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Do you define 'Deliberate Beauty' as being different to the beauty labour women do to appease the male gaze? And what of fillers, botox, etc?

I want to snatch back beauty from the clutches of the male gaze. I want beauty to be as easily abundant and as unrequiring of labour as the gorgeous scent I inhale when I put my face into the box of strawberries I reach for every morning to slice and pile berries onto my bowl of oatmeal, that bland white board that needs all the beauty it can get. We gravitate towards beauty like a sunflower turns toward the sun.

As I say in The Wonder Chronicles: 34: Beauty in the time of fascism is solace and power. It is what I call Deliberate Beauty and as I adorn my eyes with liner every morning, it is also homage and healing.

Our task is to snatch beauty back from the clutches of “the male gaze,” the phrase popularized by British film theorist Laura Mulvey in her 1973 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in which she described how the “male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly.” Use of the phrase has expanded far beyond film theory and criticism to refer to the ways patriarchy demands that beauty labour you mention.

I want to be as generous with the adornment of my face and body as my ancestors in Egypt were. When I learned that women and men of all social classes in ancient Egypt were wearing eyeliner as early as 6000 BC, it loosened considerably that patriarchal stranglehold over beauty that I’d spent so many years of my life pushing back against.

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Photo: Robert Rutledge

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Do you cook? E.R.

I vividly remember the day my mum kicked me out of the kitchen. She had been trying to teach me Egyptian dishes that I now sorely regret not paying attention to. Why oh why did I not learn how to make molokheyya, my favourite dish in the world that is sometimes uncharitably described as slimy green soup by ignorant palates but which for me is heaven. Or bamiya! Oh okra, you might be my second favourite dish but when you’re reheated the second day and that tomato base you swim in is so thick and flavourful, oh oh! I know all this deliciousness because whenever I visit my parents, my mum makes molokheyya for me the first night and bamiya the second.

I was banished from the kitchen–the cooking part of it, anyway; I’m an expert dishwasher––because I’m sure I’d mouthed off plenty of “Why do I have to learn how to cook? Just because I’m a girl?” enough times that my mum was done with my feminist hectoring. She was doing what was expected of her–teaching her daughter to cook. And I was resisting in the way that I could at the time–by refusing to learn.

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Read AMAA: 1

I’m curious about your perspective on this: how would you handle pro-MAGA folks in your family? I’ve tried the gentle approach (aiming for a discussion) and the angry approach (yelling and cussing at my brother-in-law on Christmas Day). Part of me wants to cut them out, but I also want to show my young nieces and nephews that there’s an alternative. I want them to know they have family that isn’t crazy, and that I’m here for them if they need out. (They’re between 1-11yrs old) -

When one of my nieces was about six or seven years old, she told her father, my brother, “When I grow up, I am not getting married or having children and I’ll travel the world, like Tante Mona.” I never sat her down to tell her that’s what I was doing with my life nor did I advocate for any of those things when I’d send her greeting cards on various occasions. And while she’s older now and I don’t know if those are still among her goals, her childhood ambitions were the first thing I thought of when I read your question.

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Photo: Robert E. Rutledge

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Tell me Mona how do you cultivate joy in your life whilst confronting the fuckery? Are you able to do the despair and rage as well as the joy? —@KaamaJoy

Hello Kama Joy and thank you for your question. Every morning I wake up convinced that today is the day I will destroy patriarchy. And every night I go to sleep knowing that patriarchy will most likely outlive me. And the intervening hours between waking and sleeping remind me that joy is found not in the absence of fuckery, but despite it, in spite of it, and to spite it. I rage and rage but never despair.

How come, you might ask.

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Photo: Robert E. Rutledge

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A reader asked me a question about a recent Wonder Chronicle that made me want to write an entirely new post and so I’m launching a new feature at FEMINIST GIANT for paid subscribers to ask me (almost) anything.

Ways to destroy the patriarchy, eyeliner brand(s) I use, the life of a menopausal whore, how to strengthen those feminist muscles with Feminism in 3D (Defy, Disobey, Disrupt), why so many of my lovers have been younger than me—ask me (almost) anything!

I will answer one question a week.

Paid subscribers can post their questions in the comment section of any post or email me at info@monaeltahawy.com

Yalla!

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