Mona Eltahawy Quotes

Why is violence significantly less traumatizing than our naked bodies?

A male editor I once worked with tried to dissuade me from the personal: "Who care about what happened to you?" The most subversive thing a woman can do is talk about her life as if it really matters.

It does.

I am DELIGHTED that I upset you so much.

...it is imperative to understand how civility, decorum, manners and the like are used to uphold authority...and that we are urged to acqquiesce as a form of maintaining that authority. Whether we are urged to be civil to racists or polite to patriarchy, the goal is the same: to maintain the power of the racist, to maintain the power of the patriarchy.

Equality is a practice, it's not just about words,

Slavish obedience to the clerics, who know how to squeeze every last drop of advantage out of religion, is killing our girls. We must speak-blaspheme, if necessary; be accused of being apostates, if that is what is required. Muslims are taught that Islam put an end to the Arabian practice of burying alive newborn baby girls because they were considered worthless and a burden, but as long as we stay quiet in the face of the abomination of child marriage, we are effectively burying our girls alive today.

Why do those men hate us? They hate us because they need us, they fear us, they understand how much control it takes to keep us in line, to keep us good girls with our hymens intact until it's time for them to fuck us into mothers who raise future generations of misogynists to forever fuel their patriarchy. They hate us because we are at once their temptation and their salvation from that patriarchy, which they must sooner or later realize hurts them, too. They hate us because they know that once we rid ourselves of the alliance of State and Street that works in tandem to control us, we
will demand a reckoning.

Freedom is astonishing and breathtaking. Freedom is terrifying when those who insist on that freedom are those whose submission you have been socialized into believing is your bequeathed right

We will have a reckoning with our culture and religion, with military rulers and Islamists - two sides of one coin. Such a reckoning is essentially a feminist one. And it is what will eventually free us. Women - our rage, our tenacity, our daring and audacity - will free our countries.

Saudi women who support the guardianship system - they sadly exist - are foot soldiers of the patriarchy in the same way that white American women voters who voted for Trump uphold white supremacy and its attendant misogyny. Both groups of women mistakenly believe their proximity to power in their respective countries will protect them from the worst ravages of patriarchy.

My escape route was to emphasize the
idea of "choice." If a woman had a
right to wear a miniskirt, surely I had the right to choose my headscarf. My choice was a sign of my independence
of mind. Surely, to choose to wear
what I wanted was an
assertion of my feminism. I was a feminist, wasn't I?
But I was to learn that
choosing to wear the hijab is much easier than choosing to take it off. And that lesson was an important reminder of how truly "free" choice is.

My own feminist revolution evolved slowly, and traveled the world with me. To this day I have no idea what dissident professor or librarian placed feminist tests on the bookshelves at the university library in Jeddah, but I found them there. They filled me with terror. I understood they were pulling at a thread that would unravel everything. Now that I am older, I can see that feeling terrified is how you recognize what you need. Terror encourages you to jump, even when you don't know if you will ever land.

But it is the job of a revolution to shock, to provoke, and to upset, not to behave or to be polite.

I do wonder, sometimes, if I had had a daughter, how I would have brought her up. How - when it's taken me so long to unlearn the things I believe are most damaging to the cause of women's liberation and equality - would I have raised my daughter to disobey?

I'm here to confuse you. Confusion is my right and left hook.

Western liberals who rightly condemn imperialism [are] yet are blind to the cultural imperialism they are performing when they silence my critiques of misogyny. They behave as if they want to save my culture and faith from me, and forget that they are immune to the violations about which I speak.

Words are important - the fight silence, alienation, and violence. Words are flags planted on the planets of our beings; they say this is mine, I have fought for it and despite your attempts to silence me, I am still here. Just as important, words help us find each other and overcome the isolation that threatens to overwhelm and to break us. Words say we are here.

Now that I'm older, I can see that feeling terrified is how you recognize what you need. Terror encourages you to jump, even when you don't know if you'll ever land

The god of virginity is popular in the Arab world. It doesn't matter if you're a person of faith or an atheist, Muslim or Christian - everybody worships the god of virginity. Everything possible is done to keep the hymen - that most fragile foundation upon which the god of virginity sits - intact. At the altar of the god of virginity, we sacrifice not only our girls' bodily integrity and right to pleasure but also their right to justice in the face of sexual violation. Sometimes we even sacrifice their lives: in the name of "honor," some families murder their daughters to keep the god of virginity appeased. When that happens, it leaves one vulnerable to the wonderful temptation of imagining a world where girls and women are more than hymens.

When Westerners remain silent out of 'respect' for foreign cultures, they show support only for the most conservative elements of those cultures. Cultural relativism is as much my enemy as the oppression I fight within my culture and faith.

Why were women alone responsible for sheltering men from the sexual desires women supposedly elicited in men? Why could men not control themselves? Why, if men were the ones being tempted, were they not the ones being policed?

To the girls of the Middle East: Be immodest, rebel, disobey, and know you deserve to be free

What would the world look like if girls were taught they were volcanoes, whose erruptions were a thing of beauty, a power to behold, a force not to be trifled with?

Misogyny has not been completely wiped out anywhere. Rather, it resides on a spectrum, and our best hope for eradicating it globally is for each of us to expose and to fight against local versions of it, in the understanding that by doing so we advance the global struggle.