Essay: Feminist Buzz Kill
In the 1990’s, Sinead O’Connor had a shaved head and I wore hijab. Fast forward to 2020, Shuhada was wearing hijab (she had converted to Islam) and I had a shaved head.
I shaved off all my hair because I wanted to be a lighthouse. “Come this way after the wreckage.”
I cut it all off because I wanted to rip up my return ticket to "normal."
The "normal" before Covid, the "normal" before menopause, the "normal" before fascism.
Video: Robert E. Rutledge
Five years ago, when so many of us privileged enough to stay at home could lock down and long for the wind in our hair.
“Wild is the wind,” sings Nina Simone, longingly. And I wanted the sun, too.
I wanted to look in the mirror and no longer recognise who I used to be. Less scorched earth and more “Let there be light.”
Video and buzzcut: Robert E. Rutledge
The wound is where the light enters, Rumi said. And I wanted to run my hand over my scalp and feel the stubble as if it were scars of the lives I’ve had, like the proud rings in the bark of a tree.
When I was younger, my hair was so thick that a hair stylist told me I had enough for three people. I contain multitudes as Walt Whitman said, and each Mona’s hair is a memoir: hair as hieroglyphs.
“Are you a boy or a girl?”
One of the first questions neighbourhood children asked me after my family’s arrival in London from Cairo when I was seven. It stunned me. I ran home to my parents and told them I couldn’t understand the kids. I understood the words because I had taken basic English at my school in Cairo but I did not understand why those children were asking me something that had not occurred to me to ask myself. What did they not see? What were they looking for?
Hatshepsut, is who I found.
Go to her gallery at the Met Museum in New York City, and look at the ways the king herself expanded gender presentation. Both/Neither/Everything. She/He/They.
Fifty years later: Am I a girl or a boy. Both/Neither/Everything. Prepubescent and postmenopausal. Both/Neither/Everything. I am more than my biology. I am now beyond biology. No period. No babies. Am I not a woman?
Left: Mona at age seven. Right: Mona at age fifty-seven
Both/Neither/Everything. Does it make sense? Fuck “normal.”
My grandmother liberated me from “normal” for a girl when she told my mother to cut my hair short because I always cried when Mama tried to detangle it.
An early gift of liberation from having to perform femininity–or at least to signal it via my hair. And so from the age of three or so, my mother kept my hair very short.
I am told that when I was 10 days old, that same paternal grandmother had my ears pierced. This is a very common practice for girls 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).
I shaved off all my hair because I wanted to be a lighthouse. “Come this way after the wreckage.” I cut it all off because I wanted to rip up my return ticket to "normal." The "normal" before Covid, the "normal" before menopause, the "normal" before fascism.
My hair has been short for most of my life. For a while, it was under a hijab. This is not an essay about hijab. When I saw a photograph of Sinead O’Connor, who took on the name Shuhada when she converted to Islam, in a hijab, I marveled at how we had handed a vicarious baton to each other: look at the power of our hair and how its absence/presence is so potent. The performance of hair.
Cisgender men want that performance and mete out violence when they don’t receive it. If that’s “normal,” then fuck normal. I’ll take Both/Neither/Everything, thank you. Cisgender men need no reason for their violence. The horror that is home. Home is where the hurt is. Home is the most dangerous place for women and girls. As the world locked down in terror at the pandemic five years ago, rates of male violence at home against women sharply increased. Fuck the “normal” that brought us there and fuck normal if that’s where anyone wants to return.
“Is your husband ok with that?” is a common question hair stylists ask women who want a buzzcut. It echoes the “But you might meet someone who’ll want children someday,” that women are asked by doctors when they want a tubal ligation.
Who owns my body? Who owns my hair? Who, does everyone else assume owns my body, owns my hair?
Both/Neither/Everything
.Photos: Robert E. Rutledge
What does the revolution have to do with hair? During the Irish Revolution, both sides would forcibly shave women’s hair as punishment as well as a way to control women’s bodies.
Who owns my hair, who owns my body, when the revolution in which women fought alongside men as they did in Iran in 1979, is co-opted by zealots who legislate enforced hijab? The clerics claimed as an achievement the mass covering of an entire nation’s women’s hair.
When women in Iran rose up in the Woman, Life, Freedom revolution, they not only burned their compulsory hijab, they cut off their hair on camera. When you shave the hair underneath that enforced hijab, are you then the revolution of one, defying, disobeying, and disrupting?
Who owns my hair, who owns my body, during a genocide?
Israel’s relentless genocide and blockade have left women there with no access to menstrual products, with some resorting to period-delaying pills to avoid embarrassment and shame. The “small” and daily indignities of fascist violence can often be overlooked among that gravity of death and destruction. I write to magnify the “small” with the gravity it deserves.
“One of the saddest things I’ve seen here is that many women are shaving off their hair because there is no shampoo or water to wash it in, and head lice has become a massive problem,” says Liz Allcock, the NGO Medical Aid for Palestinians’ Head of Protection in Gaza. “A woman I spoke to recently said she hadn’t washed her hair for two months. Imagine not washing your hair for months. People are being forced into indignity.”
In 2023, a man assaulted a woman in the South Korean city of Jinju because she had short hair.
"I know you are a feminist," her attacker yelled as he beat her up at the convenience store where she worked part time. “I don’t beat women, but feminists are asking to be beaten up!”
He told police that he was affiliated with New Man on Solidarity, one of the country’s most active anti-feminist groups.
Her assailant, in his 20s, also severely assaulted an older man who tried to intervene, telling him: "Why aren't you supporting a fellow man?"
The woman, an aspiring writer who goes by the pen name On Ji-goo never considered herself a feminist but changed her mind after the attack, which left her with hearing loss and severe trauma.
In a landmark ruling, a court in South Korea recognised misogyny as a motive for a hate crime. The man was sentenced to three years in prison in his appeal trial.
The attack on On Ji-goo inspired the #women_shortcut_campaign, leading hundreds of women in South Korea to cut their hair short.
An anti-feminist movement has been growing in South Korea, leading to the 2022 election of President Yoon Suk-yeol, “who openly wooed young men who felt they were losing out as women became a bigger voice in society.” His platform included a campaign promise to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, saying it focused too much on women's rights.
That same president declared martial law in December 2024—for the first time in the nation’s democratic history. Shocker! Openly misogynist president went into full dictator mode! Who could’ve predicted it?!
Thousands of Koreans turned out in protests, especially young women. The women who knew to connect his lust for tyranny with his misogyny. The women who knew that a president who claims a country is free of sexism, despite evidence to the contrary, can upend democracy just as easily. And those women celebrated his take down when that tyrant was impeached four months later
.Women, especially younger women, played a key role in the protests leading up to the impeachment of South Korea's former president Yoon Suk Yeol. Via BBC
And now those same women are enraged. For the first time in 18 years, there is no woman among the seven candidates running for president in the election on Tuesday, June 3. And the two main candidates, wanting to lap up the misogynists who steered Yoon Suk-yeol to victory, have stayed largely silent about equality for women.
Fuck “normal.”
Not all feminists have short hair. And not all cisgender women with long hair are footsoldiers of the patriarchy. But all the women who serve as lipstick for the pig that is Trump have long hair.
As I predicted shortly after Donald Trump again won the presidency, the U.S. too is coddling the misogynists.
When Trump won the 2016 U.S. presidential election, U.S. media and analysts centered the demographic that propelled him to victory (white people, who not coincidentally were the least likely to be hurt by his policies) as the group the rest of us had to coddle, tip toe around, be civil to, not call racist, cajole, and work harder to understand if we wanted them to stop voting for him.
Now that Trump has won the 2024 election, U.S. media and analysts are centering the demographic that propelled him to victory (men, more of whom voted for him in this election than in 2016, and who not coincidentally are the least likely to be hurt by his policies) as the group the rest of us have to fix if we want them to stop voting for him
Karoline Leavitt, Donald Trump’s press secretary, arrives at the White House on 22 January 2025. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA via The Guardian
Not all feminists have short hair. And not all cisgender women with long hair are footsoldiers of the patriarchy. But all the women who serve as lipstick for the pig that is Trump have long hair.
“What chic has come to mean to a lot of people is a very narrow definition of elegance. It’s this thin, white, blonde woman who speaks softly and is basically Grace Kelly,” according to Elysia Berman, a creative director and content creator.
Fascists and transphobes–see Trump and the “chic” cisgender women he surrounds himself with, see Nancy Mace, see J.K. Rowling, et al–want us to perform femininity to their specific standard.
Fascists and transphobes–two faces of an ugly currency–will get you beaten up because you have short hair and dared use the women’s restroom.
"How it started was because I'm a lesbian — just because I walked into the woman's bathroom, and I looked the way I look,"said Kady Grass after two young men beat her as she was leaving a MacDonald’s restroom. They left her with a fractured nose, a hemorrhage on her eye, and PTSD.
Fascists and transphobes will start a global witch hunt against you for winning an Olympics gold medal in boxing but you’re not white enough nor feminine enough–white and feminine is their standard.
Fascists and transphobes will have a woman verbally abuse you in an airport bathroom because she thought you were transgender because you’re a cisgender woman with alopecia.
And fascists and transphobes will get you fired from your job at a Walmart because you’re a cisgender woman who’s not small enough nor feminine enough for a cisgender man on the prowl for transgender women who followed you into the women’s restroom and you had the nerve to complain, –small and feminine is their standard.
Who owns my hair, who owns my body?
I shaved off all my hair five years ago as my “fuck you” to “normal.” There is no going back to "normal" after Covid, after menopause, after fascism.
If your hair doesn’t belong to you, then your body doesn’t belong to you, then you are not free.
Are you ready for the revolution?
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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. Her new book, an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell!: Adventures in Menopause from Around the World, will be published March 5, 2025. 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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Always love your inspiring writing, Mona.