialized to expect us to fight back. I think of that often when I hear of the spike in intimate partner terrorism during the pandemic. When I hear about men who beat the women they live with during lockdown, I always wonder why those men never fear that those women could poison their food or simply kill them in their sleep for being the abusive fucks that they are.

#COVID19 lockdown?\n\n🎥 @rerutled\n\n ","username":"monaeltahawy","name":"Mona Eltahawy","profile_image_url":"","date":"Wed Apr 29 17:26:01 +0000 2020","photos":[{"img_url":"https://cdn.substack.com/image/upload/w_728,c_limit/l_twitter_play_button_rvaygk,w_120/tg7zuyjfrv80tizlk6yy","link_url":"https://t.co/dB1DUorBa0"}],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":171,"like_count":441,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM">

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I am not asking that question to put the burden of fighting back on women. Many do, and they are punished more severely for fighting back than are the men who beat or assault them. Prisons around the world are full of women who fight back and the streets are full of the men who assaulted them.

Incarceration rates for women in the U.S. are reminders of how other oppressions such as racism are at play alongside misogyny. The national U.S. average prison sentence of men who kill their female partners is 2-6 years, while women who kill their partners are sentenced on average to 15 years, despite the fact that most women who kill their partners do so to protect themselves from violence initiated by their partners.

I am asking instead why those fuckers never stop to think “I had better not beat her up today or else she could poison my food.”

If violence is the language that patriarchy understands, isn’t it time more women speak it?

How long must we wait until men and boys stop beating and killing us? How many rapists must we kill until men stop raping us? A TV episode in Australia--an ostensible democracy--was banned in 2019 because, among reasons, I asked those questions on air.

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From a very young age girls around the world are told that they are vulnerable and weak. By the age of 10, research shows they believe it. Conversely, boys are fed the stereotype that they are strong and independent.

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?

One day when I was four years old, a man stopped his car on the street under my family’s balcony, pulled his penis out 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. How dare he ruin our reverie; two little girls, happy, oblivious to the street below.

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.

I honor that angry four-year-old girl. I honor her belief that she deserved to be free of molestation and free of interruption. 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.

That little girl found me on a dance floor in Montreal three years ago and told me “Beat that fucker up!” and I celebrate her. Today, we are waving our slippers together.

Thank you for reading my essay. You can support my work by:

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Essay: The Fuck-It List

Mona Eltahawy — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 16:38:09 GMT

Daryl McCormack and Emma Thompson in the film, Good Luck To You, Leo Grande. Nick Wall/Searchlight Pictures

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First published on June 21, 2022

When I left my ex-husband, who was only the second man I had had sex with, I started keeping a “fucked them” list. I would write in the back of a notebook the first letter of the name of every man I had sex with after my divorce. I was not keeping score of the proverbial “notches on my belt,” but tracking instead my progress in unclasping patriarchy’s hold of sexual shame on me. I was fucking the guilt out of my system.

I was born in Egypt, which has the greatest number of women and girls of any country in the world who have experienced Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting, a practice–a torture–with a clear goal: the control of female sexuality. I was not cut but I was not raised for desire. I snatched it from the jaws of shame.

In the film, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, 60-something Nancy Stokes (Emma Thompson) is snatching desire from the jaws of ageism. She has never had an orgasm. Recently widowed after a passionless three-decade marriage during which she faked orgasms with her husband, the only man she had had sex with, Nancy hires the eponymous Leo Grande, a much younger male sex worker played by Daryl McCormack, to help her go through a list of the kind of sex she never had with her husband–a “fuck-it list,” as he calls it. She wants to fuck her desire back to life.

It matters little that this woman of my generation was born in England and not Egypt because patriarchy carries its straitjacket on female desire around the world with the ease of a traveler holding a NEXUS security clearance. There is no FGM/C in Nancy’s background but she too was not raised for desire.

Bloody Hell! Adventures in Menopause

I recognize that determination to own your desire. Had I followed the rules–or more honestly, had I continued following the rules, because I did obey, for a long time–I would have been Nancy. Who among us is raised to desire? I know what it’s like to feel you were robbed of something vital—desire and pleasure—and to reckon with what feels like a second theft so to speak as peri/menopause rearranges your sex drive.

“Bitch” and “cunt” are not the worst things you could call a woman. Selfish is. Knowing what you want and taking it is filed under “selfish” in patriarchy’s dictionary. And by the time we meet Nancy, she is a woman determined, finally, to be selfish. I cried as my selfishness met hers, as I recognized the heady terror of being done, finally, with obeying.

We see that heady terror all too clearly about half way through the film, when Nancy asks Leo to take his shirt off.

The normally eloquent Nancy, a former religious education teacher who appreciates Leo’s use of “big words” like “empirically” and “reductive,” loses the ability to complete her sentences, so intoxicated and mesmerized is she by the beauty of the young man’s body. She can barely look at him head on; she must at first snatch glances sideways, partly due to shyness but also because it’s difficult to look directly at the sun.

In one of their earliest scenes together, Leo asks Nancy “Why won’t you take what you want when it’s right here within reach?” He is what she wants. He is right there. And yet she wants to cancel the whole thing several times.

She was never allowed to want.

And so no wonder that when she finally does take what she wants, by asking Leo to take his shirt off, it is too much. After gingerly circling his naked torso in awe, she faces him and almost as soon as she plants her hands firmly on his pecs, she breaks away, breathless, confessing that she is faint and nauseous. His beauty; her lust.

“Bitch” and “cunt” are not the worst things you could call a woman. Selfish is.

7 Necessary Sins for Women and Girls

Had the film focused just on Nancy’s determined pursuit of sexual pleasure, it would have startled enough. How often do films center a woman in her early 60s? I am 54 years old and can barely watch films and television shows these days because they are too often about high school students or 31 year olds whose dilemmas are too far in my past to care about and whose parents, who are my age, are too peripheral to the narrative to keep my attention.

Rarer still is the film that centres a woman in her early 60s who wants to fuck.

Heteronormative patriarchy’s designated shelf life for cisgender women is the age at which we cease to be its walking incubators. And yet here is a woman who not only wants to fuck, she has spent, as she confesses, months planning and quite a bit of money hiring Leo and renting a hotel room to finally take what she wants after years of giving.

I have watched and rewatched that scene of Nancy in awe of Leo’s naked torso. I recognize the hunger that is off bounds for those of us raised to be object and never subject, raised instead for the hunger of the male gaze but never with the power of our own gaze, taught how to please that male gaze and shamed for doing it too well or not well enough or at the wrong time.

I also see a much younger man comfortable being semi-nude, who likes being looked at and touched, and who enjoys being wanted by his clients, in a way that Nancy, consumed by body shame, cannot imagine. Here is a young man whose eldest client was 82–unimaginable for Nancy, a woman snatching sexual desire from the jaws of ageism while confessing that she doesn’t want the men who want her because “they’re all old.”

It is such complications that make Good Luck To You, Leo Grande more than a comedy about an old woman who wants to fuck. Not only is the film's older woman-younger man coupling rare enough, about ninety percent of the film is just Nancy and Leo in a hotel room. Every flicker of self-consciousness is intentional, every question they ask of each other an element in the alchemical transformation that we see them instigate in each other.

Heteronormative patriarchy’s designated shelf life for cisgender women is the age at which we cease to be its walking incubators.

Bloody Hell! Adventures in Menopause

Leo, like the eponymous 31-Year-Old-Lover of Kim Addonizio’s poem, imbues Nancy with her fantasy of “feeling young again…That feeling of having it all before me.”

Leo is tender, attentive, and curious where Nancy’s husband was insensitive and self-centered, and like her son boring. In turn, Nancy allows Leo a reckoning with a mother who was harsh and judgmental. It is a reckoning made possible because being with Leo has helped Nancy fuck judgementalism out of her system.

“My body is no longer the carcass I’ve been heaving around for 30 years,” Nancy tells Leo. “No. It’s now a thing of wonder. A playground of delight as you say.”

That is what takes Good Luck to You, Leo Grande’s subversion and propels it into the stratosphere of revolution: its acknowledgement of the liberatory power of lustful desire–of “concupiscence”--that underpins the transformation that Nancy and Leo have sparked in each other. It is a word that Nancy–when she taught religious education–used as a warning to her students. It is a word that Nancy now uses as a celebration with Leo.

That’s what Patriarchy’s Map of Life for us women 50 and older delineates: a Hiking Trail Into the Kingdom of Shriveling Up and Fading Away.

Refer a friend

Religion, so often an arm of patriarchy, had a loyal footsoldier in Nancy–as it did once with me. Several times, we hear her slut shame her female students–judging the length of their skirts, sympathizing with male teachers whom she likens to “lambs to the slaughter” in the face of the power she thinks those girls had on the teachers. Leo interrupts that slut shaming by shifting the power and the blame to where it belongs: teachers, men and women.

Patriarchy polices women’s desires and also recruits them to police other women’s. Being with Leo helps Nancy see how she had footsoldiered for that patriarchy.

Wanting sex and expressing sexuality outside the tenets of heteronormativity: these are a chaos and liberation that threatens patriarchy, deeply. There is power in expressing and insisting on desire, pleasure, and sex on our own terms. And in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, we see that power clearly signal from both Nancy and Leo.

How many women will hear the words Emma Thompson’s character says–“I see my friends fading away at the edges shriveling up over the years”--and feel their lives are being read back to them? Because that’s what Patriarchy’s Map of Life for us women 50 and older delineates: a Hiking Trail Into the Kingdom of Shriveling Up and Fading Away.

And Nancy knows.

“I’ve never done anything interesting or remarkable in my life. This is it. I always obeyed all the rules. Fell in line. Never drank too much. Never overshadowed my husband at parties. I was always the designated driver,” she tells Leo. “Ate my five a day even before they were called five a day. I always, always answer my phone when it rings. You’re the only adventure I’ve ever had. The only freedom…”

Wanting sex and expressing sexuality outside the tenets of heteronormativity: these are a chaos and liberation that threatens patriarchy, deeply. There is power in expressing and insisting on desire, pleasure, and sex on our own terms.

Headscarves and Hymens

It is worse, much much worse, than reading women’s lives back to them. This film challenges women to consider they have wasted those lives doing what everyone else wanted them to do because doing what they wanted would have left them faint and nauseous with the power of it all.

It is as if you had placed your hands on a much younger man’s pecs and felt a live wire, the third rail on the tracks of the subway: it is the power of knowing what you want, the power of taking what you want.

Just before Nancy asks Leo to take his shirt off so that she can run her fingers along his body as if he were a statue in the Ancient Greece section of a museum that allowed us to touch the art, her daughter called and ruined the moment. In her frustration, Nancy finally speaks what we are rarely allowed to say out loud.

“Sometimes my children feel like a deadweight around my neck. I’m not sure I’d have done it if I’d known,” Nancy says. “I could’ve done many other things if I hadn’t been a mother.”

And there it is. Her son, like her husband, is boring. And she resents her daughter for living the life she wished she had. What freedom would she have had if she had not had them?

It is like watching Evelyn in Everything Everywhere All At Once get a taste of options–the What If’s–available to her alter egos in other universes. We understand why women are denied a three-dimensional life, why their imagination is flattened out of daring to want any more than what they have. Because we would want more, we would want different, we would want a multi-dimensional life and enough freedom to determine who - in this Universe of ourselves - we want to be.

And what kind of selfish bitch regrets having children? Don’t ask me, I’m the selfish cunt who refused to have them in the first place.

And that is why films that center older women are important. They keep showing us women with options. In Juanita, Alfre Woodward is a woman who chooses herself–is finally selfish–over her overly-dependent grown children by leaving town altogether. And they show us women who desire—I love how Blair Underwood keeps popping up in Juanita’s fantasy!

For such an astutely observant film, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, is startlingly silent on race. An older white woman who hires a much younger Black male sex worker cannot go uncommented on. Another point that needs addressing is, as my friend Conner Habib pointed out, Emma Thompson’s support in 2015 of a campaign demanding that Amnesty International reject a proposal to endorse the decriminalisation of sex work. It does not appear like she’s reversed her position and so it is puzzling that she is starring in a film that not only does not demean Leo nor try to save him, but which echoes his stance that sex work should be offered to all who want it as a public service.

It is similarly confounding that an actor whose role in Good Luck To You, Leo Grande unpacks bodily shame, is also in a film in which she wears a fat suit.

To even consider such a question would mean we want more, we would want different. And what kind of selfish bitch regrets having children? Don’t ask me, I’m the selfish cunt who refused to have them in the first place.

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There is liberation in speaking our desire. It will leave you feeling faint and nauseous when done suddenly, akin to losing one’s breath at higher elevations before the body has acclimated. We are called selfish because patriarchy understands the dangers of such liberation. Once acclimated though, there’s no knowing what rebellion is instigated as you develop greater lung capacity, as you fuck the guilt out of your system.

For Nancy, the greatest rebellion is that against shame. In an unprecedented final scene, the likes of which I’ve never seen, she performs the equivalent of torching Patriarchy’s Map of Life for women 50+. It is glorious and heady. It is like touching the third rail.

Thank you for reading my essay. You can support my work by:

Hitting the heart button so that others can be intrigued and read
Upgrading to a paid subscription to support FEMINIST GIANT
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Thank you for reading FEMINIST GIANT. This post is public so feel free to share it.

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Essay: A Feminist in Her 50s in Love

Mona Eltahawy — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 15:13:41 GMT

Umm Kalthoum, Life Magazine, 1962. (Wikimedia, public domain)

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First published on February 14, 2022

This is the story of how tender labourers, Umm Kalthoum, and bell hooks shaped how this feminist grew to love, powerfully and tenderly and so therefore freely.

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At a minimum, I knew what it didn’t look like: it did not look like the night that I killed Valentine’s Day.

There I was, shell shocked in the passenger seat of my then boyfriend’s car in 1997, unsure if I was more distressed that my boyfriend had forgotten it was Valentine’s Day or that I, an avowed feminist, was upset that he had. From that day on, I never “celebrated” Valentine’s Day again. Celebrate that it felt I’d been abducted and replaced with a pathetic replica?

And so I killed Valentine’s Day. Fuck that shit. The absurd, the foolish, and the nonsensical are welcome to it.

I wanted nothing to do with love when I was younger. I started having nightmares when I was 17 that I’d married the wrong man. My subconscious knew something my conscious took years to understand: I was neither heterosexual nor monogamous.

For all my 20s and most of my 30s, I did not have the power for such introspection. I worried that love would wreck me with a weakness I could not afford. I wanted to be free and I associated love–at least in the ways I saw it around me–with the opposite of freedom.

I wanted to be powerful, and I spent my 20s and 30s liberating myself from all that I felt was chaining me.

Feminist love insists on being both powerful and tender, because the sum total is freedom. Free love is revolutionary.

7 Necessary Sins for Women and Girls

I wanted to be powerful and to be free, and in love, yes. And if I could not have the first two, well, then, love could wait. I chose me. I had to grow into the knowledge that a love that is free is powerful and tender; tender, not weak.

This is the story of how tender labourers, Umm Kalthoum, and bell hooks shaped how this feminist grew to love, powerfully and tenderly and so therefore freely.

I have moved back to Cairo three times. The third, was in 2013 (the first two times were in 1988 and 1999) after the revolution had finally arrived.

I had returned to say "Fuck you, I am not scared. Egypt is mine too," to a regime that had sent its police to break my arms and sexually assault me 18 months earlier, when I was still living in New York City and had been visiting Cairo to take part in one of the most iconic protests during our revolutionary year of 2011.

I had rented an apartment in a neighbourhood where it was easier than others for a woman to live alone and to have lovers spend the night. It helped that my landlady did not live in the same building and that I had no immediate neighbours on my floor because the apartment next door was being renovated.

The construction workers renovating that next-door apartment always started their day with the Umm Kalthoum song Ansak. It was the most tender alarm to awaken to, infusing as it did my mornings with a paean to love that lingers and haunts.

A declaration and a question at once, Ansak means "Forgetting you" and "How could I forget you?"

Ansak is not the most popular song by Umm Kalthoum but for the construction workers next door, it was their song. In it, she is saying she can’t forget, wants to forget, can’t love again, wants to love the beloved again.

Beginning their day with Ansak, were the labourers who carried bags of cement up four flights of stairs on their heads because the rich fucks who owned the building prohibited them from using the elevator so that they did not scratch it.

Who did those men want to forget and yet love again if they could love again? What rebellion in their heart did Ansak revive? Why that song especially?

Who is deemed worthy of love? Who “deserves” love?

These were men accustomed to being treated like shit by rich people who for years successfully blocked all attempts to extend the Cairo subway from reaching their neighbourhood which, much like Manhattan, is an island of wealth and elitist fuckery; people happy to be served by the poor who spent hours commuting to the rich enclave to cook, clean up and serve them. But letting the subway in? Why would they make life easy for the poor?

Who deserves love? The labourers next door knew they did and staked their claim.

When you watch Umm Kalthoum concerts, you can see she allows women to feel powerful and men to be tender. I will always associate Ansak with the tender labourers next door.

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In the heteronormative universe of love, wherein men “take” and women “give,” allowing women to be powerful and men to be tender is subversive. But Umm Kalthoum is her own universe and in it she was beyond gender and its limited imagination for love; she was both powerful and tender. There is a reason that she is now a queer icon.

In Umm Kalthoum’s universe, love disrupts and disturbs. I migrated to her universe and pleaded for asylum. I had to disrupt and disturb heteronormativity–I wanted to be both powerful and tender. I had to disrupt and disturb mononormativity–to truly love, I must be free and monogamy, for me, was the antithesis of freedom.

Feminist love insists on being both powerful and tender, because the sum total is freedom. Free love is revolutionary.

You have to have lived and loved and lost and had your heart smashed to pieces to appreciate Umm Kalthoum. Her songs are the lyrical equivalent of running your fingers along the scars of your heart.

Bloody Hell! Adventures in Menopause

In 2016, I was invited to South Africa to speak about Egypt, revolution, and feminism. During my visit, I spent an evening with a farming community in Modimolle, where the audience were farmers who were members of either the ANC or the Communist Party, and who called me Comrade Mona (anarchist-me was in heaven).

One farmer asked me if we still listened to Umm Kalthoum in Egypt. I was ecstatic that my comrade introduced Umm Kalthoum into our evening dedicated to revolution–in my country and theirs–and feminism–why both our countries needed it. I happily and at length answered with an enthusiastic yes: because if we loved as fiercely, purely, and as passionately as Umm Kalthoum sang, we would truly be free.

Here’s what I should have added: you have to be old. Yes–look at that: celebrating aging! It took me becoming middle aged to experience and revel in the tender and powerful and so therefore free love that Umm Kalthoum offered.

In Umm Kalthoum’s universe, love disrupts and disturbs. I migrated to her universe and pleaded for asylum.

Refer a friend

It was a world of difference to hear her when I returned in 2013 when I was 45, and lived next door to the tender labourers, compared to when I returned to Cairo the first time in 1988, when I was 21 and lived with one of my uncles and his family. Over dinner every evening, he would put Umm Kalthoum on. I squirmed in discomfort. I did not understand why she had such a hold on people.

I was impatient and my heart had not been tested. I am still impatient but my heart has since been shredded to bits.

The only reason I might wish I was born earlier than I was is to have experienced more of Umm Kalthoum’s music as an adult who understood its depth, so that I could be transformed like the woman in the audience at the end of this video of one of her transcendent live performances.

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Umm Kalthoum often sang poetry, literally - either poems written especially for her, for which composers created a score, or poetry that was then set to music.

You have to have lived and loved and lost and had your heart smashed to pieces to appreciate Umm Kalthoum. Her songs are the lyrical equivalent of running your fingers along the scars of your heart.

When I was trying to heal in 2011, high on Vicodin, both my arms in casts, and my heart smashed to pieces, I would listen to electronic dance music to lose myself and to Umm Kulthum to find home.

She sang and I heard “Egypt is yours too. Come home. This is Egypt: tenderness and power that can be yours too. Not just what they did to you.” And so I went home that third time.

And it was at home, as a middle-aged woman who had lived and loved and whose heart was full of scars, where I read bell hooks’ Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life, and understood that being tender and powerful would liberate me.

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“The desire for sex, the longing to reconcile these desires with a yearning to know love, were all a part of my struggle to become a writer, to invent a living life that could nurture and sustain a liberated woman. Fully feminist, fully self-actualized, I wanted to care for the soul and to let my heart speak,” hooks wrote (emphasis mine).

I understood when I read those paragraphs that it was time to talk about love; that even if I claimed asylum in Umm Kalthoum’s universe, I could not cede the ground in this one to the absurd, the foolish, and the nonsensical; that because I had claimed asylum in Umm Kalthoum’s universe, I had to stake my claim for love in this one too. And it was time to read Communion: The Female Search for Love, the third part of bell hooks’ trilogy on love that looks specifically at the freeing nature of love for midlife women.

My first Valentine is for my first love, Manchester United Football Club, which before I kissed any boys or girls had my heart at the age of nine. And this Valentine is for labourers next door who in 2013 woke me up every morning with the reminder to claim love, to Umm Kalthoum who gifted me power and tenderness, and to bell hooks who encouraged me to say: I am a feminist in her 50s in love, and I am free.

Fuck Valentine’s Day. Happy Valentine’s Day.

Thank you for reading my essay. You can support my work by:

Hitting the heart button so that others can be intrigued and read
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Essay: Exit Interview

Mona Eltahawy — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:20:29 GMT

Photo: Robert E. Rutledge

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Event: Galentine's Party!

Mona Eltahawy — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 14:45:31 GMT

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For those of you in New York City, join us on Friday February 13th for an end of exhibit celebration of the work of artist and good friend Pyaari Azaadi at Pen and Brush.

The evening will begin with a panel discussion of Pyaari’s art, which has been on display at Pen and Brush. The exhibit Talkin' Bout A Revolution is a wonderful retrospective and I am honoured to have contributed an essay to the exhibit’s catalogue, along with my fellow panelists Pamela Sneed (poet, performer, visual artist, and educator), and Hrag Vartanian (arts writer, curator, and editor-in-chief and co-founder of Hyperallergic). Moderating our panel will be Alpesh Kantilal Patel (art historian, curator, critic, and Associate Professor of Art History at the Tyler School of Art).

The evening is also a Galentine’s Day Party and after our panel there will be a dance by Pampi (Aparna Das) that will kick off a DJ set by the talented DJ Ashu Rai and Sholay Events.

It is free to attend RSVP is required.

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I hope to see you there!

Time & Location

Feb 13, 2026, 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM

Pen + Brush, 29 E 22nd St, New York, NY 10010, USA

Essay: Tender is the Fight

Mona Eltahawy — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 14:52:04 GMT

Image: Robert E. Rutledge

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First published on February 13, 2025

Love is not the opposite of hate. It is the opposite of indifference. We who demand a better world act out of love, not hate. We risk it all with the obsession of Majnun for Layla.

“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality,” Che Guevara said.

Despite his critics, including anarchists such as myself, Che understood that we agitate not because we hate the world, but because we so desperately love it.

A revolution is a dare to the future as much as it is a reckoning with the past. It is a message in a bottle flung at our future selves that challenges us to remember. “Your imagination brought you to the streets. Your disobedience kept you there,” the message from the revolution insists.

And love is the verb, as Liz Fraser sings in Massive Attack’s Teardrop. “Love is a doing word,” that infuses our breath with a fearlessness that is temptation and salvation at once.

“As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible,” Toni Cade Bambera said.

We who cannot resist revolution, hand over our hearts as fuel, ready to have them smashed again and again, because as Maya Angelou said, “I don’t trust any revolution where love is not allowed.”

In 2012, still wandering in a daze over what riot police did to me just months earlier to punish me for my opposition to the regime, I met a man at a protest in Cairo, still wandering in a daze over a police-orchestrated massacre just months earlier to punish him and his comrades for their opposition to the regime.

“They broke my heart, Mona,” told me the man who had survived the massacre; as if a broken heart was the worst possible punishment for wanting a revolution.

I had just gifted myself my first tattoo–a gift that I’d promised myself when my bones healed. Not when my heart healed, because I knew that would take much longer.

7 Necessary Sins for Women and Girls

And because love is the opposite of indifference, revolutionaries engaged in that grand struggle for life and liberty often describe the revolution in the way a lover talks of the beloved.

If hate is the accelerator that dehumanizes both its subject and object, to allow the former to kill the latter, then indifference is worse; it confirms that you are not worthy even of concern. If hate is a precursor to killing, then indifference is the spectator who watches.

Declaring yourself worthy of love, not from the enemy trying to kill you, but in spite of the enemy trying to kill you–is a way for the object of hate to liberate themselves, to say I love and therefore I live.

To revel in love, is to tap into a grand human activity of a revolution that erodes indifference. To point to our broken hearts is to say we cannot resist our love for this world.

And our love for this world drives revolution.

A revolution is a dare to the future as much as it is a reckoning with the past. It is a message in a bottle flung at our future selves that challenges us to remember. “Your imagination brought you to the streets. Your disobedience kept you there,” the message from the revolution insists.

Refer a friend

“Love is contraband in Hell,” writes Assata Shakur in the poem Love, in her autobiography. “‘cause love is an acid that eats away bars.”

It is not just the regime that can conspire, Assata tells us.

“But you, me, and tomorrow

hold hands and make vows

that struggle will multiply.

The hacksaw has two blades.

The shotgun has two barrels.

We are pregnant with freedom.

We are a conspiracy.”

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It should come as no surprise that the broken-hearted man who survived the massacre and broken-hearted me became a conspiracy–a “gift of the revolution,” as Muriel Rukeyser wrote in her poem dedicated to Otto Boch, the Bavarian socialist and Olympic distance runner she met in Spain at the start of the civil war. Boch, an Internationalist volunteer who was killed with 600 others during the war, was the subject of at least three of Rukeyser’s poems.

Tender is the fight, I have learned from the revolution. And there is power in such tenderness.

When I was younger and had little power, I was all sharp edges and keep that love away from me. I was not ready to be lost in its power because I was not ready for the revolution. I wanted to be powerful and to be free, and in love, yes. But if I could not have the first two, well, then, love could wait. I chose me. I had to grow into the knowledge that a love that is free is powerful and tender; tender, not weak.

Tender is the fight, I have learned from the revolution. And there is power in such tenderness.

Headscarves and Hymens

Feminist love insists on being both powerful and tender, because the sum total is freedom. Free love is revolutionary.

And perhaps the greatest poet of revolutionary love is June Jordan, who loved the world and her lovers, women and men, fiercely and with a tenderness that fuses the personal and political with the delicacy of an embroiderer stitching together a broken heart.

Even when conspiring against her enemies, love is a verb, a doing word.

“And if I

if I ever let love go

because the hatred and the whisperings

become a phantom dictate I o-

bey in lieu of impulse and realities

(the blossoming flamingos of my

wild mimosa trees)

then let love freeze me

out.

I must become

I must become a menace to my enemies.”

And perhaps the greatest poet of revolutionary love is June Jordan, who loved the world and her lovers, women and men, fiercely and with a tenderness that fuses the personal and political with the delicacy of an embroiderer stitching together a broken heart.

7 Necessary Sins (Ireland & UK)

Whether her essays, that connect injustices at home and globally, or her poems, that inject desire and the power of the erotic into her meditations on a lover’s skin or the power of poetry to signal solidarity, June Jordan tells us again and again that love is not the opposite of hate, it is the opposite of indifference; that those of us who agitate for a better world, do so out of love, not hate. Join me, she says!

“These poems

they are things that I do

in the dark

reaching for you

whoever you are

and

are you ready?”

Feminist love insists on being both powerful and tender, because the sum total is freedom. Free love is revolutionary.

Bloody Hell! Adventures in Menopause

We, for whom revolution is irresistible, find each other through love and solidarity, Jordan says.

“I am a stranger

learning to worship the strangers

around me

whoever you are

whoever I may become.”

Let us conspire, this Valentine’s Day, to birth that freedom we are pregnant with.

Let us conspire! Will you be my comrade?!

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Essay: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Love

Mona Eltahawy — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 17:34:51 GMT

A masked couple kiss in front of a burning barricade during a protest against Chile's government in Santiago, Chile November 25, 2019. REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic

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First published on March 06, 2022

Nineteen years ago this week, I went to see the Iraqi superstar Kazem al-Sahir perform at the Beacon Theater in New York City. I was not a huge fan but I was there to support his courage for coming to a country which was threatening to attack his country very soon.

Before I could enter the theater a correspondent for German and Dutch television cornered me for an interview. During my years as a journalist, I had cornered a fair number of people on their way into events, so I obliged.

When I told him I was there to show solidarity with Kazem's courage, he asked me if I supported Iraq. Like most Arabs around the world, I told him, I make a distinction between Saddam Hussein, a reckless dictator, and the people of Iraq, for whom this would be the third war in 20 years. I support the people of Iraq, oppose the war and believe everything possible should be done to avert it, I told him.

"But he (Kazem) sings about romance. Shouldn't he sing about protest?" the journalist asked me.

"Can't Arabs have romance?" I asked him before I entered the theater for two hours of nothing but romance. Love and longing are Kazem's forte. And isn’t romance a form of protest, I wish I had also said. Romance is an uprising in the name of your humanity.

Declaring yourself worthy of romance–of love, not from the enemy trying to kill you, but in spite of the enemy trying to kill you–is a way for the object of hate to liberate themselves, to say I love and therefore I live. To revel in romance, is to tap into a grand human activity that erodes indifference. We all love. We deserve to live.

Love. Life. And Liberty. Fuck the pursuit of happiness if only those who dehumanize me are considered worthy of it.

And isn’t romance a form of protest. Romance is an uprising in the name of your humanity.

7 Necessary Sins for Women & Girls

In the middle of one of Kazem’s songs, during that concert exactly 19 years ago, a woman sitting across the aisle asked me to translate a song that was working the audience into a frenzy.

It is a song that tells of a jealous lover asking her beloved who the other woman in his life is, I told her. He teases her with descriptions of his true love's unmatched beauty and her many virtues until he finally reveals that his heart's desire is Baghdad. At the mere mention of the Iraqi capital, the cheering at the Beacon Theatre became deafening.

From her accent, I could tell that the woman I was translating for was not a native-English speaker and so I asked her where she was from. I could not have orchestrated her answer better myself.

"I am Iranian. I love Kazem. I have every single one of his CDs. I love him."

That woman's country had fought Kazem's for 10 years in one of the bloodiest and most futile wars in the recent history of the Middle East. I wanted to run out and get that reporter for European television who asked me what a concert -- or romance -- could do.

To have romance is to be allowed to love, is to be worthy of tenderness, is to be worth saving. And this war between Ukraine and Russia has compounded what many of us already knew three years into a global pandemic: that to many, some lives are worth saving more than others.

With so many parts of the world still without vaccines, a new war has joined the many already wrecking lives around the world. But this most recent war and its victims, we are being told, is more important. It is a war between democracy and autocracy, we are told. But here’s the thing: many of the democracies who are supporting Ukraine in its fight to expel the invading troops of Russian autocracy, support autocracy in my country and so many others.

My country, Egypt, has long been the dumping ground and backdrop to the wars and skirmishes of “world powers,” be it through colonization, a staging ground for fighting between British and German troops during the Second World War, to a tug-of-war between the USA and the USSR during the Cold War that continues today wherein both the United States and Russia sell arms to our current autocrat, Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi.

Sisi, like Russian President Vladimir Putin, is a former intelligence chief; former President Donald Trump used to call Sisi “My favourite dictator.”

So tell me again: where is this war between democracy and autocracy? For those of us who live on the faultline of geopolitical hypocrisies, it is a constant state of emotional and political whiplash.

To have romance is to be allowed to love, is to be worthy of tenderness, is to be worth saving. And this war between Ukraine and Russia has compounded what many of us already knew three years into a global pandemic: that to many, some lives are worth saving more than others.

Bloody Hell! Adventures in Menopause

Fuck Putin and his invasion of Ukraine. Fuck war. None of what I am writing aims to dismiss the suffering and death of the people of Ukraine, at the receiving end of a punishing bombardment, nor that of the people of Russia, whose lives are wrecked by an autocrat whose havoc has wrecked many in the region from which I hail. I side with the people.

I am asking instead: whose lives matter?

Ask Syrians, Palestinians, Yemenis, and so many others whose countries have been wrecked by war and occupation—wars and occupations caused by, supported by, or justified by the very powers who now tell us they are supporting democracy versus autocracy by siding with Ukraine.

In 2016, while I was visiting Bosnia, my feminist sister and comrade Nidzara Ahmetasovic took me to Srebrenica where, starting July 11, 1995 and for over a week, Bosnian Serb forces systematically murdered 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys and ethnically cleansed 30 thousand, in the worst crime of the 1992-1995 Bosnian war. It remains the only massacre on European soil since World War II to be ruled a genocide.

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There were 6504 boys and men victims of the Srebrenica genocide buried there when I visited, after their remains had been identified. About 2,000 more were awaiting identification. When you see the names of those buried, you see from the surnames, repeated over and over, just how many families were wiped out.

Media coverage and the political statements around the Ukraine-Russia war serve as reminders that sympathy and support during war are never equal: they depend on how you look and how you pray, and they are undergirded by white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and Islamophobia–from the anti-Blackness obvious in who could leave Ukraine to the implicit and sometimes explicit confirmation that Ukrainian refugees were welcome in various parts of Europe because they were white and not Muslim.

The whiteness fueling who deserves to be saved in this latest war has compounded the whiteness of who deserves to be saved in the pandemic: white people matter the most. And not even all white people, equally. As Bosnian Muslims have pointed out–they were the “wrong” kind of white Europeans.

Media coverage and the political statements around the Ukraine-Russia war serve as reminders that sympathy and support during war are never equal: they depend on how you look and how you pray, and they are undergirded by white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and Islamophobia

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That journalist who asked me why Kazem sings of love and not protest, has been reincarnated for me recently in the assembly line of journalists, politicians, and pundits who after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, expressed shock that blonde and blue-eyed people in a country in Europe were under bombardment.

When journalists associate you with violence and war only, they help to shove you into the straightjacket of stereotype. Declaring that romance belongs to you too undoes the stitching of that straightjacket.

My parents’ romance led them from Cairo, where they met at medical school and married, to Port Said, a city that faced much of the brunt of Israeli bombardment when Egypt and Israel were at war in 1967. They were 24 and had wanted to spend their medical internships in the same city and by the sea. When the war broke out in June of that year, my mum was heavily pregnant with me.

The first sound I reacted to was that of bombs. My mum has told me I would kick inside her when bombs would fall during that war–my parent’s third and my first. They have lived through five wars so far; I three.

It is imperative that we write our own stories so that we are not objects of geopolitical hypocrisies but instead subjects of our own romances. In the same way that white journalists and politicians and pundits have told us who deserves to live–by repeatedly expressing shock that white people in Ukraine were in danger of dying from war–they have told us who deserves to be free–they repeatedly expressed shock that brown people dared to imagine we deserved to be free when country after another rose up against regimes following Tunisia’s lead in what has become known as the “Arab Spring.”

Who is considered worthy of love, who is allowed to want it? Who is considered worthy of freedom and who is allowed to want to be free? The answer to those questions is also the answer to who is worthy of living and who is allowed to live. Because the answer to all those questions undergirds our very humanity.

Nina Simone gave a masterclass in how to write your own story and why it’s important to be the subject of your own narrative, during her introduction to the civil rights anthem "Young, Gifted and Black," written for (another icon and hero for me) Lorraine Hansberry, at the Philharmonic Hall in New York live album recording for Black Gold in 1969.

"Now, it is not addressed primarily to white people. Though it does not put you down in any way. It simply ignores you. For my people need all the inspiration and love that they can get."

Who is considered worthy of love, who is allowed to want it? Who is considered worthy of freedom and who is allowed to want to be free?

7 Necessary Sins for Women and Girls

Kazem al-Sahir, like the great Egyptian diva Umm Kalthoum, sings the words of Arab poets. Those of us who are denied love and liberty and therefore life, who are not “blonde haired and blue eyed,” who are not considered “civilized” or “European,” know that we are creators and protagonists of our own romances. We must simply decentre—ignore—the white people and the white narrators who dare deny our right to romance—and the right to live—in return for indifference. And we must do so for ourselves because we do indeed need all the inspiration and love that we can get. That is a major reason that I started FEMINIST GIANT.

Our stories of romance sing across the divide of hate and indifference; a call across the aisle to our shared humanity, as the Iranian woman I met at the concert in New York City 19 years ago reminded me.

I love, therefore I am.

Perhaps this is why so many - perhaps all! - war stories are told as romances.

Thank you for reading my essay. You can support my work by:

Hitting the heart button so that others can be intrigued and read
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Essay: Inciting Liberation

Mona Eltahawy — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 21:41:53 GMT

Illustration by Hugo Martinez from Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts.

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First published on July 4, 2021

Sixty-eight years before the date that the United States of America celebrates as its “Independence Day,” an enslaved Black woman in New York City led a revolt for her independence. The woman along with other enslaved people in farmhouses nearby, decided to kill their slavers one night in 1708. She and and a man called “Indian Sam” killed their slaver, his pregnant wife, and their five offspring. They were arrested the next morning.

Historian Rebecca Hall unearthed this woman-led revolt while researching her dissertation which she has turned into the graphic novel Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts.

“This story was almost completely silenced in the history of slave revolts, though seven white people were killed and four slaves were executed,” Hall writes.

“And I am certain that the reason this was never classified as a revolt was because it was a woman who led it. And historians teach that women don’t do this kind of thing. They might kill their masters in some feminine fit of pique, but that’s different from participating in, or even planning, a revolt.

“Historians would have seen “woman” and “murdered her master” and immediately dismissed it as some kind of individual household violence. Coordinated acts of violent resistance were exclusively planned by men, conventional wisdom held,” writes Hall.

In other words, patriarchy is the reason that this freedom fighter has been erased.

Get Rebecca Hall's Wake

Known in court records only as the “Negro wench” and “Negro fiend,” the woman was executed along with three enslaved men. They were hanged and she was burnt at the stake. Why? Again patriarchy.

“Way back in 1352, King Edward III created a statute that said if a woman killed her husband or master, the killing is “treason” and the required punishment was to be burnt at the stake,” Hall writes. “In such cases, the killing was not “murder” but “treason” against the state because a woman’s husband or master was considered “her natural lord,” and killing him was like killing the monarch. It was a crime against The State.”

Fuck the State. Fuck the monarchy. And fuck the patriarchy.

And Fuck the Fourth of July and any holiday that celebrates the liberation of only a few from any of those oppressors. I am not here to celebrate the “independence” of a group of white men from a white monarch. I am here to incite for the liberation of all. I am not here to celebrate “independence” overseen by slavers: 10 of the United States’ first 12 presidents owned slaves. I am not here to celebrate “Founding Fathers” aka white slave-owning patriarchy.

Who deserves freedom? And from whom is our liberation?

“No God, No Boss, No Husband,” answered an Argentinian anarchist feminist in a letter to La Voz de la Mujer, the first anarcha-feminist newspaper which was published by the world's first explicitly anarchist-feminist group in 1896, more than 180 years after the “Negro fiend” led a revolt against slavers in New York City.

In its first issue, La Voz de la Mujer warned misogynist anarchist comrades “You had better understand once and for all that our mission is not reducible to raising your children and washing your clothes and that we also have a right to emancipate ourselves and to be free from all kinds of tutelage, whether economic or marital.”

7 Necessary Sins for Women & Girls

And in case it was not clear, the fourth edition of La Voz de la Mujer put it thus: “We hate authority because we aspire to be human beings and not machines directed by the will of ‘another,’ be this authority, religion, or any other name.”

What fucking world is this?

Ask that question, during a pandemic or at any other time, and the immediate response is "Well, what's your alternative?" We are tasked with both surviving the oppressions we are subjected to and coming up with ways to end them.

At least 3.98 million people around the world have died so far from COVD19. In the United States, more than 620,000 people have died, most of them elders, Black and Indigenous people, people of colour, the disabled, and those most marginalized by and left vulnerable to that fucking world we are tasked to both survive and fix.

What is my alternative to this fucking world?

My feminism tells me it is anarchism and anarchism tells me it is feminism.

Anarchism is often misunderstood as inciting violence. I understand anarchism as inciting liberation.

To me, as that feminist and anarchist, any talk of freedom is impossible without a reckoning with power.

The Black bisexual poet and feminist activist June Jordan reminds us of the centrality of imagination to power and freedom; it is the engine that drives them.

Get Life As Activism

“Like a lot of Black women, I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires,” she wrote in an essay in the anthology On Call: Political Essays, 1985, “All my life I’ve been studying revolution. I’ve been looking for it, pushing at the possibilities and waiting for that moment, when there’s no room for rhetoric, for research or reason: when there’s only my life or death to act upon.”

So what is the power that my freedom requires? For starters, it is a reckoning with all those oppressions that are exactly what led us to the inequalities that the pandemic has exacerbated. Those oppressions are like multiple beating hearts that have kept those inequalities alive.

In “Rethinking Anarchy,” the Spanish social theorist Carlos Taibo reminds us that “anarchists have frequently defined themselves first on the basis of what they reject — the state, capitalism, inequality, patriarchal society, war, militarism, repression in all its forms, authority.”

And I believe that anarchist feminism is the solution to dismantling those inequalities.

Almost 200 years after the “Negro fiend” led a revolt in New York City, anarchist feminist Kanno Sugako understood the path to liberation for all when she declared in 1906 Japan "Rise up, women wake up! As in the struggle workers are engaged in against capitalists to break down the class system, our demands for freedom and equality with men will not be won easily just because we will it. They will not be won if we do not raise our voices, if no blood is shed.”

Kanno Sugako

Bloody Hell! Adventures in Menopause

Sugako was executed by hanging on January 25, 1911, along with 11 other anarchists charged with treason against the emperor, whom they were charged with conspiring to assassinate. She was 29 years old and the first female political prisoner to be executed in the history of modern Japan.

We need nothing short of a revolution to dismantle the systems of oppression and injustices which the pandemic has exacerbated. I am focusing on anarchist feminists because my experience with the Egyptian revolution and those in the Middle East and North Africa, often known as the “Arab Spring,” has taught me to always ask "Who is the revolution for?" and always find the anarchist feminists telling the cis men to fuck off with their dick swinging contests. Male comrades, including leftist ones, must be held accountable too.

As Maxine Molyneux points out in her study of Argentinian anarchist feminists, "It is not difficult to see why feminists were attracted to Anarchism and why they were so rightly opposed to male anarchist hypocrisy. Its key ideas stress the struggle against authority, including the power exercised over women in marriage and the family. All anarchists should be seeking freedom within relationships. The Anarchist emphasis on oppression and on power relations opened up a space within which women could be seen simultaneously as the victims of class society and as the victims of male authority."

Too many cis men, including those who are not white, are moved only by the fight for liberation from the State. “None of us are free!” they say. If the State oppresses men and women, then the State, Street, and Home together oppress women. Cis men refuse to make those connections that make them complicit in what I call the Triangle of Patriarchy. It is why the Argentine anarchafeminist declared “No God, No Boss, No Husband.” It is why anarchist Lola Iturbe declared in 1935 Spain, "All these compañeros, however radical they may be in cafes, unions, even (Anarchist) groups, seem to drop their costumes as lovers of female liberation at the doors of their homes.”

Get Free Women of Spain

There have been moments when revolutionaries disentangled a better world from the fuckery of injustice, inequality, and dehumanization that are the tik tok of the world as we usually know it. And just as steady is the misogyny that systematically erases women from those flashes of light that continue to serve as flares for our imagination.

To ask “what fucking world is this?” is a reminder of how over and over and over again women are erased from the “history” we are taught. Fuck this world and fuck the patriarchy.

Who is the revolution for?

So often, too often, we are all called to join the revolution, to risk all for the revolution, and the revolution turns out to be a cisgender dick swinging contest.

I am not interested in dick swinging contests. The revolution anywhere, be it in the United States in 1776 or Spain in the 1930s or Egypt in 2011, will fail unless the liberation of us all is at its heart. Women are always told to wait. I am an anarchist because I am fed up with waiting and because I want to end all forms of hierarchies; to end the oppression that is a result of those hierarchies.

I do not believe that ending capitalism and class structures alone will liberate us all. Capitalism and class structures are not the only forms of oppression we must end. I want to end the oppression also of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, ageism, and other forms of bigotry. I am an anarchist feminist who fights for freedom for all. And there is no freedom without women's freedom, queer freedom, and sexual freedom.

I have risked my life. I'll be fucking damned if I risk it again for a group of swinging dicks whose aim is to get more slices of a cake that they devour and leave only crumbs for the rest of us. Fuck your crumbs. Fuck your cake. Fuck your penis contests. I want to be free. I will be free.

And toward that liberation, it is my right to fight using all the ways I can. When I say that, I am accused of inciting violence.

I am inciting liberation! I am inciting true independence. Today and every day!

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