Essay: The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls
How to Defy, Disobey, and Disrupt the Patriarchy
Photo: Robert E. Rutledge
First published September 7, 2022
I wrote this book with enough rage to fuel a rocket. I knew I had to write it while I was still high on the glory of beating up a man who sexually assaulted me. Who was this woman I had become who looks men in the eye, seizing their gaze with my fury until their fear tells me they understand not to fuck with me? I wanted to figure her out. For years, I had been shedding shame and gaining rage. For years I had been thumping away at patriarchy, like a pinata hanging tantalizingly just out of reach. It was stubborn but my tenacity and rage became my ladder. This book is my instruction manual for smashing that pinata.
Christianity preaches the Seven Deadly Sins. The Gospel of Mona presents instead the Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls: anger, attention, profanity, ambition, violence, power, lust.
I call them “sins,” but of course they are not. They are what women and girls are not supposed to be or do or want. They are condemned as “sins” by a patriarchy that demands we acquiesce to, not destroy, its dictates.
Anger, attention, profanity, ambition, violence, power, lust.
Christianity preaches the Seven Deadly Sins. The Gospel of Mona presents instead the Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls: anger, attention, profanity, ambition, violence, power, lust.
In the chapter on anger, I ask what would the world look like if girls were taught they were volcanoes that could and should erupt to disrupt patriarchy? I examine how anger and rage are discouraged and broken out of girls and the ways in which that anger and rage are important in the fight against patriarchy. I also ask who is allowed to be angry, and I analyse how, depending on their race and class, some girls are punished for behaviour that is tolerated in others.
In my examination of attention, I insist that women and girls demand attention because we deserve it and must not shy away from it. The quickest and laziest way to discredit a woman is to accuse her of “attention seeking.” I explain the importance of defiantly declaring that we deserve attention, and why such a declaration is a powerful tool for disrupting patriarchy’s demands that we remain “modest” and “humble.”.
I wrote this book with enough rage to fuel a rocket. Who was this woman I had become who looks men in the eye, seizing their gaze with my fury until their fear tells me they understand not to fuck with me?
We must say “Fuck.” In the chapter on profanity, I insist on the power of profanity as a force in disrupting, disobeying and defying patriarchy and its rules. In understanding why profanity is off-limits to women, I unpack the ways that girls are socialized into the straitjacket of being “nice” and “polite,” and recognize the absurdity of patriarchy’s claim that our profane words are worse than the violence it subjects us to.
Why is ambition considered a “dirty” word for women? Why does patriarchy teach girls and women that it is wrong to openly declare they want to be better than everybody else at something, and why - when they are better, when they are recognized as experts who are better than everybody else, must women play down or diminish their expertise and the ambition that propelled them to those levels?
What is a powerful woman? In the chapter on power, I insist on differentiating between power that dismantles patriarchy from power that is used in the service of patriarchy. Patriarchy has often thrown women crumbs in return for a limited form of power that often replicates the hierarchies that patriarchy has created. We must refuse those crumbs. We must bake our own cake. And we must define power in a way that liberates us from patriarchy's hierarchies.
This is a moment for those who are not rich, white or famous to be heard. It is a moment in which we must have a reckoning with patriarchy and in which we recognize how normalized its crimes are, as well as a reckoning with how it intersects with other forms of oppression.
In the chapter on violence I examine the right of women and girls to fight back against the crimes of patriarchy. Violence a legitimate form of resistance in struggles against colonization and occupation; it has long been accepted as just and necessary in such struggles. What about the struggle against a form of oppression that hurts half the world’s population? This book is not a roadmap for making peace with patriarchy. It is a manifesto to dismantle patriarchy and to end its crimes.
The chapter on violence is perhaps the most controversial. You can read an excerpt here and watch this clip from an Australian TV show called Q&A during which I was challenged on some of my writing in the chapter.
The episode was pulled from the ABC network’s website the day after it was broadcast—it was effectively banned—after some viewers complained. I was accused of inciting violence. Two government ministers issued statements condemning it, there was a parliamentary discussion about it and a government media body investigated the episode and issued a report that looked at viewer complaints. It cleared the episode but it remains banned.
And finally, in examining lust, I emphasize the importance of a deceptively simple but revolutionary insistence: I own my body, not the state, the street or the home, not the church, mosque or temple. I examine the importance and the power of expressing and insisting on desire, pleasure and sex on our own terms. Wanting sex and expressing sexuality outside the teachings of heteronormativity are about a chaos and liberation that deeply threatens patriarchy. I examine the centrality of consent and agency to challenging patriarchy’s stranglehold over our bodies, and how queerness upends patriarchy’s insistence that it alone dictates not only who can have sex and how they can have it, but who can express desire and lust.
Photo: Robert E. Rutledge
This is a moment for those who are not rich, white or famous to be heard. It is a moment in which we must have a reckoning with patriarchy and in which we recognize how normalized its crimes are, as well as a reckoning with how it intersects with other forms of oppression like racism, classism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and bigotry. I am from many worlds and I travel between many places. Throughout this book I will share voices and stories from across the world about the ways women and queer people yell a big fuck-you to the patriarchy.
We must seize this revolutionary moment. We will never get there if we don’t refuse the lazy and racist insistence of pointing to “over there,” by local patriarchs who tell us “Be grateful you live here and not over there where it’s shit for women.” It is shit everywhere. “Our men” and “their men” are socialized, emboldened and protected by patriarchy everywhere. That global patriarchy must remain our target.
The danger and fear that should be inherent in feminism and resistance must not be stamped out. Feminism should terrify the patriarchy. It should put patriarchy on notice that we demand nothing short of its destruction.
There are too many books which promise to teach women and girls to “resist” which do little more than help them survive a system - patriarchy - that is harmful. We must arm women and girls in the fight to dismantle patriarchy, not acquiesce to it nor draw within its lines.
Words like feminism and resistance are being drained of their meaning when we offer them up as band-aids that offer temporary relief to women and girls against the vagaries of patriarchy. Enough of giving women and girls just ways to survive rather than tools to fight. The danger and fear that should be inherent in feminism and resistance must not be stamped out. Feminism should terrify the patriarchy. It should put patriarchy on notice that we demand nothing short of its destruction.
We need fewer roadmaps towards a peace treaty with patriarchy and more manifestos to destroying it. The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls is my manifesto.
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
You can also support my work via Patreon
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.
I appreciate your support. If you like this piece and you want to further support my writing, you can like/comment below, forward this article to others, or send a gift subscription to someone else today.
Mona, thank you for channeling Sekhmet at this time of disruption and volcanic shifts. I recently developed an issue of elbow pain that stems from my neck. After years of having a “dancer’s posture,” aging has given me sunken-chest-syndrome (and hence the neck/elbow pain). And I realize that in addition to aging, the slight hunching forward is a somatic response to decades of survival in a man’s world. Fuck that.