A feminist manifesto in a time of social isolation: The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls by Mona Eltahawy
As we practice social distancing, in an effort to slow the spread of coronavirus, many people, especially women, have suddenly found themselves isolated at home spending every waking hour with an abusive partner or parent.
There was an article on April 6, on BBC, titled “Coronavirus: Domestic abuse calls up 25% since lockdown, charity says.” Since then the articles and the voices raising concern about domestic violence have been increased globally. Evelyn Regner, the Women’s Rights Committee Chair, urged the EU and member states to increase support to victims of domestic violence during the COVID-19 crisis.
Priti Patel, the U.K. home secretary, has launched a campaign to draw attention to domestic abuse victims locked up with their abusers during the coronavirus crisis. You are not alone, said Patel, urging everyone to share the hashtag #YouAreNotAlone, on social media or on the windows of our home, alongside a link to the support available, to demonstrate just how much this country cares. As if a hashtag on twitter or on our window is going to prevent men from abusing women.
It is not. Ask marginalised women everywhere. Ask poor women. The government is not helping. The police do not protect them. The truth is, We Are Alone. I learned about this the hard way. And I said never again.
As we entered the sixth week of lockdown and with the cases of domestic violence to have risen by a third in many countries across Europe and across the world, I decided to read the book The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls, a sharp manifesto for fighting the patriarchy. It is the second book from Egyptian American writer and activist Mona Eltahawy (Her first one was the Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution, 2015).
You can't help but admire Mona Eltahawy for her courage and her laser-focused battle to empower women, and to dismantle a system that tells them that they deserve less: less money, less freedom, less strength. A system that erases people who don’t ascribe to traditional gender roles, often with violence.
Mona Eltahawy wants to smash the patriarchy, or to use her own words, “Fuck the patriarchy.” The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls is a feminist manifesto and not a roadmap to peace with patriarchy. The seven so-sins which label each of the chapters of the book, are not obviously sins, but things that girls and women are not supposed to do or to be. It is a book that advocates for more confidence, and more pleasure and joy for women.
“I am writer,” she says,” and (I) understand how language works. Ι understand how audiences- and readers-react to the language I use. I know exactly what I am doing. And I say “Fuck the patriarchy,” because I am a woman, a woman of color, a Muslin woman. And I am not supposed to say “fuck.”
In my experience, almost nothing can match the power of profanity delivered by a woman at a podium, unapologetically. Because how many women –not to mention women of color, or Muslim women, or working-class women, or, or, or …...-are even invited to the podium? And of those, how many, when they get on stage still speak as if they are asking for permission to speak?”
Mona Eltahawy is intentionally profane. She is profane because patriarchy is not polite. It’s oppressive and offensive and ultimately violent. In the United Kingdom, where I live, 147 women killed by men in 2018. 75% of the domestic abuse-related crimes recorded by the police in the year ending March 2019, the victim was female, according to national statistics.
If you are sad and enraged of these statistics, then, welcome to the club of the angry women. I am one of them. I am an angry woman. I know that people don’t like it when women are angry. They don’t like it because it violates the prevalent gender perceptions which require us to be quiet and kind and nurturing. I am certainly not a quiet woman.
Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change, said the poet Audre Lorde in a speech in 1981.
But anger is not enough, argues Mona Eltahawy. It has to be the beginning but it can’t be the end, because anger for the sake of anger it succeeds nothing. When, at age 50, she was groped on a dance-club floor in Montreal, she didn’t cry, she didn’t wait for her partner to protect her. Fuelled by her anger, she beat her assaulter to the floor. Before he ran away, he took a look at the woman who dared strike back.
I want patriarchy to know, writes, Eltahawy, that feminism is rage unleashed against its centuries of crimes against women and girls around the world. Crimes that are justified by “culture” and “tradition” and “it’s just the way things are,” all of which are euphemisms for “this world is run by men for the benefit of men.” We must declare a feminism that is robust, aggressive and unapologetic. It is the only way to combat a patriarchy that is systemic.