Essay: Artemisia Teaches Us This
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.
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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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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