FEMINIST GIANT

read: Fucking Fabulous #2: Creating New Maps

Once upon a time, I was lying on a mat under a dazzling tapestry of stars in the Sinai desert, unable to sleep because I was overwhelmed by the expansiveness.

Everything was too big, too far, too wide. I’m a city person. Not just a city person, but a crowded city person. And at the time I was living in Cairo, one of the most crowded cities in the world. I was in the Sinai desert for the annual camel race. And the night before the race, which was scheduled for soon after sunrise, everything was too big, too far, too wide. I wanted to be inside somewhere. Even the inside of a car would’ve worked.

“Reach out and touch us,” the sky whispered.

It was too much sky, too much space, too much! I felt like I was going to be swallowed up.

“You’re too far!” I thought, tossing and turning. “I am not big enough.”

No sleep in sight, I spent most of the night staring at the sky. the last time I saw such an abundance of stars, during a solo road trip across the U.S., I drove off the road, distracted as I was by the beauty above.

“Wink back at us,” the stars urged.

“I can’t reach you,” I insisted.

I was used to Cairo streetlights winking at me when I looked out of the window of a plane during landing. I understood that kind of dazzle.

The fucking fabulous thing about my fifties was its gift of embodiment.

I was in my forties that night in the Sinai desert. And I know now that the reason I felt overwhelmed by the sky and its gorgeous tapestry of stars was that I had long been exiled from my body. I could not reach out and touch that glorious sky nor wink at the sparkles that are stars and I felt overwhelmed in the serenity that is the Sinai desert because I did not appreciate the heft of my body.

The fucking fabulous thing about my fifties was its gift of embodiment.

I expanded in my body. I don’t mean I put on weight, although I did during perimenopause. The fucking fabulous thing about going through menopause, with all its challenges, with how shit and how amazing menopause has been, is that it taught me the heft of my body. And the more I stretched into that body, the more I could reach out and touch space, to misquote Depeche Mode.

The changes puberty kickstarted in my body made me unrecognizable to myself. I became an exile to my own body.

Ever since I turned 50, my body and I began a conversation I long refused. The usual word for it is embodiment. Our bodies, for those of us assigned female at birth, are always viewed in relation to men, our worth defined by patriarchy.

Menopause rendered that conversation moot.

I spent so many years deliberately ignoring the diktats of patriarchy that now that patriarchy doesn’t want to talk to me anymore, I am fucking relieved. Finally!

With patriarchy out of the way, my body and I could talk. Finally!

And then I began talking to the trees.

Ever since I turned 50, my body and I began a conversation I long refused. The usual word for it is embodiment. Our bodies, for those of us assigned female at birth, are always viewed in relation to men, our worth defined by patriarchy. Menopause rendered that conversation moot.

I began walking more intentionally in my fifties and befriended the trees. By intentional, I mean I set out to walk, no particular destination in mind, not on my way somewhere, but walking for the sake of it. When I was younger, being outside, walking somewhere, was usually with a destination in mind–for work, to socialise, to argue with someone; usually in a rush.

Trees? What trees?

The more I walked, the more I expanded. The more I walked, especially when I could see the sky, the more my arms, my legs, my being conversed with the trees and appreciated the wonder of their rootedness and presence–the wide, the narrow, the tall, the short, bodies of their own, determined and demanding appreciation.

You sometimes hear advice to be outside, somewhere bigger than yourself, to remember how small we are, and by extension whatever burdens we have.

Since I began talking to the trees, I have experienced the opposite. The more vast my surroundings, the more I expand to touch the sky, and the bigger I become, to traverse the distance between us. The opposite of my experience in the Sinai desert under the tapestry of stars that night years ago.

The trees taught me.

“Look up,” they said. “See how we do it.”

We New Yorkers are not known for looking up. When we do, it’s all glass and steel and brick, which all have their own language but it’s not the lexicon of expansion.

Then I began talking to the trees in my fifties.

How can you be lonely when you have the trees? Lean in and listen. Relish a silence that is not the absence of noise but an invitation to connect. “Come this way,” the trees beckon.

I want to be a tree when I grow up. I want to bloom in lushness and then shed it all so that I can make room for more fullness that knows exactly its worth.

I’m not making facile comparisons between Spring and youth and Winter as the opposite. I mean all that lushness and shedding and then blooming again in a day, a week, a month, a year. I mean the fucking fabulousness of being alive with all its glory and pain; crooked and broken branches, breathtaking and crushing, calm and chaotic, all of it, give it to me, all!

How can you be lonely when you have the trees? Lean in and listen. Relish a silence that is not the absence of noise but an invitation to connect.

And then the wind! Oh, the wind. Amplifier and conductor at once of all that the trees have to tell me.

“Love me, love me, love me, say you do. Let me fly away with you. For my love is like the wind,” Nina Simone sings. “And wild is the wind.”

There’s a reason that wind and passion are so often twins. And when wind bursts into your heart and carries it away…to where? Who cares! Art awaits, for as Billie Holiday tells us, the winds of March made her heart a dancer. But those are foolish things.

Who cares!

It is fucking fabulous this thing called aging. Like passion, it can overwhelm, but there are trees, role models of how to age just as you are meant to. And the expanse of space–the sky, the stars, the silence and stillness of a desert night–no longer overwhelms.

And now, on my walks, I look up at the sky and, egged on by the trees, I wink. The bigger the space I can expand into, the fuller I become. Isn’t that a wonderful paradox? Just as the trees stretch upwards while their rootedness reaches far beneath.

It is fucking fabulous this thing called aging. Like passion, it can overwhelm, but there are trees, role models of how to age just as you are meant to.

I think of that night in the Sinai desert under the tapestry of stars and I now know that I was not ready. I did not know how to reach out. I was big in different ways in my forties. They were ways that served me then but my fifties needed expansion in new ways. My fifties demanded an embodiment that I had long neglected. Menopause and the trees urged me on.

The trees became my teachers. Lush, bare, crooked, blooming–just as they are. Just as I am. Menopause listened, learned, and nudged me on.

“Excuse me while I kiss the sky!”

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
Opting for a one-time payment via buying me a coffee
Sharing this post by email or on social media
Thanks for reading FEMINIST GIANT! This post is public so feel free to share it.
Share

Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. Her books have been translated into 13 languages so far. 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.

Essay: Ode to My Vagina

Mona Eltahawy — Sun, 31 May 2026 18:22:37 GMT

Image: Betty Dodson

First published Apr 23, 2025

Update: A recent study published in the journal Sexual and Relationship Therapy orgasms, specifically those achieved through masturbation with sex toys, and people in non-monogamous relationships or those who date younger partners tend to experience fewer menopausal difficulties overall. May is Masturbation Month so to celebrate on this final day of the month, I’m republishing this essay.

My vagina gives, to me, plenty. My vagina has never given birth. My vagina gives me orgasms so intense that I laugh in wonder. My vagina and I are having the best sex of our lives.

And on this World Vagina Appreciation Day (April 23), consider this an ode to my vagina.

A couple of decades ago, I read an anthology of essays about sex by women writers. It was mentioned somewhere in the book that it can be hard for “serious” women writers to write about sex because they risk not being taken seriously anymore. That might seem quaint now, to imagine such a hard firewall between the kind of writing women can do, but perhaps not so surprising considering the ways we are socialized to privilege the mind over the body if we want to be taken “seriously.”

As if the risk of writing about sex can forever taint one’s future work, like those wads of cash stolen in a bank heist that explode into blue paint that ruins them. As if sex taints and ruins. As if vaginas and their owners are dirty. As if pleasure must be stolen.

So here I am celebrating my vagina and the pleasure it gives me. I hate the phrase “give me an orgasm.” No one has given me an orgasm. I have had orgasms with other people but they don’t “give me an orgasm.” An orgasm is not a gift. It is a conversation between my vagina and me. Sometimes there are other people we allow into the conversation and other times it is just me and my vagina talking. That ownership is important. That ownership is me refusing the cisgender heternormative power play over my body. That play, and that body, belong to me.

As if the risk of writing about sex can forever taint one’s future work, like those wads of cash stolen in a bank heist that explode into blue paint that ruins them. As if sex taints and ruins. As if vaginas and their owners are dirty. As if pleasure must be stolen.

So here I am, a “serious” writer, tainting my future work. Here I am confessing that for too long my body was indeed an afterthought, fed and watered like one of those hardy plants that require the minimum of care to survive.

Here I am to tell you that menopause changed all of that.

Get Bloody Hell!

But first I had to accept the challenge. And fuck me (metaphorically for now), were there plenty (of challenges, not orgasms, hence the challenges).

Menopause fucked me sideways. (Again, metaphor. Because for a while there, there was no fucking, literally.)

First it went for my vagina. Then it came for my words. Sex and writing. Oof. It felt particularly cruel for menopause to be so fucking bespoke: to so fashion its challenges to fit exactly what I feared the most. I wasn’t having sex with anyone, including myself. And I couldn’t write. So no risk there of losing my “serious.”

So I decided to lose shame instead, because if I didn’t, I would feel robbed.

Not by the menopause transition, which is “natural” (I rarely use that word because it is often employed by cishet patriarchy in the name of fuckery), but by an upbringing and socialization that instilled in me something that should be considered unnatural and which took me years to shed.

I was socialized into a shame around sex and sexuality, and I was taught--and I obeyed--that I must wait until I get married to “have sex.”

At their core, such teachings are flags planted by patriarchy on our bodies to remind us we do not own them; to control our sexuality and fertility. Soon after puberty begins, especially after menstruation starts, we become walking liabilities that must be contained and controlled, as if our uteruses were grenades ready to explode if left to our own devices.

I am childfree by choice. And now that my fertility has finally vacated the building, who owns my body?

I do. And it is at exactly this point in my life when I am standing in my power, as a 57-year-old woman of colour that patriarchy wants to remind me that it renders me moot. Well, fuck that shit.

I was socialized into a shame around sex and sexuality, and I was taught--and I obeyed--that I must wait until I get married to “have sex.” At their core, such teachings are flags planted by patriarchy on our bodies to remind us we do not own them; to control our sexuality and fertility.

I am sad for my younger self that I obeyed for so long and thus deprived myself of the joy of sex with another person. It is a form of grieving that I am now beginning to honour as grief over the loss of joy and intimacy.

I was enjoying sex with myself from the age of about 11. I knew my way around my genitals and was giving myself orgasms for years before another person joined the conversation. I finally had sex with another person when I was 29.

I often say that I have “made up for lost time,” and that I fucked the guilt from having extra marital sex out of my system. After the laughter clears though, you should know I am making a serious point: I worked hard to own my body, to have sex the way I want to, to figure out who I am attracted to and how I want to be intimate with them.

I want to write to every person raised with any version of “purity culture” and tell them to enjoy their bodies at every stage. Don’t wait, I want to yell at them. Don’t let the patriarchy rob you.

And it is at exactly this point in my life when I am standing in my power, as a 57-year-old woman of colour that patriarchy wants to remind me that it renders me moot. Well, fuck that shit.

Bloody Hell! Advevntures in Menopause

When I began to notice the impact of perimenopause on my vagina and sex drive, it bothered me more than hot flashes, no longer sleeping through the night, and changes to my digestive system.

It bothered me because I felt I was being robbed again.

At first, I was shell shocked. Because I am determined in my shamelessness, let me tell you: I did not have sex for a year. If you had told enthusiastically-and-determinedly-sex-positive me that I would go a year without having sex, with myself or anyone else, she would have told you to fuck right off with your nonsense.

I was bereft. How was this happening? That conversation between me and my vagina, those orgasms, that pleasure–the silence felt like an abandonment. It was never about “pleasing a man.” Sex, for me, has never been about Mona giving and a Man taking. When I hear postmenopausal cisgender women say that they’re relieved they “don’t have to have sex anymore,” it saddens me deeply. Not that they’re not having sex with another person, but that they felt it was a duty or an obligation that they’re relieved to be rid of.

I fought to have sex on my terms. It has never been a duty or an obligation for me. It has always been about my pleasure. It has always been about my vagina and me.

I was fucking enraged at feeling robbed of it. Something I loved, that brought me so much pleasure, was gone, poof, just like that! How did that happen? Who was that person I did not recognize, who did not even masturbate? Who abducted Mona? And how could I bring her back?

And furthermore, I was ashamed. And that shocked me too. I am shameless!

So I took my rage and shame and pronounced them as loudly as I could. I wrote about not having sex for a year. I wrote about not writing or reading for a year. Fuck being “serious.” Sex and writing are deeply serious for me.

If something scares you, accept the challenge, look into its eyes and let it dare you to jump. I dived, deeply (ah, all these metaphors–can you tell I’ve got my vagina on my brain?) into all things menopause, and experimented until I found a way through.

I fought to have sex on my terms. It has never been a duty or an obligation for me. It has always been about my pleasure. It has always about my vagina and me.

I’ve listed here and here what I used that helped me accept the challenge of menopause, and to enjoy that conversation between me and my vagina again, to enjoy orgasms again, in solo and partnered sex.

Now, here is what I call my Sex and Writing Team:

Prescribed by my OB/GYN: Menopause Hormone Therapy (an estrogen patch that I change twice a week, and an IUD that releases a low-dose progesterone to protect my uterus), and Intrarosa vaginal inserts.

Prescribed by Mona: Cannabis (in all its derivatives–THC, CBD, CBG, CBN) and Foria products. The latter I use so frequently that the company that makes them asked me if I wanted to become a brand ambassador but I declined because I want you to know that when I recommend their Intimacy Metls with CBD and their Awaken Arousal Oil with CBD it is because they are fucking amazing and not becaused I want you to buy them with a special code that gets me a commission. They are not cheap but FUCK ME, WOW.

And sex toys. Many sex toys–the kind that vibrate on your clitoris and vulva, the suction kind, and the kind that you use for penetration that can reach further into my vagina than my fingers can and have helped me delight in the endless wonders and pleasure zones of my vagina, taking me to orgasms so intense that I laugh in wonder.

Talking of all things self pleasure—scroll up to the art illustrating my essay and click on the link to read Betty Dodson! A revolutionary!

For those of us assigned female at birth, we are “rewarded” with desirability and punished for desire. That is why it’s essential to distinguish between the two.

Power lies with she who desires. And it is when we enter menopause, when patriarchy deems us “invisible” and therefore undesirable, that our desire takes centre stage and is no longer “punished” with consequence, such as pregnancy. When we think of desire and desirability within those parameters, we can render moot the “invisibility” that patriarchy threatens us with and claim instead a power that it always tried to deny us.

I desire, therefore I am.

That desire for pleasure, that conversation between my vagina and me, that wonder at the joy of it all! There is power in that disruption of patriarchy’s diktats. Fascism is to control what feminism is to liberation what pleasure is to autonomy.

Ode to my vagina!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
Opting for a one-time payment via buying me a coffee
Sharing this post by email or on social media
Thanks for reading FEMINIST GIANT! This post is public so feel free to share it.
Share

Essay: The Demise of the Fascist Beauty Queen

Mona Eltahawy — Tue, 19 May 2026 18:14:07 GMT

Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, Marjorie Taylor Greene

PART I

Donald Trump has surrounded himself with women; specifically white women.

They lie for him, they justify murder and violence by the thugs of the immigration militia known as ICE for him, they prosecute and persecute his enemies for him; they do his bidding.

And he discards them quicker than you can say patriarchy.

Look at Kristi Noem, who as U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security was Trump’s chief enforcer of anti-migrant violence and cruelty. Look at Pam Bondi, who as Attorney General was Trump’s chief law enforcement officer and used the law to target Trump’s enemies. Look at Karolyn Leavitt, who as White House Press Secretary is Trump’s official mouthpiece and liar. Look at Amy Coney Barrett, who as Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court hammered the necessary final nail in the coffin of the federally protected right to an abortion.

White women have helped Trump make history: Kellyanne Conway was the first woman to successfully lead a presidential campaign when Trump was first elected in 2016. Susie Wiles, the chief of staff for Trump’s second term in office, is the first woman to hold that position.

And they provide a plausible deniability for him: he points at those women for cover when we rightfully accuse him of misogyny.

More than two dozen women have accused Trump of sexually assaulting them. In May 2023, while he was out of office, a jury found that Trump sexually abused and defamed writer E. Jean Carroll in 1996. Trump’s relationship with disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has defined the president’s second term. He calls the matter a “hoax.”

Nonetheless, he has frequently described himself as a “protector” of women. During his campaign for a second term in office, he declared he would protect them “whether the women like it or not.” In addition to realizing the long-held conservative goal to destroy abortion rights, he has appointed a vice president with deeply misogynist views of his own. J.D. Vance has ridiculed women who choose not to have children as “Childless, cat ladies,” and is said to oppose no-fault divorce, which has been vital for women leaving abusive marriages.

Fighting just misogyny is not enough when there are women giving cover to authoritarianism.

When fascism surrounds itself with women who are willing footsoldiers for its violence and cruelty, feminism that targets more than just misogyny dismantles the lies and hypocrisy of fascists like Trump and others.

While the “manosphere” – a range of misogynistic communities that vary from anti-feminism to more explicit, violent rhetoric towards women – helped deliver a second-term in office to Trump, the emerging “womanosphere” and its almost exclusively white women influencers is targeting young women with right wing ideology alongside lifestyle content. Researchers have found “significant cross-pollination between the ‘manosphere’ and right-wing extremism,” which the womanosphere looks likely to copy.

The goal of feminism cannot be simply the elevation of any and all women. What a vacant and meaningless goal that would be, without also destroying patriarchy, with all its attendant oppressions. Patriarchal fuckery is no more palatable because it is delivered by women.

Italy and Japan recently got their first female prime ministers–Giorgia Meloni in 2022 and Sanae Takaichi in 2025–both women come from the far right. In France and Germany, women lead far right parties–Marine Le Pen and Alice Weidel. Right-winger Laura Fernández Delgado was elected Costa Rica’s second female president in 2026. Women have led right wing parties in Denmark and Norway, countries that long boasted feminist advances.

When the U.S. finally gets a woman president, she will most likely be from the right wing.

What makes those women so powerful is a reminder of why feminism remains a vital force against fascism.

“A part of the answer lies in culture and identity. From marianismo in Latin America—a cultural ideal derived from the veneration of the Virgin Mary that defines womanhood through moral virtue, humility, and self-sacrifice—to long-standing European notions of femininity rooted in domesticity and nurturance, women have been socialised to see themselves as caretakers, mothers, and moral anchors of society,” write Christine Kellner, Maja Włodarczyk, and Marija Bule.

Undoubtedly, the gains that feminism has made so far in the U.S. and other parts of the world are what make the ascension of those women to powerful positions possible. In return for being allowed to ascend that ladder of power, those women promote right-wing opposition to immigration, provide support for tough “law and order” issues, and proffer anti-feminist positions on women and gender issues.

Conservative and right-wing parties alike, who benefit from a host of oppressions employed by patriarchy, such as white supremacy and the disparities in wealth and income that are maintained by capitalism, will obfuscate from their misogyny by pointing to the appointment by those parties of a woman here or a woman there and smugly exclaim, “See!” Yet the agendas of those women—which are the agendas of those conservative and right-wing parties—cut feminism at its knees.

We must recognise that disingenuous ruse for what it is—an appropriation of the very thing that conservatives claim to despise: identity politics.

The sorority of fascist footsoldiers are women who think they can afford the gamble that they will not be hurt by the fascist patriarchy they serve. They are not my sisters. I do not support a woman merely because she is a woman.

White womanhood is privilege sweetened with an innocence and fragility that white women--liberal or conservative, Trump-voting or not--are adept at weaponizing.

Bloody Hell! Adventures ini Menopause

PART II

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former Republican congresswoman from Georgia, was Head Girl of the Sorority of Footsoldiers for Trump during her three terms in the U.S. Congress. Ask her if serving fascist patriarchy protected her from that fascist patriarchy.

The short answer is no.

Greene spent three terms as “Trump’s most notorious acolyte in Congress,” and “had adopted his unrepentant pugilism as her own.”

Greene backed insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and supported executing prominent Democrats.

Greene has supported the far-right QAnon movement which the FBI labelled a domestic terror threat in 2019. She has called the Sandy Hook and Parkland school massacres false flag operations designed to destroy the Second Amendment.

White womanhood is privilege sweetened with an innocence and fragility that white women--liberal or conservative, Trump-voting or not--are adept at weaponizing.

Greene was dangerous and vile long before she was elected but because much of her vileness was directed at Muslims, Black people, and Jews, Republicans shrugged and carried on with their craven hypocrisy, happy to throw their weight behind anyone who brings them votes.

Greene has been called “a Donald Trump in Heels” and “the female version of Trump.” Republicans who should have done everything to ensure that she never ran for office in the first place, placated concerns about the danger of Congresswoman Greene with facile “I hope that she will grow and learn,” in office and, as they said about Trump, that the weight of her political duties would mature and moderate her.

That is delusional and enabling.

It is imperative to recognize that Greene, like Trump, is not an aberration. She is from Georgia, where 75 percent of white women voters chose a white man - Brian Kemp - against Stacey Abrams, a Black woman, in her campaign for governor in 2018. Southern white women are the nexus of the GOP’s Southern Strategy’s reliance on race, gender, and religion to keep white people in that part of the U.S. resolutely Republican and increasingly right wing.

As Angie Maxwell, co-author of The Long Southern Strategy insists, voting patterns must be disaggregated by region and race because when they are, it is clear that white women do not overwhelmingly vote Democrat. It is a long held and myopically racist caveat to claim simply that the majority of women vote Democrat and to blame Trumpism on men. Far from it: 78 percent of white women who call themselves southern voted for Trump in 2016.

White supremacist and increasingly evangelical patriarchy has an army of willing white women serving as its footsoldiers in the South.

The danger, always, is that someone as vile as Greene is normalized by the U.S. media. White, blonde, Christian women--even the dangerous ideologues--are afforded the privilege of default and the audacity of innocence.

Southern white women are the nexus of the GOP’s Southern Strategy’s reliance on race, gender, and religion to keep white people in that part of the U.S. resolutely Republican and increasingly right wing.

PART III

And then it came crashing down. Fascist patriarchy demands absolute obedience, even from its most enthusiastic footsoldiers, or else it eats them up.

Greene, who had called Trump “my favorite president of all time,” and was a staunch, vocal Make America Great Again (MAGA) loyalist for the president, voting with him 98 percent of the time, became more critical of her party and president on issues such as healthcare. The biggest rupture came when she supported legislation to force the Department of Justice to release the Jeffrey Epstein files, documents related to the case of the convicted child sex predator. That caused a bitter split with Trump, who has called the files a hoax.

Trump called her a lunatic and a traitor, and said her views were “those of a very dumb person.”

“The result of that was a pipe bomb threat on my house, a pipe bomb threat on my construction company, multiple pizza doxxing deliveries, and a direct death threat, multiple direct death threats on my own son. And this is the type of the nature of toxic politics that I think America is so tired of,” Greene told PBS News.

“But it shows, it really shows there’s a problem in the Republican Party when the leader of the Republican Party, the president of the United States, would actually attack one of his own members that has been so good to him,” Greene said.

She resigned soon after.

White, blonde, Christian women--even the dangerous ideologues--are afforded the privilege of default and the audacity of innocence.

Why would anyone who herself had engaged in “toxic politics,” that included inciting violence against her political opponents, be shocked that she could become a target of such toxicity?

Fascist patriarchy is loyal only to itself and those who work to maintain its power. And the quickest way it punishes its once stalwart female footsoldiers, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, is to resort to misogyny–calling Greene a lunatic, traitor, and “very dumb person.”. The same misogyny that it claimed to have outgrown because so many women have helped give it plausible deniability. “Of course we’re not misogynists!” fascist patriarchy claims as it points to the Marjorie Tayler Greene’s who footsoldier for it.

Fighting just misogyny is not enough.

Level up your feminism and aim it at the hypocrisy that unites the sorority of fascist footsoldiers. Level up your feminism into the serious threat to fascism that it must become.

PART IV

Right wing and increasingly fascist white supremacist patriarchy–from Donald Trump in the U.S. to Viktor Orban when he ruled in Hungary to the AfD in Germany–peddles in racist, anti immigrant hate speech that demonises Black and brown men that their white supporters, including women, are all too happy to consume.

All the while, that same right wing and increasingly fascist patriarchy is destroying the rights of anyone who is not a white, cisgender, heterosexual, conservative and wealthy able-bodied man.

Level up your feminism and aim it at the hypocrisy that unites the sorority of fascist footsoldiers. Level up your feminism into the serious threat to fascism that it must become.

Feminism is a daily revolution. It is not a coat I pull out of the closet whenever a man has been a shit to me. White supremacy, misogyny, genocide, capitalism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, ageism, and a host of other bigotries that fuel fascist patriarchy will not disappear, regardless of who occupies the White House for the next two and a half years. And a robust feminism is how to fight them all.

Feminism is not easy or nice; it is fire and a fight. I am not playing; I am here to destroy. I want to be free. That is my daily demand.

Coming soon: The Second Installment to this essay will look at how to fight back

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
Opting for a one-time payment via buying me a coffee
Sharing this post by email or on social media
Thanks for reading FEMINIST GIANT! This post is public so feel free to share it.
Share

Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. Her books have been published in 13 languages. 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.

Fucking Fabulous #2: Creating New Maps

Mona Eltahawy — Wed, 13 May 2026 12:51:45 GMT

Photo: Robert E. Rutledge

read: Fucking Fabulous #1: Off Kilter

I lost the ability to lie to myself in my fifties. I do not wish it on anyone. But it’s fucking fabulous.

I do not wish it on anyone, this dare to yourself to tell the truth, to your own face. To say “Perhaps that version of my story served me when I was younger, perhaps because I did not have the fortitude to say ‘stop lying’ to my face.”

Each of us has a personal soundtrack on autoplay in our head: That constant, inner monologue that is quite often the stuff of myths and lies, unlike affirmations that we are encouraged to say out loud to boost us into action or over a dip in self confidence.

Often on a loop, with no option to pause or erase and rewind (for those old enough to know what that means because they’ve held cassette tapes in their hands), it is easy to believe it’s the truth because it’s so constant.

I give a fuck. I want the truth.

One’s personal lore, or mythology of the self, can be as stubborn as a scar. Even when its sharpness wanes, the wound remains; the scar an echo, persistent.

Perhaps that’s what some call no longer giving a fuck. But we do; we do.

I give a fuck. I want the truth.

And since I lost the ability to lie to myself in my fucking fabulous fifties, my personal myths have been falling fast and furiously. It’s like the memes that circulated after the David Beckham documentary showing him entering the room where his wife Victoria is misrepresenting her family’s wealth when she was growing up. David keeps exiting and re-entering the room, interrupting Victoria’s half truths until she finally says the truth: that she grew up rich.

Sometimes, I play David to my Victoria during that softest and most vulnerable time: my morning face cleansing ritual. Sleep delivers me unto consciousness once again, and those early minutes in front of the mirror, soothing and swiping balms and oils onto my skin, are often when I am most aware of that soundtrack of solipsism. Off I swipe the previous night’s retinol, and in enters my David to interrupt my Victoria’s half truths.

You don’t need to know all my David and Victoria back and forths. They’ve been useful to my dare to stop lying to myself. But I will share this one with you because it surprised even me

I tried to blow up a professional relationship very soon after the episode of vertigo that I describe in Fucking Fabulous #1. I was adamant in my anger. It was a steadying force in the face of the spinning room triggered by vertigo. Anger as my emotional blanket. I know it. We’ve been friends since I was a girl. It helps me get things done. And quickly. I have no patience. Now, now, now. And so I blew up the relationship. Or at least tried to.

It wasn’t anger that I felt, though. I was sad. I was hurt. When I was younger, I would not have slowed down enough to bring sadness back from the outer regions of my being where I had banished it.

The more my David pushed my Victoria, I felt like I was living my own version of Inside Out, one of my favourite films. In the animated film, 11-year-old Riley is learning to navigate emotions. Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust are shown as distinct characters running Riley’s life from a command centre. I shared in common with the film a determination to banish sadness.

In the film, that banishment is instigated by Joy who thinks she knows best and that Sadness was unnecessary. In my film, Anger kicked sadness into exile. I knew that Sadness and Patience were the currency too often offered to girls and young women as buoys in the violent waters of patriarchy.

Once upon a time I was a volcano who believed she was a girl. Or was I a girl who knew her eruptions were a thing of beauty, a force not to be trifled with? I erupted in rage and impatience, many times in the ways that Ursula K. Le Guin encouraged before I knew who Ursula K. Le Guin was. And I honour those eruptions!

My mother has been an essential role model as a woman who easily accesses her anger and uses it to change things and for that I am forever grateful. She has shown me that a woman can be angry and can indeed be fucking enraged and I have learned.

I’m changing the map of Mona. That kind of change demands patience. Anger was always easier for me to navigate than sadness. Anger is frenetic and about now-now-now. Who had the patience to sit still for sadness?

Menopause didn’t gift me rage. I’ve always had that, aplenty. The power that came with menopause for me meant that I could now access sadness as a strength; to stand in the power of that emotion that can so easily incapacitate girls (that’s what patriarchy counts on) but which, as a woman in my fifties, I’m wielding to clarify and clear the debris of half truths that stand in my way as I mature into the woman I am still becoming.

Sadness is the internal eruption to anger’s external ones. My eruptions are now changing my internal landscape.

“We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains,” Le Guin told the 1986 graduating class at Bryn Mawr.

I’m changing the map of Mona. That kind of change demands patience. Anger was always easier for me to navigate than sadness. Anger is frenetic and about now-now-now. Who had the patience to sit still for sadness?

But I am the cartographer of my being and those new mountains need stillness. And time.

And it is fucking fabulous.

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
Opting for a one-time payment via buying me a coffee
Sharing this post by email or on social media
Thanks for reading FEMINIST GIANT! This post is public so feel free to share it.
Share
.

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.

Essay: Childfree by Choice

Mona Eltahawy — Sun, 10 May 2026 14:47:16 GMT

Maria Guzmán Capron, Faltas Tu. Courtesy of the artist and Nazarian / Curcio Gallery

Originally published in Guernica

First published on December 14, 2025

I chose to be childfree so that I could live at the airport.

When one of my nephews was a toddler, his babysitter asked him where his Tante Mona lived.

“At the airport,” he replied without skipping a beat.

He would often accompany his dad, my brother, to pick me up and drop me off when I visited. It wasn’t quite a malapropism but you could make the argument that I spent more time at the airport than my actual home in New York City because without children, I was able to travel so frequently.

I chose to be childfree so that I could get arrested twice in as many years, without having to worry about dependents, without being told “Think of your children!”

When one of my nieces was eight, she told me she had been looking up pictures of our family online.

“I saw one of you…” she paused. “Never mind.”

I thought she’d wanted to say she’d seen a picture of me with my arms in casts after Egyptian riot police assaulted and then arrested me in Cairo, and that she worried she’d upset me with a bad memory. But in fact, she’d seen a picture of me getting arrested a year later in New York City after I spray-painted over a racist pro-Israel advertisement in the subway in 2012.

I told my niece that I was proud of getting arrested. We had a good chat about why I spray-painted over the ad and why protesting was important. And then, together, we looked at the pictures of me getting arrested. And our conversation continued:

Niece: I know why you got tattoos. (Pointing to my forearms.)

Me: Why?

Niece: Because they broke those arms and you wanted to say, “I’m free and awesome!” (Pause.) Why did they break your arms?

Me: They wanted to scare me and make me go home and stop protesting.

Niece: Did you go home?

Me: No.

Niece: Good!

I’m childfree by choice because I am the worst thing a woman could be: selfish. I’m childfree by choice because I chose me. I am childfree by choice because I wanted to be free.

I’m childfree by choice so that I could spend five weeks helping my sister and her husband with their firstborn—in awe and admiration at their evolution into loving parents—hold my sister’s baby to my chest and feel the euphoria of pure, unconditional love, and return home still happy that I chose not to have children.

I’m childfree by choice because I am the worst thing a woman could be: selfish.

I’m childfree by choice because I chose me.

I am childfree by choice because I wanted to be free.

At sixteen, I vowed that I would never allow myself to be held in a situation that I could not walk away from. The year before, my family had moved to Saudi Arabia. As soon as we did, I felt like I had been sentenced to a lifetime in prison because being there was so suffocating and stifling. I could not go anywhere unless my brother accompanied me. I saw my mother—who, like my father, was a medical doctor—no longer able to drive because women then were not permitted to. Back then, in 1982, before we bought a car that only my dad could drive, when we would board a public bus, women would have to sit at the back.

By refusing to give birth, I have birthed the version of myself that I always wanted to be.

There, I was traumatized into feminism. There, I promised myself that I would always be free enough to be able to walk away, at any time. Without actually saying “I’m never going to have children”—without thinking about children at all—I had already vowed to myself not to have children. I had already decided that freedom—my own—would be my firstborn.

And now that I am postmenopausal, I am glad that I kept that vow to myself.

By refusing to give birth, I have birthed the version of myself that I always wanted to be.

Those of us assigned female at birth are expected not only to put that womb into the service of patriarchy, but to more fundamentally offer ourselves up in service.

When I was younger, I used to say in response to, “Do you have children?” that my books were my children.

I grew to utterly reject that notion. I want to challenge the idea that we need to live on through something, be it children or books.

As I rejected, “Oh but you would’ve made a great mother.”

As I rejected, “Happy Mother’s Day,” yelled at me by complete strangers on the street.

As I rejected, “You mother so many of us,” said to me by kind readers when I complained that random people would wish me a Happy Mother’s Day. I wanted to challenge the idea that a cisgender woman must mother someone or something.

And I reject all the above because I claim the right to be selfish. I always say the worst thing a woman can be called is not a bitch or cunt, but selfish.

My books are not my children. I do not mother the people who read and are influenced by my work. I would not have made a “good mother.” I am a great aunt.

7 Necessary Sins: The Course

Those of us assigned female at birth are expected not only to put that womb into the service of patriarchy, but to more fundamentally offer ourselves up in service. To mother is to be in service—that most “feminine” of enterprises in the form of care and caregiving. To always put others first. To never say, “I come first.” To always sacrifice. To never insist that you are worthy, empty womb notwithstanding.

My books are not my children.

I do not mother the people who read and are influenced by my work.

I would not have made a “good mother.”

I am a great aunt.

When I started saying in public lectures that I was childfree by choice, women would track me down in a corridor, backstage, or in the bathroom to whisper, “Thank you. I have never heard another woman say that out loud before.” It was an important reminder that silence is the brick and mortar of shame, and I was glad to help to dismantle that house of stigma.

I am happy with the life I have created. I have never wondered what it would have been like to have children. I say that because we often hear, “You’ll regret it when it’s too late.” Well, here I am on the other side—it is “too late”—and I am here to say: I do not regret it.

Most books and essays I have seen about being childfree by choice are written by cisgender white women. We need to hear from more Black women and women of colour, and women from different cultural and faith backgrounds as well as trans and gender-expansive people who choose to be childfree.

Looking back from this side of menopause to the years when I could—but refused to—have children, I recognise that something that worked to my advantage was that I was married just for two years. For a woman of my background (Egyptian, Muslim family) and generation (I was born in 1967), the pressure to have children was built into socially acceptable life scripts, such as marriage. But my parents neither pressured me to marry young (I was thirty-three when I met the man I married), nor to have children during my brief marriage. I am forever grateful. I know from my extended family that my life choices are unorthodox and rare.

Looking back now, I see that it was partially because my parents themselves were, for their generation and family, unorthodox. They both chafed under the strict hierarchical nature of their chosen careers in Egypt—and as soon as they could get a scholarship to continue to study abroad, moved us to London so that they could get PhDs in medicine. My mother is one of eleven siblings and my father is one of eight, and yet there we were in our small unit of four, living on meager student stipends thousands of miles away from all that they knew. I marvel at their daring sometimes—to move a young family to a new country and to complete dissertations in a new language!

Their wonderful adventure released me to embark on my own adventure. Even though I am the eldest—and the eldest daughter to boot—they have watched me turn my back against one social expectation after another. There have been some fights but I know, because they tell me, that they are proud of me.

I am forever grateful.

Can you be an ancestor if you are childfree by choice? Can you celebrate your descendants, when you yourself are childfree? I am being poetic. But also deliberately heterodox when it comes to lineage and the ways patriarchy lays claim to it.

I know—from friends in my social circle of Muslim women and women from North Africa and South West Asia—that a growing number of women are having or trying to have children outside the “acceptable” configuration, i.e. marriage to a man. They include: women who are not married, women who are lesbian or bisexual, women who marry a friend or agree to co-parent with a friend so that they can have a child, and women having a child through surrogacy.

Such arrangements are still taboo—to the extent that in 2017, an Egyptian TV presenter was sentenced to three years in jail for daring to talk about ways to become pregnant outside of conventional marriage on her show.

What would the freedom to choose, for all, look like?

I should never have been childfree because my extended family is so fecund and full of progeny. My paternal grandmother had eight children. My maternal grandmother had eleven children (she was pregnant fourteen times). My mother is the eldest of those children and she has three children of her own. I am the eldest of those children—and I am glad to have none of my own.

How does my family tree look, my branch abruptly ending with me? I wonder if I am my ancestors’ wildest dream or wildest nightmare. I am fifty-eight, divorced, queer, nonmonogamous, and childfree by choice. I am determined to become the wild ancestor for future generations—the ancestor that I have always wanted to have. Can you be an ancestor if you are childfree by choice? Can you celebrate your descendants, when you yourself are childfree?

I am being poetic. But also deliberately heterodox when it comes to lineage and the ways patriarchy lays claim to it.

I am Mona, daughter of Ragaa, daughter of Na’ima, daughter of Amina. I am working on a family tree that is richer and more expansive than tracing men to the original patriarch.

I hope that as they grow up, my niblings remember that Tante Mona is happy to live at the airport, to get arrested, to cherish the ways they have expanded my heart’s capacity for euphoria—and to be childfree by choice.

7 Necessay Sins: The Course

Let’s also create family trees that are richer than their number of progeny; to see the branches that end abruptly with ourselves as not “less,” as in childless, but “more,” as in blossoming with love, rebellion, and freedom. There’s more than one way to grow.

When I was eleven years old, I had a teacher who would tell us that people are either birds or trees—those who are forever flighty, or those who value deep roots. I always thought I was the former, but now that I am working on that new kind of family tree, I think of the airport as the place from which I fly to the various branches of my family. I am both bird and tree. Perhaps I am more accurately a bumblebee, cross-pollinating those various branches.

I hope that as they grow up, my niblings—a gender-neutral word to describe the children of siblings—remember that Tante Mona is happy to live at the airport, to get arrested, to cherish the ways they have expanded my heart’s capacity for euphoria—and to be childfree by choice.

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
Opting for a one-time payment via buying me a coffee
Sharing this post by email or on social media

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

Essay: Unmothering

Mona Eltahawy — Sat, 09 May 2026 13:43:17 GMT

First published on May 09, 2021

I am childfree by choice.

My paternal grandmother had eight children. My maternal grandmother had 11 children (she was pregnant 14 times). My mother is the eldest of those children and she has three children of her own. I am the eldest of those children and I am glad to have none of my own.

It is still a taboo to say that.

Arabic version of Unmothering.

I vowed to myself at 16 that I would never allow myself to be in a situation that I could not walk away from. The year before, my family had moved to Saudi Arabia where, as soon as we moved there, I felt like I had been sentenced to a lifetime in prison. There, I was traumatized into feminism. There, I promised myself that I would always be free enough to be able to walk away anytime because being in Saudi Arabia was so suffocating and stifling. Without actually saying “I’m never going to have children” -- without thinking about children at all -- I had already vowed to myself not to have children.

At around the age of 17, I was having nightmares that I married the wrong man so I thought this marriage thing is not for me. My parents never pressured me to marry. My aunts and uncles in Egypt though! Soon after I moved back to Egypt when I was 21, they began lining up husbands for me. They tried everything.

“Mona, he owns five buildings. He has so much money.” I don’t want money, I would tell them.

“Mona, he’s going to take you around the world.” I’m going to take myself around the world, I would say.

“Mona, he’s going to buy you all the jewelry you want.” Every piece of jewelry I’m wearing right now, I bought myself.

Without actually saying “I’m never going to have children” -- without thinking about children at all -- I had already vowed to myself not to have children.

Get 7 Necessary Sins in Ireland & UK

I had a boyfriend in Egypt and we were very much in love. One day, he told me he had just seen a little girl on a bus that day who looked like she could be our daughter and he asked me to marry him and I said yes. Two weeks later, I was having panic attacks. Sixteen-year-old Mona was ringing the alarm. “Hello! You fucking promised me!”

That proposal-yes, I’ll marry you-Mona has a panic attack and then takes it back happened two more times. Then he dumped me because, he said, “You’re never going to marry me and I want to get married and have children.”

Two years later, I fell in love with an American and in the biggest mistake of my life married him. Seventeen-year-old Mona to 33-year-old Mona: “Are you fucking kidding me?!” I left him two years later.

If marrying him was the biggest mistake of my life, not having children with him was the biggest relief of my life. If at age 16 my vow to not have children had been unspoken, it was loud and clear when I was 35 and newly divorced. You can walk away from a marriage and I did. You can fly away from your family and your country of birth and I have. But you can’t walk away from children. I want to be free.

A couple of years after my divorce, my mum asked me “Are you happy like this, with no children?” And I said I was.

When I started saying in public lectures that I was childfree by choice, women would track me down in a corridor, backstage, or in the bathroom to whisper “Thank you. I have never heard another woman say that out loud before.”

Most books/essays I have seen about being childfree by choice are written by white cis women. We need to hear from more women of colour and women from different cultural and faith backgrounds as well as trans men and non-binary people who choose to be childfree. I have my own book planned.

You can walk away from a marriage and I did. You can fly away from your family and your country of birth and I have. But you can’t walk away from children. I want to be free.

When I was growing up, and mostly still the case, Egyptian women were expected to wait until they got married to have sex and to get pregnant as soon as they got married. When I was growing up, a maternal and a paternal aunt could not get pregnant and I remember what a struggle it was for them. They were the only examples of childfree women I knew and it was not by choice for either one of them and I know it was difficult.

I am the first grandchild on either side of the family. And I am the first of those grandchildren who is childfree by choice. I hope my choice has provided an alternative for my cousins.

I am happy with the life I have created. I have never wondered what it would have been like to have children. I say that because we often hear “you’ll regret it when it’s too late.” Well, here I am on the other side -- it is “too late” -- and I am here to say: I do not regret it.

What would the freedom to choose, for all, look like?

7 Necessary Sins: The Course

I know--from friends and women in my social circle of Muslim women and women from the Middle East--that a growing number of women are having/trying to have children outside the “acceptable” i.e. marriage to a man. They include: women who are not married, women who are lesbian or bisexual, women who marry a friend or agree to co-parent with a friend so that they can have a child.

Such arrangements are still taboo that an Egyptian TV presenter was sentenced to three years in jail in 2017 for daring to talk about ways to become pregnant outside of conventional marriage on her show.

It is also taboo to say I own my body and that you will not enlist my womb for capitalism. You will be called “deficient” and “incomplete.” And sometimes the patriarchy will say the quiet part out loud--HAVE BABIES FOR THE ECONOMY--while ignoring what many who do indeed want to have babies have long been saying out loud—YOUR ECONOMIC POLICIES HAVE MADE IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR US TO HAVE BABIES TO BOOST AN ECONOMY THAT BENEFITS VERY FEW OF US. We are more than walking wombs for capitalist patriarchy.

That drive to draft wombs into the service of producing workers is especially sharp in the United States of America and China, each vying for global leadership and each reeling from population decline and plummeting birth rates. Notably, it is the decline in white babies in the United States and Han Chinese babies in China especially that worry the powers that be. We are more than walking incubators for ethno-supremacist patriarchy.

In China, feminists who refuse to offer up their wombs to the patriarchy are punished for it. So threatening is the rejection of heterosexual sex, marriage, and child-rearing—an idea known as 6B4T, which originated from South Korea’s radical feminism movement—that feminist groups espousing it were abruptly kicked offline.

I have never wondered what it would have been like to have children. I say that because we often hear “you’ll regret it when it’s too late.” Well, here I am on the other side -- it is “too late” -- and I am here to say: I do not regret it.

Get 7 Necessary Sins in North America

I wonder if I am my ancestor’s wildest dream or wildest nightmare. I am 53, divorced, queer, polyamorous, and childfree by choice. I am determined to become the wild ancestor for future generations that I have always wanted to have. Can you be an ancestor if you are childfree by choice? Can you celebrate your childfree descendants, when you yourself are childfree?

I am on a mission to find the ancestors who would celebrate me.

My family name--Eltahawy--can be traced back 12 generations. It is somewhat of a family badge of honour to recite the names all the way 12 generations back to that patriarch Eltahawy. The names are all men’s.

I want to find out the 12 generations of women’s names that connect us. I want to know who that matriarch was 12 generations ago. Who was my ancestor who first bore this family line? Who are my foremothers? I want to know and honour those women.

I can start with these women who were alive when I was born:

- Nazira, my paternal grandmother

- Na’ima, my maternal grandmother

- Amina, my maternal great-grandmother

I am Mona daughter of Ragaa daughter of Na’ima daughter of Amina. Now to do that with nine generations of women on my mother’s side. And on my dad’s.

Who are you the daughter of? Who are your foremothers? Who is your mother? And her mother? And her grandmother? Do you know the name of your great grandmother’s mother? How far back can you go with your foremothers’ first names?

When I asked those questions on Twitter in 2019, the responses created one of the most beautiful and powerful streams of responses I have ever seen. It was like standing in a hall together calling the names of our ancestral mothers, invoking them, honouring them.

If I had a child, it would be a daughter so that I could tell her about my lovers. She would hate it, I am sure. But we would slay shame and taboos and I would kick her out into the world with the exhortation: LIVE.

So, because I am childfree by choice, I will instead tell my unmothered daughter about my lovers and we would slay shame and taboos in a book I am writing: Feminist Giant’s Guide To Losing Your Virginity.

If I had a daughter, I would have taught her to disobey everything I taught her. I wrote this poem for her.

To My Unborn Daughter

by Mona Eltahawy

I would not have known how to love you.

I would have taught you to be too big to be a wife.

I would have taught you to disobey everything I taught you.

What could I teach you when I’m still unlearning everything I was taught?

The revolution came too late for you, my love;

I fight for your unborn daughter.

—————————————-

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
Opting for a one-time payment via buying me a coffee
Sharing this post by email or on social media

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

Essay: Artemisia Teaches Us This

Mona Eltahawy — Wed, 06 May 2026 21:57:48 GMT

Artemisia Gentileschi: Judith Beheading Holofernes Judith Beheading Holofernes, oil on canvas by Artemisia Gentileschi, c. 1620; in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

cw: rape, sexual assault

The women’s determination was like a magnet, tugging, pulling, dragging out of me a belief central to my being that I could kill a man.

I’d seen the painting many times online before but standing in front of Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes in real life was like being initiated into a secret society that communicated telepathically, the oils alchemizing a conversation between Judith, her maid accomplice, and me, the viewer, another accomplice across the centuries, entranced, ready, eager to join their rolled-up-sleeves seriousness.

Sign me up. Give me instructions, Artemisia. How did you do it? I know they heard me. The canvas that hangs in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence seemed unresponsive, but I know Judith and her maid heard me.

Much propagandizing surrounds Judith’s beheading of Holofernes. This is neither an exploration of the Biblical story or religious traditions around it nor the ways Israel mines it for political purposes.This is the story of how a woman – me – wanted to dive headfirst into a canvas and help two women finish a man off because it is fucking shit out here.

Sign me up. Give me instructions, Artemisia.

The 7 Necessary Sins for Women and Girls

Because in the real world, on the day when I stood before Judith Beheading Holofornes to learn how she did it, the news was still dominated by a CNN report on a society that was not so secret that had been teaching men through a website on a porn platform and a chat group how to drug and sexually assault their unconscious wives and partners.

French lawmaker Sandrine Josso told CNN that the website and the connected chat group functioned as a “school of violence” and an “online rape academy.” Josso was all too familiar with drug-facilitated sexual assault. Former French senator Joël Guerriau, was found guilty in January of this year of putting the drug MDMA (commonly known as Molly, ecstasy, X) into a glass of champagne he served to Josso in November 2023.

I had heard Josso speak at the 2025 International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, on a panel about media coverage of another case in her country of drug-facilitated sexual assault. Who had not heard of Dominique Pélicot and how he drugged his wife Gisèle, “almost to a state of coma,” and invited men to rape her?

Pélicot was jailed for 20 years by a French court in December 2024 after being found guilty of the attacks, alongside 50 other men whom he invited to rape and sexually assault Gisèle. Police have not been able to identify all the 70 perpetrators believed to have accepted his invitation that read thus: “I’m looking for a pervert accomplice to abuse my wife who’s been put to sleep.”

The CNN report was a reminder of how not unusual Pélicot’s crimes were. And Josso’s comments to CNN were a reminder of how generous too many men were with how to get away with it.

So I stood before Judith and her maid as they telepathically urged across the centuries: join us. Here are instructions. This is how you do it.

I stood before Judith Beheading Holofornes and let it tug, pull, and drag at me with its vow of vicarious vengeance just days after I’d been at this year’s International Journalism Festival, where two survivors of convicted child sex predator Jeffrey Epstein had spoken. At our hotel, I heard one of them cry over breakfast from the exhaustion of constant retelling of the horrors she’d been subjected to. I went to hear journalist and ghostwriter Amy Wallace recount her relationship with another Epstein survivor, Virginia Giuffrie, who Wallace spent years helping write her life story. Giuffrie died in April 2025, before her memoir came out and now Amy speaks for and about Virginia, with the love and grief of a dear friend.

Those panels were during the day.

At night, I was reading about Justin Fairfax, former Lieutenant governor of Virginia and “rising Democratic star,” who had just killed his estranged wife, Dr. Cerine Wanzer, and then himself, two weeks before a judge’s deadline to move out of their family home. Their children were in the house at the time.

There is no respite. Where do I put my rage? Where do I put my demand for vengeance, if not retribution? There is no respite.

So I stood before Judith and her maid as they telepathically urged across the centuries: join us. Here are instructions. This is how you do it.

We all, in order to get on with our lives, push to the back of our minds that we will one day die. We know it because it is our collective fate. But to live, we must forget that we will die. For us women, we have an added burden: the knowledge that the violence of men can find us. It could be the way we die. We might survive it. But like death, it hovers in our mind, often harder than death to forget. We can never forget it.

In October 2017, I was in Dublin to attend the Safe World Summit, which is organized by the NGO Safe Ireland as a gathering for activists from around the world discuss and advocate for ways to end violence against women and children. Many of the speakers were themselves survivors who shared their own experience with patriarchal violence: sexual abuse by parents or priests, intimate partner violence, incest, rape, and other forms of sexual violence. Some talked of how they survived, others of how they barely have. After two days of listening to the speakers’ searing and gutting stories, I wanted to kill men.

Two intense days of survivor stories; my heart sick, my mind consumed. “How can I not hate men?!” It is a challenge - genuine - and one I often surrender to. It is difficult not to hate men.

“It is true. It is true. It is true. It is true.”

This is not an “All men are trash” manifesto. This is not reaffirmation for those who seek it that feminism wants to destroy men. It does not. Feminism, I will insist again and again, wants to destroy patriarchy. Patriarchy is not men. It is a system of oppressions that privileges male dominance.

Patriarchy sure as fuck has no qualms about destroying those of us who are not men.

This is the story of how a woman – me – wanted to dive headfirst into a canvas and help two women finish a man off because it is fucking shit out here.

This is the story of how Artemisia Genteleschi was the first woman admitted to the prestigious Accademia delle Arti del Disegno (Academy of the Arts of Drawing) in Florence in 1616, when she was 23. Six years earlier, a man hired by her father as her artist-tutor her raped her. Her father pressed charges and the tutor was convicted but only after a seven-month trial during which Artemesia was tortured to “prove” she was telling the truth. She was tortured as her rapist watched.

“It is true. It is true. It is true. It is true,” Artemisia said at the trial of the man who raped her.

This is the story of the maze of misogyny we must navigate; of how generous patriarchy is with its fuckery, and how, if and when we survive it, we can still be brilliant.

Many male artists have painted their own version of Judith Beheading Holofornes. And it shows that they are men who have not known what it is to survive that maze of misogyny. It is an intellectual exercise for them. For Artemisia Gentileschi, it is guts and gore: there is plenty of intellect but the stakes are much more visceral. It is as if she were practicing, painting Judith Beheading Holofornes over and over; teaching herself, teaching us.

Rape survivor is not the only way to identify Artemisia Gentileschi. We are not just a collection of the patriarchal horrors that we survive (and which some don’t survive).

If each of us women and girls were to be identified by the way men had sexually assaulted us, where would we even start?

“Hello, I’m Mona. When I was four, a man pulled out his penis and beckoned to my four-year-old friend and me to come down from our respective balconies where we had been chatting to meet him in the street below.”

And which assault would we highlight, if we were to choose just one? Because I have lost count: Do I start from what happened to me when I was four or do I lead with the night that I beat the fuck out of a man who sexually assaulted me when I was 50? I am not a collage of the men’s hands that have touched me without consent, I say, even as I remember the riot police who beat me and sexually assaulted me and whose hands I pulled out of my jeans as they mauled my genitals and breasts at a protest near Tahrir Square in November 2011.

Thank goodness you weren’t wearing a dress, a friend told me later.

The men today might have a Telegram chat group, a school teaching them drug-facilitated sexual assault, and how to rape blacked out women. Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith is our school – a school for how to fight back.

Standing before Judith Beheading Holofernes was like watching a distant memory brought to life on canvas. The women’s determination was like a magnet, tugging, pulling, dragging out of me a belief central to my being that I could kill a man.

I know that determination, that clarity, the rolled-up-sleeves seriousness. It was what I felt as I was beating up that piece of shit who assaulted me when I was 50. Perhaps in another life I killed a man. In this life, beating one up will have to do, for now.

I care little for the religious lore around Judith but you should know this: she beheaded Holofornes after he drank so much he blacked out. The men today might have a Telegram chat group, a school teaching them drug-facilitated sexual assault, and how to rape blacked out women. Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith is our school – a school for how to fight back.

Artemisia gave Judith an accomplice; the maid. Let us become each others’ accomplices against patriarchy.

We must make patriarchy fear us.

It is true. It is true. It is true. It is true.

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
Opting for a one-time payment via buying me a coffee
Sharing this post by email or on social media
Thanks for reading FEMINIST GIANT! This post is public so feel free to share it.
Share

Essay: A Time for Fire and Guillotines

Mona Eltahawy — Fri, 01 May 2026 14:37:04 GMT

A painted anarchy symbol adorns a door of the Metropolitan Cathedral in Guatemala City, Sunday, Nov. 22, 2020. (AP Photo/Moises Castillo)

First published on December 12, 2020

Ask for work. If they don't give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread.

--Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays

Americans are taking bread. And pasta and baby formula.

Since the pandemic began, shoplifting of staples has noticeably increased in the United States, where an estimated 54 million Americans will struggle with hunger this year, a 45 percent increase from 2019. In the wealthiest country in the world, Americans are stealing food to survive.

At the end of this month, millions of Americans could lose their homes when a moratorium on evictions expires. Twelve million long-term jobless and gig workers will lose supplemental federal unemployment benefits which will be cut at the end of this month.

Meanwhile, Congress continues to tell Americans to go fuck themselves. You wouldn’t know from the way their partisan bickering has held hostage a desperately-needed Covid relief package, that a calamity of monumental proportions was hammering millions of Americans. . .

That’s what happens when the majority of lawmakers are too rich to understand hunger or poverty, and are too comfortable to even imagine either.

The majority of the legislators tasked with determining just how sharp the hunger and how deep the bite of poverty that millions of Americans must endure this winter are too insulated by their wealth to feel that urgency in their heart, let alone their gut.

Get 7 Necessary Sins for Women and Girls

Most members of Congress earn $174,000 a year, which is more than triple the average wage across all American workers of $51,960 and higher than the median earnings of even the highest paying jobs in America. The typical congressional representative – including both senators and House members – has “an estimated net worth of over $500,000, or roughly five times the median U.S. household net worth.”

The coronavirus emergency relief legislation agreed to by Congress in March amounted to one fucking measly check of $1200 per adult and $500 for each child under 16.

To become incandescent with rage that anyone in the wealthiest country in the history of humanity can go hungry--at any time, let alone during a pandemic--must hunger have cut its sharpness into your gut? Must poverty have sunk its teeth so deeply into your pride that its marks take on the permanency of tattoos so that you vow to burn this unjust fuckery into the ground?

The majority of the legislators tasked with determining just how sharp the hunger and how deep the bite of poverty that millions of Americans must endure this winter are too insulated by their wealth to feel that urgency in their heart, let alone their gut. Only a few viscerally understand.

Rep. Cori Bush, the first Black woman elected to represent Missouri, knows the sharpness of hunger.

Photo by Chris Kohley via St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“It’s one thing to know that I can’t eat today, but I’m making sure my children eat. It’s another thing — it does something to your mind — when you know not only am I not eating today, I don’t know how I’m going to eat next week,” she told Ali Velshi on MSNBC.

“I’m trying to pay my bills. You’re reaching out to family and friends to try to help you, but your family and friends, that network, is in the same boat as you. So you can’t pull from other people. Being poor is so expensive.”

Bush tweeted about shopping at thrift shops in order to afford business attire for Capitol Hill, as she awaits her first paycheck which will come in January. She is a single mother of two children who gave up her health insurance to run for office and left full-time work as an ordained pastor and nurse.

Another single mother and lawmaker --Rep. Katie Porter--knows that there is a calamity within the calamity and that, like most things in the U.S., it is racialized and gendered. And, as usual, she has the numbers.

Photo by House of Representatives photographer via wikimedia commons

More women than men were pushed out of the workforce during the pandemic. And job losses due to the pandemic hit Black and women of colour especially hard because they are disproportionately employed by many of the businesses most affected by the pandemic, such as hotels, restaurants, retail and other jobs in the service industry. Porter’s office issued a report on the urgency of relief to offset the Covid crisis that backed that up with Labor Department statistics.

“Without action, the pandemic will likely erase decades of progress for working women, who are now being forced to shoulder the burden of childcare and remote learning. As a single mom of three young children, I know these challenges all too well,” she says in the forward to the report.

It is no exaggeration to say that the pandemic and the economic crisis it has triggered are a fucking disaster for women. About 22% — over 1 in 5 — women in the U.S. have been pushed out of the labour force since the start of the pandemic and, even more shocking, 42% of women with children under 2 years old reported leaving the workforce during the pandemic. Mothers of children ages 6 to 17 saw employment fall by about a third more than fathers of children the same age, and mothers are returning to work at a much slower rate.

Labor Department figures on job recovery since August echo the all-too familiar fuckery of white supremacist patriarchy, or as The Washington Post puts it, “the pain is not spread evenly.” White women have recovered 61% of the jobs they lost during the pandemic by September - the most of any demographic group - while Black women have recovered only 34% of their lost jobs by then.

If I had children I would not just steal to feed them, I would set the world on fire for them.

There is a panic that clings to every waking moment when you have no money. It is exhausting and humiliating. I have known the painful demolition to self worth of being unemployed and having no money. And that was in a year that was not ravaged by a fucking pandemic.

I know what it’s like to lose weight from going hungry because you’re too poor to buy food and what it’s like to swallow your pride to ask for money. But at least I had someone to ask for money when I could not pay rent and when I had no more coins left for $1 meals at McDonalds. I am childfree by choice so the hunger and the inability to afford rent and health insurance was a panic that burdened only me. It should burden no one.

If I had children I would not just steal to feed them, I would set the world on fire for them.

We should all set fire to this fucking world that allows anyone’s children to go hungry. There is enough food in this wealthiest country in the history of humanity, no one should be hungry. There are enough houses and apartments and empty hotel rooms, no one should be unhoused. There is enough money, no one should be poor. And no one should be without healthcare.

It is not enough to hand out one check here or another there. Cancel rent. Freeze mortgages. Give everyone Universal Basic Income.

And set injustice on fire. Fuck the “normal” that benefited only wealthy, white, cisgendered, able-bodied men, and that continues to enrich America’s 614 billionaires who since the start of the pandemic grew their net worth by a collective $931 billion.

In November, protesters in Guatemala angry at a proposed 2021 budget that would have cut spending on health and education while increasing lawmakers’ own stipends, set part of the Congress building on fire and set up a guillotine outside. The bill was “shelved.”

A protester outside Congress in Guatemala via The Guardian

We must all set this fucking world on fire. As the Ni Una Menos feminist collective says, “We will not let ourselves be burned because this time the fire is ours.”

We all should set fire to the criminal complacency of elected representatives and to the capitalist patriarchy they help to uphold. To riff off Zoe Leonard’s 1992 poem I want a president, I want lawmakers who have “stood on line...at the welfare//office and (have) been unemployed and layed off.”

I want lawmakers who want to set the fucking world on fire.

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
Opting for a one-time payment via buying me a coffee
Sharing this post by email or on social media

Thank you for reading FEMINIST GIANT. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Fucking Fabulous #1: Off Kilter

Mona Eltahawy — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 12:02:13 GMT

Photo: Robert E. Rutledge

I wrote a book in five and a half weeks and immediately after I finished it, I went to urgent care with what I thought was a concussion that turned out to be vertigo.

I was ecstatic: I finished another book! Fuck yeah, me!

I was in full panic mode: what the fuck is that see saw in my head and how do I get off it?!

That is the Fucking Fabulous of the title of this series.

I am turning 59 this summer. Approaching the border between the decades as I am, I am writing letters of love and farewell to my fucking fabulous fifties. They have been magnificent. I have become magnificent over this decade. Yes. Here I stand, fucking fabulous and magnificent. That “fucking” is a deceptive fucker though; both an exclamation of emphasis and a qualifier. It is the fucking of the see saw in my head that tempered my excitement at finishing a book in five and a half weeks.

I began my fifties by beating up a man who sexually assaulted me in a club. It was magnificent. It wasn’t planned. I didn’t think “I will mark my fifties by beating up a man.” It was fucking fabulous to finally and with clarity beat up one of the endless array of men who have touched my body without my consent.

Approaching the border between the decades as I am, I am writing letters of love and farewell to my fucking fabulous fifties. They have been magnificent. I have become magnificent over this decade.

I published two of my-so-far three books in my fifties and I’m about to publish another before crossing over into sixty. Each book has tantalised me with immortality and been a reminder that I will die. It was in my fifties that I truly began to grasp that I will die. And I wonder how much of the volcanic eruptions of anxiety that have splattered across the magnificence of this decade have been triggered by that knowledge, growing and urgent, that I will die.

What is that see saw in my head and how do I fucking get off it?

How much time do I have to become brilliant?

Each book, as proud as I am of it, incarnates the gap between what I know I’m capable of and what I have achieved on the pages. How much time do I have to become brilliant? I want to translate the magnificence I feel in my fifties into a brilliance that my ghost can point to and say “I was fucking fabulous.”

There’s a Tom Ford fragrance called Fucking Fabulous. When I spray just the right amount, it is beguiling and effortlessly sexy. Too many spritzes and I want to peel my skin off.

I lost the ability to lie to myself in my fifties. That’s what makes me magnificent. I don’t like everything about myself. I could no longer refuse to see what I disliked about myself in my fifties in the same way I understood I was going to die. To deny either is childish and I’m fucking fabulous.

I lost the ability to lie to myself in my fifties. That’s what makes me magnificent.

Become a Sinner: Tickets

Once upon a time, back in the 90s when I was resigning in anger at my boss at a full time job I had at the time, he told me that I wasn’t as important as I thought I was. Minutes later, when I handed him my resignation letter, he urged me to stay.

So I guess I was as important as I thought I was. That was back in my thirties. I am now almost double that age and I am magnificent. I have been asked “Who do you think you are?” enough times to know that I am a FEMINIST GIANT, hence the name of this newsletter.

These letters of love and farewell to my fifties are my conversation with brilliance and death. Having vertigo is fucking terrifying. These letters connect the dots between fabulous and terrifying, fucking always.

Maudlin makes me want to peel my skin off. It is not my style. Beguiling and effortlessly sexy are.

These letters of love and farewell to my fifties are my conversation with brilliance and death.

A vestibular therapist called Dr. Matthew Rome at Equilibrium Physical Therapy treated my vertigo with maneuvers that returned to the ear canal crystals that migrated out and caused me to feel there was a see-saw in my head and that the room was spinning. For a month after, I felt off kilter, still. The dictionary definition of “off kilter” is “not in perfect balance: a bit askew,” and also “eccentric, unconventional.”

My letters of love and farewell to my fifties aim to be just that: a bit askew and eccentric.

Do I think I’m more important than I am?

Who are you calling fucking fabulous!

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
Opting for a one-time payment via buying me a coffee
Sharing this post by email or on social media
Thanks for reading FEMINIST GIANT! This post is public so feel free to share it.
Share

Become a Sinner with Mona: The Course

Excerpt: How Many Rapists Must We Kill?

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

Via Beacon Press

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?”

Become a Sinner with Mona: Tickets

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.

Get the Book

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: The Course

--------------------------------------------------------

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

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?

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!

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

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.

-------------------------------------------

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?

--------------------------------

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

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

———————————————

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

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
Opting for a one-time payment via buying me a coffee
Sharing this post by email or on social media
Thanks for reading FEMINIST GIANT! This post is public so feel free to share it.
Share
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.

Share FEMINIST GIANT Newsletter

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)

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?

Share FEMINIST GIANT

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.

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.

Bloody Hell! Adventures in Meno[ause

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

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.

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.

Share FEMINIST GIANT

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.

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
Opting for a one-time payment via buying me a coffee
Sharing this post by email or on social media

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

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.

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?!

Bloody Hell: Menopause Anthology

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.”

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.

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)

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.

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
Opting for a one-time payment via buying me a coffee
Sharing this post by email or on social media

Essay: Home is Where the Hurt is

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

Dylan Martinez | Credit: REUTERS

The 7 Necessary Sins for Women & Girls

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.

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.

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?

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.

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
Opting for a one-time payment via buying me a coffee
Sharing this post by email or on social media

Thank you for reading FEMINIST GIANT. This post is public so feel free to share it.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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
Opting for a one-time payment via buying me a coffee
Sharing this post by email or on social media
Thanks for reading FEMINIST GIANT! This post is public so feel free to share it.
Share

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

If Amy Coney Barrett Was a Muslim

First published on January 29, 2025

This is the latest in a series. Read also:

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

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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
Opting for a one-time payment via buying me a coffee
Sharing this post by email or on social media

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

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.

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.

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.

Bloody Hell! Adventures in Menopuase

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.

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.

Buy the book

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.

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.

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
Opting for a one-time payment via buying me a coffee
Sharing this post by email or on social media

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)

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

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.

Signed copies of Bloody Hell!

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.

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.

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
Upgrading to a paid subscription to support FEMINIST GIANT
Opting for a one-time payment via buying me a coffee
Sharing this post by email or on social media

Event: FEMINIST GIANT & The Strand Present Halal Sex

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

Get Tickets

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

---------------------------------------------------------------------

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

Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls

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.

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.

Signed Copies of Bloody Hell!

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.

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.

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.

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
Opting for a one-time payment via buying me a coffee
Sharing this post by email or on social media
Thank you for reading FEMINIST GIANT. This post is public so feel free to share it.
Share

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

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

Photo: Robert E. Rutledge

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.

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.

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.

Get 7 Necessary Sins for Women and Girls

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">

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

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">