Mona Eltahawy Quotes

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.

The battles over women's bodies can be won only by a revolution of the mind

I believe it's the writer's job to tell society what it pretends it doesn't know.

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

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?

Being a woman anywhere is dangerous.

The most subversive thing a woman can do is talk about her life as if it really matters.

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

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

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.

The niqab represents a bizarre reverence for the disappearance of women. It puts on a pedestal a woman who covers her face, who erases herself, and it considers that erasure the pinnacle of piety.

It is cruel to abandon women and girls to a culture they had no say in ratifying and to a religion they had no say in interpreting, and which in many cases practically demands they worship men: from a male god to their fathers to their husbands—the literal patriarchs.

Why is violence significantly less traumatizing than our naked bodies?

Patriarchy refuses to believe that girls and young women can be angry, attention-seeking, profane, ambitious, powerful, violent, and lustful.

Racism and bigotry are not polite, and I refuse to be polite in my fight against them.

I am DELIGHTED that I upset you so much.

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.

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.

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 was traumatised into feminism -- there's no other way to describe it

They ignore the reality that to be strong in the face of oppression is not the same as overcoming oppression, that endurance is not to be confused with transformation.

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 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.

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?

White supremacy promises white women protection from the imagined danger of men of color in return for their loyalty. But the truth is, women around the world are hurt the most by men they know: current or former partners or relatives. In other words, the greater danger for white women who vote for far-right groups is their own misogynists.

Candy in a wrapper, a diamond ring in a box—these analogies are commonly used in Egypt and other countries to try to convince women of the value of veiling. They compare women to objects that are precious but devalued by exposure, objects that need to be hidden, protected, and secured. When it comes to what are described as the Islamic restrictions on women’s dress, women are never simply women. There

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

It is revolutionary to say “I count” when patriarchy demands that you must be “modest” and “humble.

Profanity is an essential tool in disrupting patriarchy and its rules. It is the verbal equivalent of civil disobedience.

The most subversive thing a woman can do is talk about her life as if it really matters. It does.

Women who do not ask for permission are powerful.

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.

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.

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.

It is hard enough to fight patriarchy. That fight is made harder by rules that constantly work against us, goalposts that endlessly shift, and women who sign up to do patriarchy’s bidding. The last remind us that patriarchy is not about men, that feminism is not about “hating men.

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.

What would the world look like if girls were taught they were volcanoes, whose eruptions were a thing of beauty, a power to behold and a force not to be trifled with? What if instead of breaking their wildness like a rancher tames a bronco, we taught girls the importance and power of being dangerous?

To be “out of touch” with a society in which women have internalized their subjugation is an admirable thing.

Patriarchy is so universal and normalized that it is like asking a fish What is water?

patriarchy is not about men, that feminism is not about “hating men.” Patriarchy is about power, and feminism is about destroying patriarchy.

Patriarchy keeps us terrified, demanding from us an endless supply of patience, passivity, and obedience, as it pathologiezes and snuffs out our justifiable rage.

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

Men cannot sit back and say, 'Well, I'm not rich and powerful; that's not me.' It is you - if you are not actively dismantling the patriarchy, you are factually benefiting from it. Are you uncomfortable? Good. You should be. Discomfort is a reminder that privilege is being questioned, and this revolutionary moment is one in which we must defy, disobey, and disrupt the patriarchy, everywhere.

Encouraging white women to see themselves as higher up the ladder—the hierarchy—of oppressions and injustices employed by patriarchy to maintain itself must be seen for the ruse that it is. Those women might be benefitting from proximity to white power, but nothing protects women from patriarchy. We must dismantle the hierarchies that patriarchy uses, not aim to climb our way up its ladder of injustices.

Anger is important in girls because waiting for patriarchy to self-correct, to do the right thing, to do the moral thing, has got us not very far. Anger is a first step to putting patriarchy on notice that we are done waiting.

Too many religions are patriarchal and imbued with misogyny. Because of this I am often asked how I can be a Muslim feminist. My response is that I am both of Muslim descent and a feminist, and the two identities are not connected. One does not depend on the other.

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.

...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.

Christianity preaches the Seven Deadly Sins. The Gospel of Mona presents instead the seven necessary sins women and girls need to employ to defy, disobey, and disrupt the patriarchy: anger, attention, profanity, ambition, power, violence, and 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.

I understand the need to defend one's headscarf -- I did it for years, even as I was privately struggling with it. It's an important defence in the face of Islamophobes and racists. I get that. But if it's done without cognisance of the lived realities of women who do not have the privilege of choice, then my interlocutors end up doing exactly what they accuse me of doing with my support of a niqab ban: silencing other women. Why the silence, as some of our women fade into black, either owing to identity politics or out of acquiescence to Salafism?

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.

Too often, ‘community’ is synonymous with men, and too often those self-appointed male leaders are the ones who determine what is ‘too far’. In fact, the word and concept ‘community’ is much like the word and concept ‘culture’: for example, a popular way to rein in people – read ‘women’ – is to tell them that they must not oppose a behaviour or way of being because it is part of the ‘culture’ or what the ‘community’ wants.

Patriarchy wants to control vaginas, but it also wants to control who has the right to even say the word “vagina.” Not only that, patriarchy screams “decorum” when we dare to fight back.

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

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.

When I travel and give lectures abroad and I'm asked how best to help women in my part of the world, I say, help your own community's women fight misogyny. By doing so, you help the global struggle against hatred of women. I have written this book in that spirit; it is my flag, my manifesto that exposes misogyny in my part of the world as a way to connect to that global feminist struggle. Those countries that have managed to reduced their levels of misogyny were not created more respectful of women's rights. Rather, women in these countries have fought hard to expose systemic violations and to liberate women from them.

It is cis-heteropatriarchy that insists on the right to use vaginas to insult and also insist on prohibiting women from cursing, even though our body parts are being used to fuel profanity. It is a world in which “vaginas,” “pussies,” and “cunts” are words that are deemed inherently female and at the same time inherently profane.

Patriarchy, racism, and capitalist exploitation cannot be solved on a per individual basis by celebrating exceptional cases who survive and thrive despite those systematic oppressions.

if you are not actively dismantling the patriarchy, you are factually benefiting from it.

What would the world look like if we did not wait to be anointed worthy of attention according to patriarchy’s standards? What if we commanded, seized, and created attention instead of waited to be “paid” attention?

It is always easier and more comfortable to point to patriarchy “over there” and to ignore its manifestations “over here.

So now, in the spirit of flipping the House, I am flipping the narrative: Why do Republican white women submit to misogyny? Or, to paraphrase Trump, maybe they weren’t allowed to vote any other way?

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

Equality is a practice, it’s not just about words, about having a nice clause in a constitution. Women are fighting many different types of extremism: economic extremism, cultural extremism, and various forms of violence. The real difference will come when I feel safe everywhere I go. If I stand here in the street, do you really respect me as a woman, can you guarantee my safety?

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.

Mopai's stories draw us into the lives of South Africans- from a lesbian couple trying to survive homophobia, to a woman living with albinism and insists on staring down at misogynist violence in many forms- from sex-for-grade abuse in college campuses to the way patriarchal societies pits women against each other to the way such patriarchy limits men's lives too. She is a superb storyteller and I'm eager to see what she does next.