Every morning, Mona Eltahawy carefully lines her eyes in thick kohl. “It’s a ritual I gift to myself every morning,” explains the 53-year-old Egyptian author, journalist and feminist activist. “Holding that brush is like being a calligrapher, and I consider lining my eyes as a way of writing a love letter to myself. It’s a form of adornment, but it also connects me to my Egyptian heritage, because in ancient Egypt, men and women of all social classes wore eyeliner. It has become a kind of self-care for me since the pandemic began.”
We are speaking via Zoom, with Eltahawy in Montreal, where she lives with her partner. Behind her is a framed portrait of the Egyptian blogger and women’s rights activist Aliaa Mahdy, by the Canadian artist Nadine Faraj. Eltahawy speaks fast, beaded earrings swinging from her ears, often pausing to run her hand through her close-cropped hair; she shaved her long red hair in May. “Red was my power before,” she says, “but to signal power now, I wanted to shave it all off, to say, ‘This is the pandemic me that is emerging.’” Eltahawy is not one for the unexamined life. She is likable, earnest and sincere.
We are speaking ahead of the launch of her second book, The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls. The book explores personal qualities typically thought of as unbecoming in women – ambition, power, attention-seeking – and reconstructs them as positives. Profanity can smash through oppressive civility; anger directed outwards is a healthier force than the internalised self-hatred that fuels eating disorders and self-harm in young women. “Patriarchy knows that when we nurture anger in girls,” Eltahawy observes in Seven Necessary Sins, “they will hold patriarchy accountable, and that those girls will grow up to be women who demand a reckoning.”
The book can occasionally be restless, skipping from Larry Nassar’s sexual abuse of the US gymnastics team to female genital mutilation in Egypt in the space of paragraphs. Eltahawy’s intention is clear – she wants to show how patriarchy transcends national borders, religion, and class – but the overall effect can feel chaotic. If the chapter on anger is the most successful in the book, it is perhaps because Eltahawy is herself furious. Reading Seven Necessary Sins is akin to having a chemical peel: it stings, but you know it’s good for you. What’s her baseline anger level right now? “Oh like, through the roof!” she says. “People often ask me, what inspires you to write or where do you get your ideas from? I say, ‘Whatever’s enraged me that particular day.’”
After living in Egypt and the UK, Eltahawy’s family moved to Saudi Arabia in 1982, when she was 15. “I felt like I had been put on trial,” she writes of the experience, “found guilty of being a teenage girl, and sentenced to life in prison.” At 16, she vowed to become a journalist, because she wanted “to be free”. She worked as a news reporter and correspondent, including stints in Cairo and Jerusalem for Reuters, before pivoting to opinion writing in the 2000s.
Everything changed for Eltahawy during the Arab spring. In 2011, she was arrested by the Egyptian authorities while covering protests in Tahrir Square. Eltahawy was detained for 12 hours, sexually assaulted, and threatened with gang rape. Her left arm and right hand were broken. She managed to borrow a phone from another activist and tweet a message to her then 5,000 Twitter followers – “beaten, arrested, interior ministry” – that was picked up by the Guardian, among other publications. “My fame saved me,” she writes. “If I were an unknown woman, I might well have been gang-raped or killed.”
Since then, she has become a spokesperson for a radical Middle Eastern model of feminism that excoriates patriarchal oppression in all its forms. “Yes,” she wrote in a viral article for Foreign Policy in 2012, “women all over the world have problems … [but] name me an Arab country, and I’ll recite a litany of abuses fuelled by a toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle, lest they blaspheme or offend.”
The essay was criticised for reinforcing Islamophobic attitudes about the subjugation of women within Muslim cultures. “Any woman of Muslim descent is caught between a rock and a hard place,” she says now. “The rock is racist Islamophobes who don’t give a fuck about Muslim women, but who are all too eager to weaponise my words and anything I say that criticises misogyny among Muslims. The hard place is the misogynists within various Muslim communities, who also don’t give a flying fuck about Muslim women, who want to silence any criticism from a woman of Muslim descent because they accuse us of giving ammunition to the rock. Neither of those sides care about us. They speak to each other over our bodies, they use our bodies as proxy battlegrounds.”
Eltahawy has previously stated that she’d support legislation banning the niqab, a stance that was condemned by Muslim feminists for denying women their right to dress how they please. Her position has softened over the years, motivated in part by the legislation passed in France, Belgium, Austria and most recently Switzerland, to ban the wearing of the burqa or niqab in public. “The niqab is inherently misogynistic, because you’re erasing a woman,” she says, but points out that she wrote her columns criticising the niqab years before the successive waves of legislation across Europe against Muslim dress, catering to xenophobic voters. “In France, they’re obsessed with Muslim women. Obsessed! They’re doing a terrible job with the pandemic so Macron could easily lose to Marine Le Pen in the upcoming presidential elections. So who becomes their scapegoat? Muslim women. So my position now is that unless you’re a Muslim woman or a woman of Muslim descent, this is not your conversation.”
Eltahawy is a heavy social media user, posting multiple times a day on Twitter and Instagram. (She also has a newsletter, Feminist Giant, a roundup of feminist news from around the world.) Like many famous journalists, she has embraced the membership platform Patreon, more out of necessity than anything: “When the pandemic began, I couldn’t make money the way I used to, which was occasional freelance writing, but mostly public speaking.” After so many years as a journalist, Eltahawy prefers the creative control self-publishing gives her. “The opinion editor at the New York Times once asked me to stop saying ‘fuck’ on Twitter,” she says. “Even though I didn’t work for the Times, I was never a full-time employee. I thought, are you kidding me? All this fascist fuckery that the Times opinion pages were publishing at the time ... they were publishing mercenaries and all these rightwing fuckwits who were promoting fascism, and I’ve got to stop saying fuck?”
In her chapter on violence in Seven Necessary Sins, Eltahawy recounts being groped in a club in Montreal in 2017. She punched her assailant in the face, later tweeting about the incident with the hashtag #IBeatMyAssaulter. “Stop sending girls only to ballet class ... patriarchy does not want us to be as fluent in violence as men are,” she writes. It’s hard not to read this as victim-blaming, as well as dangerous advice: women often calculate that if they don’t comply, they might end up dead. “I intentionally say that you can’t always fight back, and my priority is that we survive,” she counters. “I don’t want us to further endanger our lives. The last thing I want to do with my violence chapter is put the burden on women – what I want to do is put the patriarchy on notice. Those of us who can fight back will fight back.” It’s a nuanced argument, but encouraging women and girls to violently confront abusive men – the book is aimed at a young audience – feels reckless.
Eltahawy’s vision is anarchic: she wants to rip the guts out of the patriarchy and chuck its innards on the fire. The pink-washed, “girl boss” iteration of feminism is not for her: “Girl boss feminism does girls a great disservice by telling them they can do anything. It deceives them and diminishes the challenges and dangers that come to them from patriarchy.” Her model of feminism is all jutted chin and stamping boot. “Fuck the patriarchy,” Eltahawy writes repeatedly in Seven Necessary Sins. It’s a neat sentiment, but what comes next? “When I talk about anarchist feminism,” she says, “I talk about destroying capitalism, misogyny, militarism, ableism, ageism, and any form of hierarchy, because that’s effectively what anarchism is. Anarchism is ending the systems of authority and oppression that uphold those hierarchies.”
It’s a shame you’ll never get to witness that within your lifetime, I observe. “That’s one of the biggest tragedies of my life,” Eltahawy laughs. “I wake up every morning trying to forget that.” She runs her hand through her soft fuzz once again, kohl-rimmed eyes brimming with defiance. “But every day I wake up and think, today’s the day I will destroy the patriarchy. Because feminism for me is not a T-shirt, it’s not a 9 to 5 job. Feminism for me is every day. It’s my existence. So I absolutely believe that I will dismantle the patriarchy and I absolutely know it probably will not happen during my lifetime. Within that paradox is this very fine line that I walk. I think that’s probably the most honest way to describe it.”
The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls by Mona Eltahawy is published by Tramp Press. To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com.