Essay: When Girls Erupt

Iranian schoolgirls raise their middle fingers to their country’s leaders. Picture via social media

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Iran's Feminist Revolution--Women, Life, Freedom

Dear White Women Cheering Iranian Women

“Before (the revolution), I was saying ‘no.’ Then the revolution came, and I began to say, ‘I demand.’”

If women are volcanoes, as Ursula K. Le Guin once said, what happens when girls erupt? 

TL:DR the patriarchy is FUCKED, that’s what happens. 

The longer version is the story of what happens when girls go from saying ‘no’ to saying ‘I demand,’ and is there anything more breathtaking than schoolgirls telling patriarchy to get fucked?

Watching a revolution is like staring at the sun; it will ruin your vision for life. Every time you close your eyes, its imprint is still there. And it will singe your heart so that ‘no’ is no longer enough, and ‘I demand’ is the start of the list of what you know you deserve.

I initially did not have a dedication for my first book, Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution, which was published in 2015. But the editors asked if I wanted to include one. My heart was singed by the stumbling revolution in my country of birth, Egypt. My vision was ruined by the intoxicating promise of freedom. And my heart and my vision beat for and saw only girls.

“To the girls of the Middle East and North Africa: Be immodest, rebel, disobey, and know you deserve to be free,” I wrote as the dedication.

And now as I watch schoolgirls in Iran erupt, I feel as if I’ve woken up and there they are! 

Notice I did not say “I feel as if I’ve gone to sleep and dreamed them up” or “I have died and gone to girl heaven.” No. None of that. To see girls hold in one hand the enforced hijab they now refuse to wear (be immodest, rebel, disobey) and with the other they give the middle finger to the patriarchy that enforced that hijab on them, knowing they deserve to be free, I know this is girls fully realized, not dreamed up, not a fantasy, but erupted into their full glory.

Watching a revolution is like staring at the sun; it will ruin your vision for life.

Protests began in Iran after Mahsa Zhina Amini, a Kurdish woman, died after being in the custody of the “morality police” who had taken her in because she was not wearing a “proper hijab.”

I point to the girls and insist that the revolution is not so much about regime change but about how people have changed. People-change.

Revolutions have long been about men–what they want and how they get it. Because patriarchy determines the words we use and the ways we see. 

For example: The laws and lexicon of human rights do not recognize that intimate partner violence is a form of torture, because it is only what the State can do to men that it takes seriously –and what men do to women is just “domestic violence”. Similarly, revolutions are rarely counted a success unless men can say they changed the regime–i.e. snatched some of the power of the State for themselves. 

And here come girls and women in Iran with their eruptions! Fuck your regime and fuck your naivetee if you think they will stop at just its change.

The dedication to my book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution, 2015

The quote at the start of this essay is from Nesma el-Khattab, a lawyer who was 24 years old when I interviewed her in Cairo in 2014 for a BBC World Service radio documentary on women and revolution that I made with producer Gemma Newby. 

“My personal revolution began when I was twelve or thirteen, I began to say no to many things in the family,” she told me. “I fought against (female genital) cutting, which happened to me when I was nine. I told my family, ‘If you do it to my younger sister, I’m going to turn this house upside down.’”

“Before (the 2011 revolution), I was saying ‘no.’ Then the revolution came and I began to say, ‘I demand.’ It’s way out there now: head-to-head confrontation. I would go to Tahrir without our family knowing and my mother would say, ‘You're not allowed back in the house.’ I’m twenty-four. I’ve been fighting for years but the revolution took it to another level.”

I first met Nesma at a feminist gathering soon after I moved back to Cairo from New York City in 2013. And like hurricanes, one often follows another, and in the audience was another force of nature.

“I am full of so much rage! No one can imagine how much rage I am filled with!” Alaa, 19, told us. 

She spat out those words with such force that we could indeed imagine. What a force to harness, that rage!

Alaa told us that she wanted to remove her headscarf but her mother would not let her and that her father beat her. She said this to a room full of strangers. She came determined to erupt.

“I want to run away. Should I?”

I told her that I could not answer that question for her. But I suggested that she already knew the answer and that she had come to our discussion for a reason. As Alaa spoke, her predicament reminded me of the emotional terrorism too many of our families inflict on girls and women.

Glory and power to girls–their rage, and their daring and their audacity, their immodesty and rebelliousness, their disobedience, and most of all: their knowledge that they deserve to be free.

What good is the revolution against the State, when the home remains the most dangerous place for women and girls? You think those girls flipping their theocrats off in the schoolroom in Iran will leave their rage behind in that room when they go home? You think those girls who chased away an education director from their school grounds will pack up their audacity into their satchels after school is out? You think those schoolgirls chanting “Death to the dictator” do not go home and see the dictator there as well?

Polite and well-behaved girls do not terrify the patriarchy. These are girls who terrify patriarchy. You think that girls around the world are not watching, knowing that they too can erupt? There is a reason that anger is one of The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls.

Alaa did indeed remove her hijab and leave home, but only for a few months, because she was not yet of age according to Egyptian law, which sets adulthood at age twenty-one. She joined a support and consciousness raising group that I started in Cairo, and it was thrilling to watch some of the other members marvel at the fortitude she mustered in order to leave home–a huge step in Arab societies.

Rania, a member of the group who was in her thirties, once turned to Alaa and asked simply “How did you do it? How did you do all of this at nineteen? I just traveled for the first time by myself last year when I was thirty-four!” Rania was the eldest member of the group, and Alaa was the youngest.

It is these conversations and the juxtapositions of experiences and struggles they produce that bring the revolution home. And that revolution at home is the hardest because all dictators go home. And yet, the uprisings, the defiances and disobedience and disruptions (what I call feminism in 3D) are rarely taken seriously because the “real” revolution, the one that media and history books record, we are told happens out there against the State by men and for men and unless we change the regime, nothing has changed.

When I was writing Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution, I would hear from some men that it “wasn’t the time for feminism.” 

“Men aren’t free either, you know,” these men would tell me, unironically and without a whit of understanding of patriarchy’s harms to them.

And my answer would always be, “Indeed, the State oppresses us all, men and women. However, together the State, the Street, and the Home oppress women.”

It is the revolution against that Trifecta of Patriarchy that will liberate us all. Do you think those schoolgirls in Iran will ever be the same, their eruptions magnificent and monumental?

I see a rage and determination that cannot be contained.

I see middle fingers raised, and I hear Fuck the patriarchy.

And I know that every girl and woman in the countries around Iran hears it, and I know it reverberates around the world. The real revolution–the real battle–is between patriarchy–established and upheld by the State and the Street and at Home–and women and girls–who will no longer accept the status quo.

Such a reckoning is a feminist one.

“We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains. That’s what I want—to hear you erupting. You young Mount St. Helenses who don’t know the power in you—I want to hear you,” Ursula K. Le Guin told young women preparing to graduate in 1986.

Glory and power to the women in Iran who have seized the narrative and become object and subject in a revolution they began and which they propel.

Glory and power to girls–their rage, and their daring and their audacity, their immodesty and rebelliousness, their disobedience, and most of all: their knowledge that they deserve to be free.

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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editing an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell! And Other Stories: Adventures in Menopause from Across the Personal and Political Spectrum. 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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