Headscarves And Hymens

Imagine you are a woman born in the United Arab Emirates. Your father or brother or husband can beat you and remain fully compliant with the law so long as he leaves no marks. If you are unlucky enough to be born to Egypt there is a 90% chance to have your genitals cut and almost certainly (99.3% ) you will experience sexual harassment at some point in your life.
In Saudi Arabia, you are not allowed to drive and you need the permission of a male legal guardian to travel, marry, work or access education. You have to wear the abaya in public. Yet, even though you cover your entire body in black, 86.5%* of the Saudi men think that “women’s exaggeration in wearing make-up (to clarify – that means mascara and eyeliner) is the main cause of the rise in molestation cases in public places.” Not that is better in Moroco, where 16 years old girls are forced to marry their rapists, so that the rapist to escape conviction.

The Egyptian-American journalist Mona Eltahawy is perhaps the most provocative voice in misogyny in the Middle East. Headscarves and hymens is a brassy, provocative and emotional book – a mix of memoir and indictment against the misogyny society who oppress Arab women.

The Arab women, Eltahawy says,

…live in a culture that is fundamentally hostile to us [women], enforced by men’s contempt. They don’t hate us because of our freedoms, as the tired post 9/11 America cliché had it. We have no freedoms because they hate us.]

They hate us, she writes, 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.

To back up her argument, Eltahawy presents horrific statistics and stories about women that survived genital cutting (FGM), child brides who bleed to death when they are raped by their husbands on their wedding nights, young women in Egypt who sexually assaulted in Tahrir Square and forced to have ‘virginity tests’. Egypt, she writes, “is an important case study in how state and street work in tandem to push women out of public space”. It demonstrates how regimes, regardless of ideology, have proven unwilling to address what Human Rights Watch has described as “an epidemic of sexual violence.”

Eltahawy’s generalisation and isolation of the Arab women from a fight that is global is not perhaps the best way to approach gender equality. Not all Arab societies are the same and misogyny do not exist just in the Middle East. They are many women across the globe who feel like ‘second-class citizens’. But this is her fight and it is just great that her article and book has reignited a discussion that needs to be at the forefront of the public debate in many societies.