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Every month or so, the Woman Has Said a Bad Word circus comes to town, with clowns, acrobats, and contortionists in every ring. This time around, bipartisan shit is being lost because a woman - President-Elect Joe Biden’s deputy chief of staff Jen O’Malley Dillon - had the temerity to call congressional Republicans what they actually are: “fuckers.” She even couched it gingerly: “I’m not saying they’re not a bunch of fuckers.” It’s a fucking double negative!

I agree with her appraisal of Republicans. I’m not such a big fan of spineless, cowardly Democrats, either. But what would all those hyperventilating over O’Malley Dillon’s language do if they knew she said “fuck” THREE times in that Glamour interview? She is clearly comfortable with profanity and being positioned to be one of the most powerful women in the country, she’ll be fine. The current occupant of the White House is foul-mouthed himself : “shithole countries,” “grab them by the pussy” “Iran knows that they have put on notice. If you fuck around with us...we are going to do things to you that have never been done before.”

The obsession with civility in the United States is bipartisan and white, and often directed at women, especially Black women and women of colour. The less power a woman has, the less freedom she is given to curse. The more a woman is caught in the intersections of oppressions--race, class, gender, other forms of oppression--the more her language is policed, fenced, and suffocated.

I’m an expert at upsetting white men with my proudly profane mouth. When the rules are made by white men for white men, a proudly foul mouth on anyone who is not a white man is a weapon.

Once when I was still a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times (from 2014-2018), James Bennet, the editor of the opinion pages, insisted that I stop saying “fuck,” especially “flying fuck,” as in “I don’t give a flying fuck” on social media. Not in the columns that I wrote for the paper, but on Twitter. I was never an employee of the Times. He said the word “fuck” wasn’t conducive to conversation.

The next day, I launched #WhyISayFuck on Twitter, published an essay--in another publication--about why I say “fuck,” and wrote a proposal for a book that called on women to practise seven “sins” I believe are necessary to destroy the patriarchy. And you’d better fucking believe that Profanity was one of those sins.

Bennet’s pearl clutching was particularly laughable considering the opinion pieces his page published. What is really more offensive: my saying “I don’t give a flying fuck” on Twitter? or opinion pieces calling for fascist violence that Bennet approved? In the pages of the Times in 2017, war criminal Erik Prince advocated the use of “contractors” aka mercenaries in Afghanistan; and earlier this year, Senator Tom Cotton called for the military to invade American streets and crush the Black Lives Matter uprising in a piece called Send in the Troops. Bennet was pushed out soon after the publication of the latter.

Fascism isn’t an “idea” to be debated. White liberals, specifically cisgender men, blithely play thought exercises with our lives, even as a fascist fuck has occupied the White House. My run in with Bennet was just one example of the ways white men in power use civility to comfort the powerful and censor the rest of us. At this most uncivil of times, giving a platform to the likes of Prince and Cotton is dangerous and abominable, but to editors like Bennet, it was simply a visit to the “marketplace of ideas.” For people of colour, Muslims, LGBTQ, disabled people, it is our lives at stake.

And we--whose lives are directly threatened by the fuckery of Erik Prince’s promotion of mercenaries and Tom Cotton’s promotion of effective martial law --are expected to behave, as if saying “flying fuck” is much more offensive than war crimes or that martial law. Fuck that.

We must recognize that the ubiquitous ways patriarchy socializes women to shrink themselves - physically and intellectually - extend also into language, into what we can and cannot say.

At the heart of that policing, standing guard over our language like a baton ready to strike, is civility. Patriarchy reserves for itself the power to offend, the power to be obscene. And yet it wastes no time in policing women’s mouths as vehemently as it does the genitals of anyone who is not a cisgender heterosexual man.

Not that I need a reason to say “fuck” and I never pass up a chance to fling out a “flying fuck,” but that particular week I met Bennet when I was Twitter yelling “flying fucks” was the week when I launched #MosqueMeToo, to show solidarity with Muslim women who like me had been sexually assaulted either during the Muslim pilgrimage or at Muslim religious spaces. I had been bombarded with “You’re too ugly to be sexually assaulted” and a compendium of hate aimed at gaslighting and shaming me for speaking out against sexual assault.

I was stunned that I was expected to be “polite” even as I’m accused of lying about being sexually assaulted.

Harvard Professor of Afro-American Studies Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham coined the term “politics of respectability.” It refers to ways members of marginalized groups police each other in an attempt to replicate mainstream values as a way to achieve mainstream acceptance. It is an especially sharp tool against women of marginalized groups. The politics of respectability condemns some women as warnings to other women: caution, this is not the kind of woman you should admire.

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

Profanity is an essential tool in disrupting patriarchy and its rules. It is the verbal equivalent of civil disobedience. In January, I recorded this in front of the White House as my act of civil disobedience against its occupant.

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There is nothing polite about fascism. There is nothing civil about grabbing pussies. There is nothing polite about putting children in cages. There is nothing respectable about leaving 310,000 people to die of a pandemic. There is nothing civil about white supremacy, fuckers.

We must make patriarchy fear us. We must reject politeness; there is nothing polite about patriarchy. We must reject civility; there is nothing civil about racism or misogyny. When warnings precede profanity, to protect the sensibilities of the reader; where are the warnings that precede patriarchy to protect the lives of women and girls? Curse words are bleeped out of television and radio broadcasts; how do we bleep out patriarchy?

Image: Moudhy al-Rashid

What would the world look like if the energy spent policing women’s language, was expended instead into policing the violence of patriarchy.

I swear because I insist that my language be as free as I want to be. I say fuck because I will own that word and use it when I want. Patriarchy insists it controls everything, including our mouths. When our mouths threaten that control, patriarchy insists we shut them.

I begin every event where I speak, in the before time when we used to be in the same hall and on webinars where we talk to each other via our Zoom or Crowdcast boxes, this way:

My name is Mona Eltahawy and this is my declaration of faith: Fuck the patriarchy.

I could say, “Dismantle the patriarchy.” Or, “Smash the patriarchy.” Or use any number of verbs that signal urgency, but I don’t. I am a writer, and I understand how language works. I understand how audiences—and readers—react to the language I use. I know exactly what I am doing. And I say, “Fuck the patriarchy,” because I am a woman, a woman of colour, and of Muslim descent. And I’ll be fucking damned if I jump through your civility or decorum hoops any day, especially today.

Fuck the patriarchy.

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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. Her books have been translated into 13 languages so far. Her new book Feminism vs Fascism: Ten Tactics to Topple Tyrants is forthcoming February 23, 2027 via Mariner Books. Her latest book is an anthology on menopause she edited called Bloody Hell!: Adventures in Menopause from Around the World. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.

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Essay: Speak Truth of the Dead

Mona Eltahawy — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 14:25:47 GMT

Turning Point USA Co-Founder Charlie Kirk speaks during a campaign rally, Oct. 24, 2024, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher, File)

An artist has made a statue of Charlie Kirk. It has failed ot make him the millions he had hoped for. Here’s my essay on Kirk from last year.

First published September 11, 2025

Charlie Kirk is dead. Good riddance.

The Patron Saint of the Male Debate Me Industrial Complex died doing what he loved–spewing hate and incitement at a debate. Kirk’s last words before someone shot him in the neck at a “Prove Me Wrong” debate at Utah Valley University were of hate against transgender people, one of the many communities he has targeted.

The man who urged supporters in 2023 during the Biden administration to “Buy weapons. Buy ammo. If you go into a public place, bring a gun with you,” because “You have a government that hates you, you have a traitor as the president” was killed during the administration of Trump, for whom he rallied young supporters, by someone who bought a weapon, bought ammunition, took the gun to Kirk’s public appearance and turned that gun against him.

As I said, good riddance.

I will not whitewash the white supremacist that was Charlie Kirk. For someone so young, what an embarrassment of hatreds he left us to excoriate him with.

The United States is talented at political amnesia. It kicks in especially virulently when someone odious dies. That amnesia comes too readily to those who were least affected by the now dead person’s danger. Exhibit A: California Governor Gavin Newsom, a white cisgender, heterosexual, wealthy man who in a bid to court the manosphere and broligarchy et al as he eyes a Democratic presidential nomination had Charlie Kirk on his podcast earlier this year.

“I knew Charlie, and I admired his passion and commitment to debate. His senseless murder is a reminder of how important it is for all of us, across the political spectrum, to foster genuine discourse on issues that deeply affect us all without resorting to political violence,” Newsom said.

Only a wealthy and powerful white man unaffected by Kirk’s dangerous hate and ideology could find anything to “admire” about his “passion and commitment to debate,” as if debate were just words that had no ramifications on real people’s lives; only words that were not themselves a form of political violence.

The Male Debate Me Industrial Complex loves to debate because it is rarely, if ever, their humanity that is up for debate.

The United States is talented at political amnesia. It kicks in especially virulently when someone odious dies. That amnesia comes too readily to those who were least affected by the now dead person’s danger.

7 Necessary Sins for Women & Gir.ls

As if Charlie Kirk were the only victim of political violence, as if the right-wing activist did not himself engage in political violence against the multiple communities he targeted with his hate—his racism was political violence, his misogyny was political violence, his bigotry was political violence,

Men like Newsom, and Trump who was unsurprisingly effusive in eulogising Kirk, do not recognise the hate and incitement that Kirk peddled in as political violence. Only guns and bullets qualify as political violence for them. And for Trump–who incited and inspired the violent insurrection on January 6, 2021–it is a violence that he recognises as perpetrated only by his opponents, rather than the ICE thugs his regime sends to terrorise migrant communities, or the political violence he used to abduct, detain, and deport anti-genocide protestors.

I will not whitewash the white supremacist that was Charlie Kirk. For someone so young, what an embarrassment of hatreds he left us to excoriate him with.

What is there to admire in the “passion and commitment to debate” of a virulent racist like Kirk who said “"If I see a Black pilot, I'm going to be like, 'Boy, I hope he's qualified,” and “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s,” and claimed that deaths from the Texas floods “would not have been as high if it wasn’t for” diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives”

What is there to admire in the “passion and commitment to debate” of a blatant misogynist Christian zealot like Kirk who extolled the subordination of women, telling girls and young women, “Young ladies need to be willing to submit to a godly man when you meet one. And if you're not willing to do that, then you've got to pray about that,” and would exhort those girls and young women to focus more on getting married and having children than on earning degrees and having careers?

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) describes Turning Point USA (TPUSA), which Kirk co-founded as “a hard-right student organization known for throwing flashy, expensive, multiday conferences primarily targeting young people.”

“These events regularly platform xenophobic, racist, sexist, homophobic and other hateful views. The nonprofit has links to Southern Poverty Law Center-identified extremists as well as prominent conservative politicians, including President Donald Trump,” SPLC said.

As if Charlie Kirk were the only victim of political violence, as if the right-wing activist did not himself engage in political violence against the multiple communities he targeted with his hate—his racism was political violence, his misogyny was political violence, his bigotry was political violence,

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What is there to admire in the “passion and commitment to debate” of a bigot like Kirk who cheered the far-right boycott of Target over the retailer’s Pride collection — which included trans-friendly youth apparel and other LGBTQ-positive gear — for what he decried as “their support for grooming kids,” when that same bigot accepted corporate sponsorship from a registered sex offender convicted of attempted “coercion and enticement” after trying to persuade “a minor female” to “engage in sexual activity.”

Instead of the truth about how dangerous he was, instead of how much hate and incitement he whipped up during his life, we hear eulogies and platitudes demanding we refrain from speaking ill of the dead. As if that dangerous and now dead person did not speak plenty of ill about so many of us during his life.

Fuck that.

That is how the worst among us is whitewashed.

As if death were a penance that erased the damage he inflicted while alive; a wand that abracadabra’d away his danger. The worst among us who are still alive must know that we will remember the worst in him, that he will be known for the worst things he said and did, and that we will not succumb to political amnesia.

Charlie Kirk took the most repugnant white Christian nationalist zealotry from the places it festered in the odious margins and moved it to the Trumpian mainstream, becoming a millionaire who moved into a $4.75 million estate in the process.

Speak ill of him. It is the truth.

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Books: Free Women and The Red Virgin

Mona Eltahawy — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 18:17:33 GMT

Today, July 19, 2026, is the 90th anniversary of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War. Here are two reviews I’ve written on books about anarcho feminism, a political and philosophical lens that was central to that revolution and which in turn is central to my feminism.

First published as reviews on my Patreon in April 2020

Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women, Martha A. Ackelsberg

Who is the revolution for? So often, too often, we are all called to join the revolution, to risk all for the revolution, and the revolution turns out to be a cisgender dick swinging contest. I am not interested in dick swinging contests and neither were Mujeres Libres (Free Women), an anarchist organization founded officially in Spain in 1937, The women who founded it were for the most part members of anarchist-affiliated organizations active in Spain at the time. Those organizations might have expressed commitment to gender equality but many male members of those organizations did not take women seriously and failed to be as committed to that revolutionary goal of gender equality. Sexism does not live just among the right wing and the conservatives. The "comrades" must be held to task too.

Men of the left are not sterling feminists. The idea that just because a man is an activist or a leftist makes him ipso facto a feminist is delusional and absurd. Over and over, too many forget. I am fed up of the dick swinging. A revolution that does not target patriarchy is a dick swinging contest.

And so anarchist women across Spain founded Mujeres Libres - which published a magazine by the same name - to work alongside those other anarchist organizations but to devote themselves explicitly to ending what they called "the triple enslavement of women" as workers, as women, and to ignorance.

If ever there was a moment in history to which I could press go and return there it would be to anarchist Barcelona during the Spanish Revolution. This book is a vital reminder that there is no liberation without women's liberation. And also sexual liberation. Ackelsberg notes that "Spanish anarchists had devoted considerable attention to sexual liberation, for both women and men. They advocated increased information about sex and sexuality, greater sexual freedom, and the abolition of legal and religious marriage in favor of "free love," by which they mean voluntarily contracted relationships that could be terminated at the will of either partner...The revolution allowed for the implementation of new public policies in the arena of sexuality, particularly in Catalonia."

Buy Free Women of Spain

Nonetheless, Ackelsberg also points out the double standard between what the compañeros and the compañeras could do, and notes the prudishness in the magazine that kept even anarchist women from being "explicit" or "radical" with regards to sexual liberation in 1930s Spain, even as all were fighting for the social revolution that would create the society they wanted.

The revolution anywhere, be it in Spain in the 1930s or Egypt in 2011, will fail unless women's emancipation is at its heart. Women are always told to wait. That is a mistake. I am an anarchist because I want to end all forms of hierarchies; to end the oppression that is a result of those hierarchies. I do not believe that ending capitalism and class structures will liberate us all. Capitalism and class structures are not the only forms of oppression we must end. I want to end the oppression also of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, ageism, and other forms of bigotry. I am an anarchist feminist who fights for freedom for all. And there is no freedom without women's freedom and without sexual freedom. My revolution declares "I own my body."

I have risked my life. I'll be fucking damned if I risk it again for a group of swinging dicks whose aim is to get more slices of a cake that am offered only crumbs from. How's that for mixing my metaphors?! Fuck your crumbs. Fuck your cake. Fuck your penis contests. I want to be free. I will be free.

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The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia, Mary M Talbot and Bryan Talbot.

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

At least 365,000 people around the world have died so far from COVD19. In the United States, most of the 100,000 people who have died are elders, Black and Indigenous people, people of colour, the disabled, and those most marginalized by and left vulnerable to that fucking world we are tasked to both survive and fix.

And so I'm reading and rereading, taking notes and setting fire to my mind. What is my alternative to this fucking world?

This wonderful graphic biography is a reminder of 70 days in 19th century Paris that continue to set fire to our imaginations as we try to create that better world. More than 50 years before the Spanish Civil War and revolution - see my review of Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Emancipation of Women - during which Catalonia implemented anarchist visionary social policies, La Commune - the short-lived takeover of Paris by radical workers - created civil partnerships, the separation of church and state, pay equality, freedom of the press, trade union representation within private firms and a minimum wage. In 1871. La Commune started on March 18, 1871 and ended in a bloodbath on May 28 but its resonance and inspiration continues.

The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia, a graphic biography of Louise Michel, anarchist feminist and a leader of the Paris Commune, is one of several recent titles that give the graphic treatment to leftist activists and thinkers - e.g. Rosa Luxemberg and Hannah Arendt.

And again and again and again - always ask "Who is the revolution for?" and always find the anarchist feminists telling the cis men to fuck off with their dick swinging contests. A couple of decades after La Commune was crushed, the world's first explicitly anarchist-feminist group was created as part of the thriving 19th century anarchist movement in Argentina. It produced the first anarcha-feminist newspaper La Voz de la Mujer which in 1896 in its first issue warned misogynist anarchist comrades:

“You had better understand once and for all that our mission is not reducible to raising your children and washing your clothes and that we also have a right to emancipate ourselves and to be free from all kinds of tutelage, whether economic or marital.”

In Paris, Louise Michel was demanding "Neither God nor master! Bring on the social revolution!" And about two decades later, a supporter of La Voz de la Mujer signed herself “No God, No Boss, No Husband.”

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

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

In 1906 Japan, anarchist feminist Kanno Sugako exhorted "Rise up, women wake up! As in the struggle workers are engaged in against capitalists to break down the class system, our demands for freedom and equality with men will not be won easily just because we will it. They will not be won if we do not raise our voices, if no blood is shed,”

And here are Mujeres Libres in Spain, some 60 years after Louise Michel and about 40 years after Argentinian anarchist feminists and their La Voz de la Mujer, and some 30 years after Kanno Sugako:

"All these compañeros, however radical they may be in cafes, unions, even (Anarchist) groups, seem to drop their costumes as lovers of female liberation at the doors of their homes," Lola Iturbe, Mujeres Libres in 1935.

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

My obsession with those flashes of possibility and the women who set them off sustain me. And they are especially urgent now.

To ask “what fucking world is this?” is to refuse to go back to (ab)normal. We are tasked with ensuring that the parenthetical prefix (ab) is our tenacious rejection of that regression. Some 150 years later, the barricades that Louise Michel defended and the challenge that she posed to both her comrades and the regime are worthy goals of that better world we must demand.

The art in this book is phenomenal and the politics are vital. And if you’re wondering who is Louise Michel? It’s a reminder of how over and over and over again women are erased from the “history” we are taught. Fuck this world and fuck the patriarchy.

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Essay: The King Herself

Mona Eltahawy — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 19:17:08 GMT

Photos: Robert E. Rutledge

First published December 01, 2020

For eight years, my hair was a bright, flaming red. I dyed it red to set fire to my rage, to mould it into what I needed in order to get to the core of my being. There, I found power.

When the pandemic started, the power that my crown of flames had once given me became moot. I had dyed my hair red to signal FUCK YOU I SURVIVED and I moved back to Cairo from New York City to further signal to the regime whose riot police had broken my arms and sexually assaulted me that I would not hide. I went home not to roost, but rage.

Seven years later, what good was the power of a crown of flames, during a pandemic, when I am at home all the time, effectively hiding from a virus? What was my power without that fire? How do I signal power now?

From a very early age, my hair has been the site of a dance - more robust tango than delicate waltz - between disobedience and independence. And now, in the limited confines of lockdown, the dance took on a more urgent tempo as I learned to liberate myself from what had once given me power so that I could fashion anew my strength.

I had to shave my hair off.

The longer the lockdown became, the shorter my hair had to be. I knew that, every time I looked into the mirror. But I was terrified. I hate being scared of anything. I hate just admitting to being scared. What was I scared of? Fuck that shit. I refuse to be scared! Always, always, whatever scares me the most, in just the thinking about doing it, is what I need to do the most.

Quietly, when I slipped under the din of my denial, I knew. I had to do the opposite of what I did to signal FUCK YOU I SURVIVED. To survive now, I had to whittle all that hair of fire away and start with a blank canvas. To get to that canvas, to shave off my hair, would - and here is where the terror came in - force me into a reckoning with being ugly. Underneath the layers of my 53 years, past all that sediment of rage upon rage, was a girl who was told - and she believed - she was ugly. She was waiting for me. And to find her, I had to take off my crown of fire and embrace instead the nakedness of a buzzed head

Ugly. Such an arcane word. A word I never use. Its power could slice through whatever feminist armour of titanium I naively thought bolstered my strut. Impenetrable does not stand a chance when confronted with the wounds of a teenage girl.

Any reckoning with ugly had to involve a face-off between disobedience and independence. To be ugly is to disobey. To be ugly is to be independent. The latter I cherished. The former I had to learn. It was a dance rooted in my hair and which began in my childhood.

I was not a disobedient child. But I cherished independence before I knew what it meant.

On the first day of kindergarten, my parents tell me, I (too easily?) let go of their hand and excitedly headed to a desk where I took my place and waved goodbye to them, surrounded by a sea of children in various stages of “don’t leave me!” meltdown.

Independence and disobedience are not the same thing. I was a very obedient child. I listened. I learned. I behaved. Do we learn to obey or must we learn to disobey? I know I had to learn disobedience.

Crying and fighting my mother when she tried to detangle my hair when I was about 3 years old; fighting the anesthesiologist when he tried to make me go under for a tooth extraction when I was about 8 years old: those were unusual and organic acts of disobedience. My norm was otherwise.

And yet, every meeting between my parents and teachers resembled the other: Mona is an excellent pupil, but she talks too much. Too much? Learning to disobey invariably involves “too much.”

To disobey I had to collide headlong into the systems and structures of patriarchy that ensure girls obey: religion, law, teachers, norms, beauty standards that sit atop the three-legged stool of capitalism and racism and misogyny. In the name of the tentacles of patriarchy, women, girls, and femmes are to be contained and controlled; suffocated by the tentacles of the octopus called patriarchy into obedience. Contained, controlled, suffocated, or else.

Or else what?

The thought of shaving my hair off tantalized me. It promised an answer to that “or else what?” but only if I stopped running away from ugliness.

There is a scene in Abbas Kiarostami’s film Ten when a woman sitting in a car in Tehran traffic gingerly removes her hijab to reveal a shaved head. When I first saw that film in New York City in 2003 I started to cry. It had been 11 years since I stopped wearing hijab and it would be another 17 years until I shaved off my own hair.

I rewatched the film soon after I shaved off my hair and that scene still seized me.

What does the revolution have to do with hair? During the Irish Revolution, both sides would forcibly shave or cut off women’s hair as punishment as well as a way to control women’s bodies. The Iranian Revolution was co-opted by the clerics who then claimed as an achievement the mass covering of an entire nation’s women’s hair. The revolution, like ugly, is a dance-off between disobedience and independence.

I prepared myself to shave my hair off by posting endlessly on Twitter. I was daring myself; publicly throwing down a gauntlet to myself so that I wouldn’t chicken out. Several women wrote to complain that hair stylists in their respective locales would ask them “Does your husband know you’re doing this?” before they agreed to buzz their hair. Or else.

I learned recently from an article about intimate partner abuse that while training hair stylists to be on the lookout for such abuse, activists advised the stylists to be on the lookout for men who would accompany women to the salon and dictate what their wife/girlfriend could do to her own hair.

And how is it possible that California became only the first state in the United States as late as 2019 to ban employers and school officials from discriminating against people based on their natural hair? How did it take so long? The CROWN Act has made it illegal to enforce dress code or grooming policies against hairstyles such as afros, braids, twists, and locks.

Who owns my hair, let alone my body, when a revolution in which women fought alongside men soon after declaring victory enforced hijab? When you shave the hair under that enforced hijab, are you then the revolution of one, defying, disobeying, and disrupting?

When you cannot cut your own hair the way you want to without assuring the stylist that your husband approves, how quickly does public Patriarchy become private patriarchy?

And when white supremacist patriarchy could punish you for being a Black woman who had an Afro how brave is your home or free your land?

How do I signal FUCK YOU, I OWN MY BODY in a way that both Patriarchy and patriarchy understand? And why must I give a fuck?

Every time I publicly dared myself to shave my hair off, I was privately daring myself to look ugly in the eye and see who would blink first. I practiced in the mirror. Days and days of looking at myself and conjuring up the 13 year old girl that I used to be, on her first trip back to Egypt since my family left in 1975 when I was 7. There in Cairo, a boy walking behind me and my aunt said to his friend, loudly enough for me to hear “That girl used to be a boy and they gave her a sex change.”

I had returned to Cairo from London with my brother and mother. My grandmother had died suddenly and my mother needed to be with her siblings to grieve. My parents were on student stipends in London and we could not afford tickets back to Egypt which meant my mother had not seen her mother in five years before she died.

One of my mother’s sisters who came to Cairo airport to meet us later told me that upon first seeing me she had told other aunts that she pitied her sister - my mother - because I was so ugly that my parents would have to pay a man a dowry to marry me.

That was the ugly that I prepared myself for. I braced for it. I wanted to tap into it and unwrap it. For years I have not been able to look at pictures of myself from that trip to Egypt or my teen years because I believed I was indeed ugly. And so I abandoned myself. I left that girl waiting for me to claim her.

The pandemic surrounded us with so much ugliness. Find her, it yelled at me. Claim her, it challenged me. Stop running away from her.

I was ready.

I was also ready to ask what possessed my aunt to think I was ugly and moreover to share with me that she thought that?

It was a painful time for her and her siblings. She was the unmarried aunt who had been looking after my grandmother. She was mourning and perhaps unable to access an empathy that should know better than to dig into that well of ugly. Her grief was not gentle and it tunneled into nasty instead. And here and now, during a global pandemic, as we mourn, how will we ensure empathy, how do we ensure our grief remains gentle and does not tunnel into nasty?

I looked up pictures from that trip to Egypt. I had to meet 13 year old me again. I would look into her eyes ready to set on fire once again my rage - not at the regime that had sent its riot police to break my arms and sexually assault me but at that Footsoldier of Patriarchy, my aunt, who slipped me what felt like a poison contaminating my soul.

I see you, bright-eyed girl. I see your fire, before it became the kindle for rage; I see it, flickering in your gaze. I am looking for ugly and all I see is a girl preparing for the violence of patriarchy and its footsoldiers. I see you bright-eyed girl. I see you brace for the lessons in disobedience that would save you.

I am told that when I was a few weeks old, my paternal grandmother had my ears pierced. This is a very common practice in Egypt where a popular gift for baby girls is gold stud earrings.

That same grandmother was a teacher and a smoker - in a society where smoking is considered a male privilege - and supported Zamalek, the other Cairo football team, to spite her husband and eight children who in their majority supported Ahly (much like I support Manchester United and the majority of my family support Liverpool).

When my mother complained to her that I cried every time she tried to detangle my hair after washing it, my grandmother advised “Just cut her hair short.”

And so from the age of three or so, my mother kept my hair very short. When I moved to London in 1975 at the age of 7, the first time I went downstairs to play with the other children, they asked me if I was a boy or a girl. My English wasn’t so good and I ran back home.

What does a girl look like?

“What’s your name? Do you speak English? Are you a boy or a girl?”

None of the questions were asked with malice but the last one was indicative of an expectation they had for markers of “boy” and “girl.” They didn’t see those markers in my appearance and they were confused.

It was said with malice in Cairo when I was 13 years old by the guy who told his friend “That girl used to be a boy and they gave her a sex change.”

What does a girl look like? Who taught me to be a girl? If pretty is the root of obedience, then ugly surely equals disobedience and independence squared. And at the heart of that equation sits femininity, on a three-legged stool of capitalism, racism, and misogyny.

Femininity had taunted me for decades and in return I scoffed at it. It knew that I did not want it and that I could not ignore it.

When I was 15 years old, I wanted to hide. From men. Their hands. Their eyes.

When I write about my years wearing hijab, I recognize I am wading into a minefield. This is my experience of wearing it. I do not speak for Muslim women. It is preposterous and the worst form of reductionism and silencing to think that anyone can speak for the array of Muslim female experience.

Soon after I turned 15, my family - recently relocated to Saudi Arabia - went on Hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Makkah, which is the fifth pillar of Islam. While performing the rituals, I was sexually assaulted twice - once by a man performing the rituals and again by a Saudi police officer. I have written and spoken about this in essays and interviews about how those sexual assaults and my determination to create a space for Muslim women to expose sexual assault during Hajj were the reason I launched #MosqueMeToo in February 2018.

But, back then in 1982 as that 15-year-old, being sexually assaulted twice during Hajj shattered my world in ways it took me years to understand. It heightened my awareness of the danger of men and the weakness and powerlessness and vulnerability of my body. And every time I was sexually assaulted again - at the marketplace, in the mall, anywhere - I wanted to hide, disappear, place a barrier between my body and the world.

Some girls take to wearing baggy clothes, some girls disappear into eating disorders, and I was pushed into a deep depression in which I negotiated with God: I hear a good Muslim girl wears hijab. So I’ll make a deal with you, I told Her. I’ll wear hijab, you save my rapidly deteriorating mind, and we’re even. And at 16, I began to wear hijab.

Headscarves and Hymens

Never mind that the hijab I wore during Hajj - the first time I’d ever worn hijab - did not save my body from assault. But I was thinking of my body less, and of my mind more. And God did not keep Her side of our deal. Therapy - many years later - was the help I needed for my depression, not hijab.

And then a year after I began to wear hijab, I missed the wind in my hair and could not stand the growing gap between the external Me and the internal Me. But it would take me eight more years before I finally mustered all my courage, took off my hijab and left the house bareheaded.

Semi-bareheaded if I’m being accurate. And I made sure to go to a woman hair stylist because I wanted an ugly haircut. In Egypt back in 1992, hairstyling was considered a job of ill repute for women and so was dominated by men. With the rise in the numbers of women who wear hijab who can only see a woman stylist, that has since changed.

Back on that 1992 day, when I was 25, the owner of the salon asked me if I was sure I wanted a woman stylist. I did. And she gave me the ugly haircut I needed. I did not want to be beautiful. I did not want my de-hijabing to be ascribed to a need for the male gaze’s approval. I wanted nothing to do with that gaze.

I was unsure if I really liked not just the gaze - that infamous eye of the beholder, the power of that gaze, the power of its beholder - but the beholder himself.

I still had that short hair that I had since I was a child. From the age of 16-25, that short hair hid under a hijab. I had not, during those years, experimented with the power over the male gaze that some girls begin to figure out in their teens. I associated femininity with weakness and the need for the male gaze’s approval. And I was hiding in plain sight, under that hijab. Besides, I believed I was indeed ugly.

I realize now, too, that back then I was not sure I was heterosexual. It would take a while - and a lot of sex - for that reckoning .

I once interviewed an architect in Egypt about a building project that had been suspended because archaeologists believed ancient Egyptian artifacts lay underneath. “Every inch of Egyptian land contains artifacts from ancient Egyptian times. We have to balance the needs of the living versus the treasures of the dead,” he told me.

We build atop the monuments and treasures of our ancestors. Sekhmet, the most revered and feared of my ancestors’ deities, found me at my most vulnerable and helped me to weaponize femininity and render my hair the site of excavation and reinvention.

“In this hall, there are 16 statues of Sekhmet, the ancient Egyptian goddess of retribution and sex.”

You had me at retribution and sex! Yes. Please. I want both.

I was 44 years old, in a hall lined by those 16 statues, looking into the eyes of Sekhmet while listening to the director of the Egyptian Museum in Turin, who was giving me and US diplomats a private tour in March 2012.

I was on a speaking tour of Italy that was organized by the State Department and Italian universities and cultural centres that wanted me to talk about the Egyptian revolution of January 25, 2011, and feminism and social media. It was the first overseas trip for me after the casts on my broken arms had been removed.

High on Vicodin, I had promised myself bright red hair as a gift for surviving. And also tattoos as a way of reclaiming my body. I had a scar on my left arm from surgery. I was proud of that scar but had not chosen it. The tattoos would be a marking - permanent - of my choosing. But of what?

And then Sekhmet found me.

There are more statues built of Sekhmet than any other ancient Egyptian god or goddess because she was the most feared and revered. So I am sure I had encountered her before. But there is encountering and there is being found and she found me in March 2012 when I needed power.

And so my first ever tattoo - in 2012 - was of Sekhmet as rendered for me by the artist Molly Crabapple - all tits and hips. Here was weaponized femininity in the shape of the goddess of retribution and sex. First she’d kick your head in, then she’d fuck your brains out.

The second tattoo in 2013 was of Arabic calligraphy of the name of the street of that now iconic 5-day protest on Mohamed Mahmoud Street during which police killed at least 40 people and I was among 300 wounded.

I wrote a poem about Sekhmet. I am not a poet but my assault and my broken heart needed the embrace of poetry, and I am proud that some have called Sekhmet’s Tits pornographic.

Sekhmet - first she’d kick your head in - filled me with the fire of a weaponized femininity - then she’d fuck your brains out - and then she turned it all upside down by directing that fire to burn a path to Hatshepsut - Egypt’s woman-god-king and the pharaoh who commissioned many of those Sekhmet statues as well as instituted a Festival of Drunkenness in the goddess’ honour - who is now being seen through a gender-bending lens that holds out the promise of power of a different kind.

She/he/they. Sometimes you need to revisit places to force yourself to revisit what you thought was you. I've been to Hatshepsut's temple. It is wondrous. But I had not met the King Herself.

(L) A stone statue of Hatshepsut (Wikimedia Commons). (R) Pharaoh #Hatshepsut pictured shirtless with chiseled pecs. Statue of Hatshepsut from The Metropolitan Museum of Art || ca. 1479–1458 B.C

Why was a history that should be mine denied to me for so long. Why did it take me so long to be found by Sekhmet? Why did it take me so long to learn that Hatshepsut - who for more than 20 years was the most powerful person in the ancient world - alternated pronouns? She/he/they. Are you a girl? Are you a boy?

I had to brace myself for a buzzed head because I thought I had to reckon with being ugly. Instead, I had to prepare for a face-off with power. There was a time when I thought femininity was weak. And then I learned to stand in the power of my femininity. I can flex the feminine and the masculine. And the more I learn about Hatshepsut, especially from queer historians and more popular engagement with that pharaoh, the greater the power available to me.

Was Hatshepsut a boy or a girl? It depends on who was doing the digging, because as Kim Armstrong writes in Making Queer History, “the social biases of historians shape history.”

Where does power lie? With the eye of the beholder of ugly or with she/he/they who says FUCK YOUR EYE AND WHAT IT SEES? Are you a boy? Are you a girl? Who the fuck cares. Are you ugly? Fuck the beholder and the eye of the beholder.

Sekhmet said “Fuck your eye, beholder!” and Hatshepsut completed the sentence “And what it sees!” One was disobedience, the other independence. Their tango was a gift that took gender and its performance and shifted its axis in ways I still don't fully understand.

Hatshepsut, for whom as Noor Sullivan writes in Making Queer History "Pronouns, apparently, were just too far out of her jurisdiction,” had not been anywhere on the horizon of my words, but writing about how Sekhmet found me nudged and nudged me towards the King Herself.

It is a distinctly cissexist imagination that collects all the documentation and representations of Hatshepsut and contorts itself like this in a search for her ‘real’ womanhood - Noor Sullivan

Sekhmet found me in the Egyptian Museum in Turin in 2012. Ever since, I look for her at every museum I visit, among the stolen treasures of my people on display so far away from home. I find Sekhmet and I stand before her and I look into her eyes and she tells me "Stand in your power." For 20 years, Hatshepsut, she/he/they, was the most powerful person in the ancient world

Those words are words I know. I wrote a chapter on the "sin" of Power in my second book The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls. But really standing in the power of those words took shaving my hair off and seeing myself, no longer with a crown that for eight years had given me fire. I was scared of losing that fire when I shaved it off. Instead, I found my power. I found myself. I found it in all her/his/their aspects: Hatshepsut. And the goddess Sekhmet led me there. “Stand in your power,” she told me. And her words echoed those with which Ntozake Shange ends her choreopoem forcoloredgirlswho have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf,

“i found god in myself
and i loved her
i loved her fiercely”

One day in Cairo in the 1990somethings, I was on my knees in the rubble of what used to be my childhood home, torn down to make room for a high rise in the increasingly popular neighborhood, digging frantically in the dirt. Digging for me.

I was looking for pictures of myself as a child that I had been told had not been retrieved before the demolition of the two-storey building where my parents had once rented an apartment.

I don’t know what I thought I could achieve, digging with my bare hands. But I needed to find myself. I needed to see who I had been. To hold onto that girl so that I could become the woman she wanted me to be.

“Every inch of Egyptian land contains artifacts from ancient Egyptian times. We have to balance the needs of the living versus the treasures of the dead.”

Once upon a time there was a girl who was told she was ugly and she believed it. And she could not free herself from that yoke until she understood that “ugly” was the “too much”: those who talked too much, those who would not hide, those who were asked “Are you a boy or a girl?”

Ugly is not about aesthetics but about power. I might have been in lockdown but I was going to walk away from the confinement of ugly. I was going to own it. I was going to disarm and dismantle that weapon of ugly and refurbish it into shoes for tango.

Sekhmet told me “Stand in your power” - she is the warrior and the healer; she is Disobedience - and Hatshepsut showed me how - she is the King Herself who walked away from gender; she is Independence.

I shaved all my hair off to shed what I once had needed, thankful that my crown of fire brought me here. I have turned my body - including my hair - into a canvas upon which I paint my own hieroglyphics because if I don’t, patriarchy will. It always has. And now it was time to draw my new me into being.

To work on my draft for what is to come, I stood in the lightness and liberation of my scalp, running my hand across it, soft and tough at once, like the new skin after a scab peels away.

And then I started to build. I wanted brightness.

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Signed Copies of Bloody Hell!, Headscarves and Hymens, and 7 Necessary Sins

Mona Eltahawy — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 13:30:44 GMT

Clockwise from top left: Bloody Hell!, Headscarves and Hymens (UK edition), The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls (Ireland and UK edition), The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls (U.S. edition). All paperback.

If you live in the U.S. and have Venmo or PayPal and would like to buy signed copies of the paperback editions of The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls and Bloody Hell! Adventures in Menopause from Around the World, you can order them directly from me.

The total cost (price of a book plus media mail cost in the U.S. plus packing) is $25.

Send me the edition you would like, the name you’d like me to sign the book for, and the mailing address along with payment to Venmo:

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Essay: Inciting Liberation

Mona Eltahawy — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 12:15:53 GMT

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

First published on July 4, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get Rebecca Hall's Wake

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

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

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

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

Who deserves freedom? And from whom is our liberation?

I am not here to celebrate the “independence” of a group of white men from a white monarch. I am here to incite for the liberation of all. I am not here to celebrate “independence” overseen by slavers: 10 of the United States’ first 12 presidents owned slaves. I am not here to celebrate “Founding Fathers” aka white slave-owning patriarchy.

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

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

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

What fucking world is this?

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

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

What is my alternative to this fucking world?

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

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

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

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

Get Life As Activism

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

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

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

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

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

Kanno Sugako

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

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

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

Get Free Women of Spain

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

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

Who is the revolution for?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Essay: Feminism 1 - Patriarchy 0

Mona Eltahawy — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 13:31:45 GMT

Spain's team celebrates with the trophy after winning the women's World Cup.Rick Rycroft / AP

First published September 1, 2023

“Sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognise your power – not because they don’t see it, but because they see it and they don’t want it to exist,” bell hooks

What a delicious irony that the man who accused “false feminism” of trying to instigate his downfall, will indeed be brought down by a feminist uprising in Spain.

If feminism promises an audacious freedom from cisgender heterosexual patriarchal norms, then women’s football is Exhibit A.

It is no coincidence that patriarchy has tried to destroy women’s football.

As the late Black feminist bell hooks said, “Sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognise your power – not because they don’t see it, but because they see it and they don’t want it to exist.”

Both this year’s World Cup finalists, Spain and England, and several other countries at this year’s World Cup, banned women from football for decades, ostensibly to “protect” them, but in fact to protect the men’s game from losing attendees and their hearts to women’s football.

I watched my first men’s World Cup on television with my father and brother in 1978. I’d grown up thinking of men’s matches as something with an ever-present threat of violence: players ready to fight when fouled, to argue with referees, to dive and exaggerate the consequences of a challenge. Violence that was often mirrored by fans in the stands and after matches.

There is a documented spike in intimate partner violence that accompanies both the weekly matches in domestic leagues and international tournaments, such as the men’s World Cup. Researchers have shown that there is an increase in men’s violence against women whether a national team wins, loses, or draws.

And it’s not just the supporters of the game. Their behaviour, remember, mirrors that of the football idols they follow. On the pitch, off the pitch, from managers to players to the men who support them: patriarchy fuels a dangerous cocktail of toxic masculinity in football as well as many other men’s sports. Football tournaments did not invent patriarchy. The latter drives the men’s game and the harm it takes home.

Women’s football is wonderful because it isn’t about being better than the men–it is about throwing out men as the metric.

In 2015 I attended my first Women’s World Cup matches in Montreal, Canada. I watched Germany beat France in the quarterfinals, and then the United States beat Germany in the semifinal to advance to the final, which the United States went on to win. The stands were full of outsiders: women with babies, teenage girls with their faces painted in the colors of their teams and men there alone, all of us unburdened by the need to imitate a form of masculinity that the men’s game insists on as the price of admission.

On the Women’s World Cup pitch, the players were liberated from that performativity. Those women wanted to play and had no time for time wasting. That liberation was echoed in the stands.

With teen fans at Women’s World Cup Semi Final between USA and Germany, Montréal, 2015. Photo: Robert E. Rutledge

Women’s football is wonderful because it isn’t about being better than the men–it is about throwing out men as the metric.

Feminism hamstrings itself when it holds up men and says, “I want the right to be exactly like that.” Feminism must want more. I’ve grown to love women’s football because it felt like an arena where we’ve figured that out.

And patriarchy has never forgiven women’s football for calling out its lies, for daring to want more than doing whatever a man can. Men are not our yardstick. If men themselves are not free of the ravages of racism, capitalism and other forms of oppression, it is never enough to say “I want to be equal to them or to do whatever they can.”

To cut us down to size, patriarchy insists that men play, and women are just playthings.

Rubiales is not alone. Allegations of abuse, often sexual, have affected national teams around the world in recent years, including reported cases in Haiti, Venezuela, Zambia, Argentina, Colombia and Afghanistan, where the women’s team was disbanded because of Taliban rule.

As long as patriarchy remains unchallenged, men will continue to be the default and the standard against which everything is measured. As long as men are the yardstick, patriarchy can forever move the goalposts to ensure we never win. My ambition is for much more. I want to be free. And on the pitch, women’s football is audacious in that freedom

How dare girls think they can play a boys’ game? And how dare the women’s game in its audacious freedom throw into relief how unfree the men are?

If you are a man who plays football, you would be naive to think that misogyny is patriarchy’s sole crime. Patriarchy is what fuels the boos when players take a knee and the racist abuse yelled at Black and players of colour; it is what fuels homophobic chants that are brushed off as “jokes.”

To cut us down to size, patriarchy insists that men play, and women are just playthings.

“The degree of abuse in football, I think, is widely underestimated. And the systems currently are not able to either protect, properly investigate and support ultimately the victims and survivors,” said Jonas Baer-Hoffmann, General Secretary of FIFPRO, the global players’ union.

Men play. Women are playthings.

It is no coincidence that after a Women’s World Cup that broke all sorts of records, the patriarchy’s attempts to destroy it were so brazen and swift. Especially at a time when the women’s game is ascendant as the men’s is mired in rapacious greed and toxic masculinity.

7 Necessary Sins (Ireland & UK)

Men just play.

Women play and think about the ways they must survive and thrive despite all the obstacles--unequal pay and facilities, sexual harassment and abuse, fighting to be taken seriously as footballers.

i.e. backwards and in high heels, to quote a Frank and Ernest comic strip published in 1982, in which cartoonist Bob Thaves shows two men and a woman outside a Fred Astaire Film Festival.

“Sure he was great,” the woman says. “But don’t forget that Ginger Rogers did everything he did…backwards and in high heels.”

Men win and become icons and legends worldwide.

Women win and become overshadowed by a misogynist fuck who assaulted a world champion as the entire world watched, and who has spent the time since demanding that we disbelieve our eyes.

It is no coincidence that after a Women’s World Cup that broke all sorts of records, the patriarchy’s attempts to destroy it were so brazen and swift. Especially at a time when the women’s game is ascendant as the men’s is mired in rapacious greed and toxic masculinity.

The day after Rubiales’ assault on Hermoso, Manchester United’s men’s team–which I’ve supported since 1976, when I was nine–finally let go Mason Greenwood, whose girlfriend said he had raped her. But not quite. It has been reported that United are loaning Greenwood to La Liga’s Getafe, and that the Premier League club is funding a six-bedroom, £8,000-a-month villa and a private translator for Greenwood at the Spanish club. The awful timing of Greenwood going to a Spanish team now is not lost on any of us—Manchester United supporters as well as women in Spain.

So Manchester United are effectively keeping Greenwood on their books. They are either oblivious to their green lighting of misogyny or they think they are too big to care. I don’t know what’s worse. United has either miscalculated how deeply shaken we supporters are by what Mason Greenwood’s girlfriend has said he did to her or the club think it will be forgotten. Again, I don’t know what’s worse

While the women’s game scrambles with the pittance with which it must make do, the men’s game has long been awash in greed, most obviously displayed these days with one after another star player lured by Saudi Arabia’s astronomical offers.

You know who said no to money from a country ruled by an absolute hereditary monarchy, whose de facto ruler ordered the butchering of a journalist as well as the largest crackdown on women’s rights activists?

Women footballers.

FIFA—football’s world governing body which gave the 2022 Men’s World Cup to Qatar, a country where at least 6,500 migrant workers died to make the tournament possible—admitted defeat over plans to make Visit Saudi a major sponsor of the 2023 Women’s World Cup after a huge backlash from organisers and players.

We will remember the name of Jenni Hermoso as the name of Luis Rubiales rots in the trash bin of patriarchal history.

This World Cup crossed a threshold and that is where Luis Rubiales miscalculated–the anger directed at him and the support that Jenni Hermoso and her teammates have received.

We will remember the name of Jenni Hermoso as the name of Luis Rubiales rots in the trash bin of patriarchal history.

Meanwhile, with fewer resources, less pay, and considerably more patriarchal fuckery to overcome, the Women’s World Cup logged the largest number of countries that played, record-breaking attendance and viewership, and, as LGBTQ+ publication Autostraddle said, it “just might be the most openly queer sporting event in history,” with 100+ queer players and coaches.

There were no out queer players in the Men’s World Cup. Not a single one. The men know why.

Murray Drummond, director of the Sport, Health, Activity, Performance and Exercise Research Center at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, told the Washington Post that the visibility of gay players at the women’s World Cup “highlights the significant issues that we have in men’s sports.”

“We’re really still struggling to come to terms with different forms of masculinity among men,” he said.

How dare the women be free of cishet patriarchy?! Look at how diverse the sexual and gender identities of the players at this year’s World Cup.

Look how hemmed into the straitjacket of cishet patriarchy the men are—not one out queer major male player! Not one. They would not dare because cishet patriarchy would destroy them.

And so patriarchy reluctantly lets the girls play - but punishes the girls for thinking they can challenge cishet patriarchy.

But they do. And they are winning.

Backwards and in high heels and Doc Martens and Vans and Converse and all manner of footwear.

Next time you watch a women’s football match, watch the stands full of outsiders, unburdened and unfettered by the straightjacket of cishet patriarchy. I say "outsiders" because that's what we've been when the men's game is considered the default. The 2023 Women’s World Cup has considerably reset the dial on that.

Default for who? Default according to who?

To reimagine Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire: Sure male footballers are great, but don't forget that the women do everything they do, all while tackling patriarchal fuckery.

Fuck the patriarchy.

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Essay: When Football Goes Home

Mona Eltahawy — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 14:13:59 GMT

"If England gets beaten, so will she". Picture: National Centre for Domestic Violence UK campaign, 2018

First published on July 9, 2021

Six weeks before the Men’s Euro 2020 tournament began, Wales named a caretaker manager for their national squad after three charges of domestic abuse were announced against Ryan Giggs, who had been in charge of the team since 2018.

Giggsy, as he is known to us supporters of Manchester United, where he spent his entire playing career from 1991 until retiring in 2016, is accused of abusing his ex-partner and her sister. He has pleaded not guilty.

I have supported Manchester United since 1976, when I was nine years old and Giggs was two. I have cheered Giggsy on and always thought he was one of our best guys. And the charges against him are a reminder--another--that football is one of the many outlets that patriarchy offers to cisgender men as an excuse to treat us like shit.

Remember that, ahead of this weekend’s epic lineup of finals. On Saturday, arch rivals Brazil and Argentina face off in the Men’s Copa America final. And on Sunday, England are at home in Wembley against Italy for the Three Lions’ first final in an international tournament since 1966 when they won the World Cup, the one and only trophy they have won, that was played also at Wembley.

If “it’s coming home” is shorthand for an intensely optimistic--some would say delusional--confidence in the England men’s football team’s ability to bring back a trophy to where many think the game was born (which is disputed), then patriarchy is the even shorter explanation for the hell that researchers have shown male abusers create at home for women and children after major football games.

Whether England is the home of football or not matters little to women and children whose abusers make home hell after major football games.

Let’s be clear though: it is not football that makes cisgender men abuse women and children. It is not the alcohol those men readily consume while watching football that makes them hurt women and children. And win, lose or draw, the score doesn’t make a man beat a woman.

Patriarchy does.

It enables and protects abusers. It socializes them to believe they are entitled to our time, attention, and bodies. And like the pandemic-induced lockdowns during which countries around the world have recorded a spike of at least 30 percent in domestic abuse, football tournaments exacerbate pre-existing abusive behaviours.

Abuse “doesn’t happen by appointment. It happens all year round – it is a choice a perpetrator makes, stemming from power and control, from gender inequality, which misogyny and patriarchy helps perpetuate,” said Kim Manning-Cooper, head of communications at Refuge, a UK charity that operates a 24-hour national domestic abuse helpline.

During lockdown, Refuge logged a 61 percent surge in calls to its domestic abuse helpline in England. In Italy, women who could not call a helpline or directly report domestic abuse to the police could call a police emergency number and say: "I'd like to order a margarita pizza" which would alert the operator to send round a patrol.

It is not football that makes cisgender men abuse women and children. It is not the alcohol those men readily consume while watching football that makes them hurt women and children. And win, lose or draw, the score doesn’t make a man beat a woman. Patriarchy does.

Whether England is the home of football or not matters little to women and children whose abusers make home hell after major football games. It is a hell that decreases by 5 percent during the 2-hour duration of the game, but that starts increasing and peaks about ten hours after the game, researchers at the London School of Economics Centre for Economic Performance found. They examined eight years of call and crime data from Greater Manchester police, correlating with the timing of almost 800 games played by Manchester United and Manchester City between April 2012 and June 2019.

The researchers say that “all increases are driven by perpetrators that had consumed alcohol, and when games were played before 7pm,”; games which start during the day give supporters more time to drink.

As useful as it is to know all of that, it is imperative to resist the temptation of thinking that simply moving all football games to evening start times will end domestic abuse associated with games. The starting time of games is the trees. We must stay focused on the forest: patriarchy.

Abuse “doesn’t happen by appointment. It happens all year round – it is a choice a perpetrator makes, stemming from power and control, from gender inequality, which misogyny and patriarchy helps perpetuate.”

Get 7 Necessary Sins for Women and Girls

Moreover, researchers from UK’s Lancaster University who analysed domestic violence figures from England’s games in the 2002, 2006 and 2010 World Cup found that incidents of domestic abuse were 11 percent higher the day after an England match.

More alarmingly: incidents of domestic abuse rose by 38 percent when the England team lost and increased by 26 percent where England won or drew, compared with days when there was no England match.

Their findings were used in a photo campaign by the UK’s National Centre for Domestic Violence (NCDV) with the tagline, “If England gets beaten, so will she.” The NCDV’s campaign extended to other nations in the World Cup, including Switzerland, Japan, Belgium and France and showed images of national flags imprinted onto women’s faces in blood.

#WorldCup, including #Switzerland, #Japan, #Belgium and #France by portraying the flags of each country via blood and bruises on a woman’s face. ","username":"monaeltahawy","name":"Mona Eltahawy","profile_image_url":"","date":"Wed Jul 11 12:52:00 +0000 2018","photos":[{"img_url":"https://pbs.substack.com/media/Dh02OwyW4AAN0pK.jpg","link_url":"https://t.co/r9RNm1DRgc","alt_text":null},{"img_url":"https://pbs.substack.com/media/Dh02OxHXUAAdqsg.jpg","link_url":"https://t.co/r9RNm1DRgc","alt_text":null},{"img_url":"https://pbs.substack.com/media/Dh02OxHXcAEBn81.jpg","link_url":"https://t.co/r9RNm1DRgc","alt_text":null},{"img_url":"https://pbs.substack.com/media/Dh02OwzWkAA49b6.jpg","link_url":"https://t.co/r9RNm1DRgc","alt_text":null}],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":53,"like_count":47,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"video_preview_media_key":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM">

During the 2014 and 2018 World Cups, cases of intimate-partner violence against women rose by an average of 38 percent and 25 percent respectively when Colombia played. And by nearly 50 percent during the 2015 Copa America, compared to days when Colombia did not play. Colombia won third place in this year’s Copa America tournament.

Abusive men will abuse you whether their team wins or loses or draws, whether there is a lockdown or not, because it is about the abuser and about the ways patriarchy enables and protects his belief that he is entitled to control you. As lockdowns are being lifted in Europe, there has been a resurgence of deadly violence against women as abusers experience a "loss of the control" they enjoyed throughout the coronavirus lockdowns.

And football authorities--corrupt, male dominated, enraptured by sponsorship deals with alcohol companies--have been woefully awful at confronting that toxicity. Much as schools and universities are loathe to confront their star players, football authorities pay lip service to “kicking out” everything from racism to domestic violence to homophobia but it is all too often a kicking that is performative and as weak as Harry Kane’s penalty against Denmark in the Euro semi final.

The Italian League has been condemned for failing to act decisively enough against sexism, racism and antisemitism--not just from fans but by club officials.

On the pitch, off the pitch, from managers to players to the men who support them: patriarchy fuels a dangerous cocktail of toxic masculinity in football as well as many other men’s sports. Football tournaments did not invent patriarchy. The latter drives the men’s game and the harm it takes home.

And the abusive behaviour of superstars like Giggs must be directly connected to the behaviour of abusers in the stands and in the pubs who watch them. The through line is patriarchy. So egregious is the enabling and protection of such superstars in Brazil, the BBC claims “The Brazilian Football Association could likely field an entire team of active players accused or convicted of crimes related to gender violence or sexual assault.”

Perhaps the most egregious: former Flamengo goalkeeper Bruno Fernandes de Souza, who served less than a third of a 22-year sentence for ordering the murder of a former lover, Eliza Samudio, who was strangled and her body chopped up and fed to dogs. Bruno continues to earn a living playing football for Rio Branco in the northern state of Acre.

"Clubs are organisations that can speak to the people a lot better than the government. They help create a culture, so when a...football club...accepts someone found guilty of violence against women, it says to the Brazilian people that it's acceptable,” says Monica Sapucaia Machado, a professor of political and economical law and specialist in women's rights.

In Argentina, two players with one of the country’s most known clubs--Boca Juniors--have been accused of domestic abuse--goalkeeper Augustin Rossi and Colombian forward Sebastian Villa. This in a country where the number of women killed reached a 10-year high under coronavirus lockdown in 2020.

There are countless more examples of abusive footballers. I have focused on just a few examples from the four countries playing in this weekend’s finals.

The abusive behaviour of superstars must be directly connected to the behaviour of abusers in the stands and in the pubs who watch them. The through line is patriarchy.

I watched my first men’s World Cup--hosted and won by Argentina--on television with my father and brother in 1978. I’d grown up thinking of men’s matches as something with an ever-present threat of violence: players ready to fight when fouled, to argue with referees, to dive and exaggerate the consequences of a challenge. Violence that is often mirrored by fans in the stands and after matches.

The violence that goes home with the men’s game is a wholly-owned subsidiary of patriarchy. You would be naive to think that such violence is limited to targeting women and children. It is what fuels the boos when players take a knee and the racist abuse yelled at Black and players of colour; it is what fuels homophobic chants that are brushed off as “jokes.” Misogyny is not patriarchy’s sole crime.

How when we know that at least 10 percent of any population belongs to the LGBTQ+ community, is there not a single out player in the men’s top leagues while the women’s game has a long history of openly gay and bisexual players?

Patriarchy. That’s how.

It is time for men to learn from women how to play football.

If queer is the opposite of heteronormativity, the queerest--and joyously so--sporting environment I’ve witnessed were the Women’s World Cup matches in Montreal in 2015.

With teen fans at Women’s World Cup Semi Final between USA and Germany, Montréal, 2015. Photo: Robert E. Rutledge

The stands were full of outsiders: women with babies, teenage girls-- a demographic I rarely see in televised men’s games--with their faces painted in the colors of their teams and men there alone, all of us unburdened by the need to imitate a form of masculinity that the men’s game insists on as the price of admission.

There were no reports of abuse going home after the matches; no campaigns that warned that “If England is beaten, so is he,”; and the players on the pitch were there to play, not engage in bombastic flops and fake injuries.

It is time for men to learn from women how to play football.

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BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT! Feminism vs Fascism

Mona Eltahawy — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 15:07:23 GMT

Cover design by Victor Mingovits.

I am thrilled to announce my new book! Feminism vs Fascism: Ten Tactics to Topple Tyrants, to be published February 23, 2027 by Mariner Books, an imprint of Harper Co…

Fucking Fabulous #3: Talking to the Trees

Mona Eltahawy — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:51:22 GMT

with all its challenges, with how shit and how amazing menopause has been,with how shit and how amazing menopause has beenPhoto: Robert E. Rutledge

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!”

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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.

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.

7 Necessary Sins (Ireland & UK)

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.

Headscarves and Hymens

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.

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.

Bloody Hell! Advevntures in Menopause

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

—————————————-

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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

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

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

7 Necessary Sins (Ireland & UK)

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

7 Necessary Sins: The Course

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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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?

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

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

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

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

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.

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Take Patrice N,

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

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

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

The profile of a rapist is long overdue an update.

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

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

And he will treat you like a princess.

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

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