The Wonder Chronicles: 28

On Giants

Logo: Sheyam Ghieth

This is part of a running series. Read the previous Wonder Chronicle: On Getting Up

When fascism flexes its muscles, supersize your feminism and become a giant.

Close your eyes and recall your origin story. Every superhero has an origin story. Often, it is from a time when they almost succumbed to an antagonist, a force of evil, a nemesis who brought them to their knees.

And then they snapped.

That snap is the sound of the giant within you being born.

Is it scary? Fuck yeah, it’s scary. Coming into your power is a thing of wonder. To give birth to that giant you are meant to be is marvellous:

: causing wonder : astonishing

: miraculous, supernatural

: of the highest kind or quality, notably superior

When fascism flexes its muscles, supersize your feminism and become a giant.

When theocracy seizes the pulpit and prosyletises for fascism, we must sin.

In the Gospel of Mona, the greater the sin, the greater the giant.

Anger. Attention. Profanity. Ambition. Power. Violence. Lust.

Pick one, Choose all seven. In the time of fascism and theocracy, to sin is to be a feminist giant. 

Each sin is a molotov cocktail to aim into the belly of patriarchy. Accumulate your arsenal and finesse your aim. Keep the patriarchy in your crosshairs every day. Shoot!

I am here to destroy it: wherever it lives, however it manifests, whoever carries its water.

Build your feminist power and know that to be powerful is not to do or be what a man can do or be. Feminism demands more than equality with cisgender heterosexual men. Men are not my yardstick. 

When theocracy seizes the pulpit and prosyletises for fascism, we must sin. In the Gospel of Mona, the greater the sin, the greater the giant. Anger. Attention. Profanity. Ambition. Power. Violence. Lust.

If men themselves are not free of the ravages of racism, capitalism and other forms of oppression, it is not enough to say I want to be equal to them. As long as patriarchy remains unchallenged, men will continue to be the default and the standard against which everything is measured.

Feminism is not about doing what men do. I do not want what men have. I want much more. 

I want to be free. 

To be a giant is to know that power is more complicated than presidents and elected representatives. Power lives in more places than the presidential office. It lives in the State, the Street, and the Home: the Trifecta of Patriarchy. Keep all three in your crosshairs. And shoot!

Daily acts of defiance, disobedience and disruption of the patriarchy are the workouts that build up feminist muscles and make of us giants.

Patriarchy too often throws women crumbs in return for a limited form of power. Women who accept those crumbs are expected in return to uphold patriarchy, internalize its dictates, police other women and never forget that power bestowed is power that can be retracted.

I don’t want crumbs; I want the whole cake, and I want to bake it myself. Refuse the crumbs of patriarchy. Vow instead to destroy it and its measly crumbs.

Bake your own cake and eat it too!

Feel the snap within you and recall your origin story. Become a giant of feminism!

My goal: that you are found by wonder.

My wish: that you intensely live. 

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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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