The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls|Mona Eltahawy

“We must make patriarchy fear us”- Mona Eltahawy

Worldwide, feminism remains a dirty word, but that hasn't stopped writers, famous or not, from questioning systems of oppression encouraged and maintained by religion, politics and domestic life. A testament to this fact is the ever expanding list of feminist nonfiction, bold in its intent to capsize the status quo that generally sees men on the deck and women in the bilge.

In The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls, author, journalist and unapologetic feminist Mona Eltahawy does just that in easy yet searing language, turning rage into ink and calling on the proverbial weaker sex to wage furious war against patriarchy until they achieve complete freedom. The book, an obvious wink to Christianity's seven deadly sins, proposes seven vices women and girls should commit without shame to achieve that aim. Anger and lust, adapted from their original source, are imbued with a feminist twist alongside the sins of attention, profanity, ambition, power, and violence.

In Eltahawy's rendering, the idea for the book came shortly after she pummeled a man for groping her in a club in Canada. It's a story her over 300,000-strong Twitter followers know well, one she recounted online in 2018 under the hashtag #IBeatMyAssaulter, prompting women the world over to narrate their own acts of violence against sexual predators.

Each chapter tackles one sin, which aims at ripping the social pandemic that positions men and boys ipso facto above women and girls. To make her case, Eltahawy deploys as salvos statistics, excerpts from essays and speeches by feminist intellectuals, and her personal experiences as a Muslim, Egyptian and American. 

In the chapter on profanity, she explores Ugandan academic and feminist activist Stella Nyanzi strategic use of obscene language to goad her government into honouring its campaign promise to deliver free sanitary towels to the roughly 30 percent of teenage girls who miss schools during their period.

On Facebook, Nyanzi wrote, "What malice lies in the heart of a woman who sleeps with a man who finds money for millions of bullets, billions of bribes, and uncountable ballots to stuff into boxes but she cannot ask him to prioritise sanitary pads for poor school girls?"

She also (in)famously described President Yoweri Museveni as a pair of buttocks, wrote she was going to lick first lady Janet's clitoris at a time the Ugandan government was cautioning against oral sex, then went on to further shame the couple with a successful sanitary pad donation drive for school girls.

For her trouble, Nyanzi was arrested for daring to insult despots who adeptly brutalise citizens with poverty and misogyny, and reportedly told the judge that "[the president] lied to voters that he would provide pads and Ugandans are offended that he is such a dishonourable man. It is we who are offended, not him."

On ambition and power, Eltahawy urges girls and women to seek them unabashedly, for to do otherwise is to surrender to the patriarchal belief that women's natural position is that of the eternal subordinate. Ambition, she explains, is to be more than; attention means you deserve to be heard.

But as women and girls push to be more than wives and mothers, mandatory roles expected of them to fulfill, patriarchy pushes back. Hard.

Case in point is the admission scandal she highlights that rocked Japan's medical schools, including Tokyo's Medical University, which admitted to intentionally failing female students in order to advantage their male counterparts on grounds that women would eventually leave medicine to raise kids. Rather than question the lack of affordable day care to ensure mothers can continue working outside the home, society punishes women who "aim high," a common exhortation ironically promoted by society.

In a similar vein, she cites the Boston Consulting Group's survey of 141,000 women from 189 countries that revealed how the patriarchal nature of companies destroys women's ambition, not motherhood.

"Companies are a microcosm of patriarchy," writes the 55-year-old Muslim feminist, expounding on the report's findings. "Telling women to aim higher, be more confident, as patriarchy remains intact is to insist that an individual take on a system by herself and then blame her when her individual efforts fail to dent that system. It's sadistic."

And what would ambition—which currently centres on wealth and rising through the corporate echelon, and reflects the limited measures of success conjured and shaped by centuries of male domination—look like in a feminist world for a poor woman, for those who don't want to be CEOs or wealthy? She argues that any humane changes to our ingrained understanding of ambition would entail reimagining success and the definition of work.

In her call to arms against gender-based violence, Eltahawy evokes a provocative scenario, where women indiscriminately massacre men in a bid to force them into dismantling patriarchy, then asks how many men need to be killed before the world jumps into action. That Australia banned the TV show episode in which the fiery author raised the question demonstrates the double standards applied to gender in terms of violence.

"The national US average prison sentence of men who kill their female partners is two to six years," notes Eltahawy. Meanwhile, women who kill their partners can expect a fifteen-year jail term, despite most acting in self-defence. 

Telling women to aim higher, be more confident, as patriarchy remains intact is… sadistic.

In other words, violence is considered normal for one gender but abnormal for the other, with the result that every day around the world, husbands, boyfriends, brothers, neighbors violate women with impunity and little consequence, while women remain fearful of the consequences of protecting themselves. And yet, picturing a fictional world, where the reverse occurs simply to annihilate the social order that rewards and protects men at women's expense, is too horrendous a concept for some to process. 

For male violence against women to cease, the Egyptian-American writer insists girls should be taught to fight back "until we get to the part where men fear women enough that rape becomes an anomaly."

Indeed, in a patriarchal world, women's pain means nothing as evinced by the memorialisation of male and female victims of the Bosnian War. Although the former rightfully got commemorative plaques, the hotel, Vilina Vlas, where women and girls as young as 14 were raped and killed continues to admit guests, Eltahawy explains in the wake of a guided tour. 

"In Srebrenica, the men and boys have a moving and fitting memorial that acknowledges the horror they were subjected to. In Višegrad, women and girls have a spa, where memories of the atrocities committed in the war's biggest rape camp have been erased."

For those conversant with Eltahawy's work on and offline, The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls is chock full of familiar anecdotes, like the account of her assaulting her assaulter, to the point of tedium. Also, certain phrases and paragraphs are repeated within and across chapters, which feels apt if the intent is to belabor readers with a point until it sticks like a mantra. 

"We must make patriarchy fear us," is one such example. "Defy, disobey and disrupt the patriarchy" is another. 

Although Eltahawy admits she likely won't be alive to see a world rid of the odious stench of patriarchy, she insists women liberate themselves from its long, oppressive tentacles rather than wait on Prince Charming—one likely high on benevolent sexism and set on rescuing only those damsels society deems respectable—to protect them.

"I don't want to be protected," she declares. "I want to be free." 

You May Also Like