Liz Bucar

Mona Eltahawy doesn’t care what you call her. Ugly. Slut. Whore. Bitch. Witch. This “extremely online” journalist and activist has heard it all. In fact, her recent feminist manifesto is all about encouraging girls and women to do the very things patriarchy has told us not to do and to understand the backlash as a sign that our efforts are working. Patriarchy sees Eltahawy coming for it. And patriarchy is scared.

If we want real change, Eltahawy says, we have to defy, disobey, and disrupt at every opportunity. We have to do the things we are not supposed to do. Want the things we are not supposed to want. Be women and girls in the ways we are not supposed to be. She calls these the seven necessary sins: anger, attention, profanity, ambition, power, violence, and lust.

Many of the sins are common feminist sense. Women and girls should be ambitious, draw attention to ourselves, seek power. Others push us to think about feminist disruption in new ways. Take profanity. Educated women, professional women, classy women don’t use profanity. But anyone who reads Eltahawy’s work, or has heard her speak, knows she likes to say “fuck.” A lot. She is uninterested is self-censoring, or presenting a sanitized version of herself, especially because she knows that as a brown Muslim woman, her profanity is unexpected. Her profanity, she tells us, “is the verbal equivalent of civil disobedience.”

As someone who teaches about sexual ethics, I found Eltahawy’s discussion of her seventh sin, lust, intriguing. Claiming a connection between queer advocacy and feminism is nothing new. Both camps insist we own our bodies and get to desire whoever we want. They are natural allies. But Eltahawy is not talking about feminist support for LGBTQIA civil rights. That would be working within the current system, and that system is rigged. She is suggesting something much more radical: dismantling the ideas and structures that make being queer a marker of difference in the first place. And that means not only fighting compulsory heteronormativity but also compulsory monogamy.

Monogamy, she suggests, is about possession—being a possession and possessing one’s beloved. A regime of sexuality in which polyamory was the default would be quite the sexual revolution indeed. The expression of sexuality and gender based on an absolute right to have sex wherever we choose and with whomever, as long as we have consent, not only threatens heterosexuality and monogamy but also threatens patriarchy.

Her call for violence is perhaps where some readers will think she goes too far. To use profanity is one thing, but to advocate for physically fighting back seems quite another. And that is her point. Violence against women is normalized. Women fighting back is not.

She tells a story of fighting back when a man recently groped her in a Montreal night club. Grabbing her ass landed her assailant on the floor, with Eltahawy punching him in the face. Unexpected? Yes. But can the possibility of woman’s violence deter male violence against women in the first place? It might. And since patriarchy contributes to daily acts of violence against women simply for being women, why should violence be off limits as a tactic of fighting back? Remember, Eltahawy wants patriarchy to be afraid.

I think this book’s natural audience is girls and young women. The radical rethinking of feminism she is calling for frankly doesn’t seem possible for many of us who have played by the rules of patriarchy for decades. We have navigated institutions and social situations organized by patriarchy. We have succeeded in our careers within that unjust system. We have been rewarded for being good girls. And we are now part of the problem.

Young girls seem to be doing a better job than us. Take my eleven-year-old daughter and her friends as an example. This fall they demanded a school assembly to address the policing of girls’ bodies, and they created a safe space for queer identities, which allowed classmates to feel safe enough to come out. These girls demand attention, and from what I can see in their texts, they are not afraid of profanity. And they not only want but expect to have power. They are loud. Very loud. They are becoming the feminist army that will make Eltahawy proud.

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Maria Bustillos

Mona Eltahawy is a heat-seeking missile blasting into the firestorm of global feminist conflict. A veteran activist who has suffered a great deal in the struggle, she is a survivor of multiple sexual assaults whose right hand and left arm were broken in November 2011 by the riot police who arrested her in Tahrir Square. Significantly, she hadn’t been living in Egypt at the time of the riots; when she learned what was going down in the country of her birth, she dropped everything, bought a ticket to Cairo, and, characteristically, charged into the fight.

Eltahawy's latest book, The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls, is passionate, daring, scary, and, ultimately, exhilarating; the literary equivalent of being shoved into a cold swimming pool and emerging, not very comfortable, but twice as alive.

The violence of her rhetoric scares me sometimes. For example the chapter “Violence” opens with a deliberately hyperbolic and horrible conjecture: What if women just started killing men off in increasing numbers, as part of a systematic campaign for dismantling the patriarchy? "How would men feel," she writes, "when they saw so many of their fellow men, murdered simply for being, like them, men? Would they change their behavior—walk together for safety, avoid certain areas of town, make sure they were not out beyond a certain time?" The patriarchy relies on its use of violence, she writes, “to keep women scared shitless,” and Eltahawy wants women to consider what it would mean to scare them right back.

I am a pacifist and find any talk of physical violence distressing. Yet I can clearly see the meaning of this passage: Men aren’t going to stop harming women because we ask nicely. And they are harming women—so many, and so badly, and everywhere, so that we can't even guess the real extent of it. So long as women are forced to fear men, women must also give men a reason to fear our retaliation, as a deterrent, because at present they don’t. We have to think about this.

In movies like Thelma and Louise, Mad Max: Fury Road, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the idea isn’t shocking or troubling at all. On the contrary, it’s a very familiar trope: women must fight back against the violence of men. Eltahawy herself pounded some dude in the face after he grabbed her body in a Montreal nightclub; she knocked him down and screamed, "Don't you ever touch a woman like that again!" with fists flailing.

The fact that her IRL response was so unusual is itself the point. As I read, I reflected that I’ve told my own daughters this a zillion times: If you should ever be assaulted, fight, scream, bite, hit! I know from experience that men are less likely to mess with a woman who is going to stand up for herself. But also, the very idea of such an encounter makes my knees turn to Jello.

So The Seven Necessary Sins succeeds on its own terms, as a deeply provocative call to the world’s women to seize and ignite, together, their own dormant political, intellectual, sexual, and physical power. It changed how I think about profanity and disobedience and "civility" even though I am a lifelong disobedient rabble-rouser of advanced age.

But if I could ask for more, for the next step in this argument, it would be this: Men are afraid of their own violence—they hate and fear the violence of other men, and the violence within themselves, an aspect of patriarchal dominion that goes unmentioned. I understand why men are outside the scope of this book—Eltahawy addresses this directly—and yet men's violence is the problem. I mean, it’s very striking how viciously men attack Eltahawy right in public, on social media and elsewhere, to this day. They've called her a monster, threatened to injure and kill her. “What is so special about you, that anyone would assault you?” as if that were a favor. And this is obviously projection, right? A lot of men are very obviously enslaved by their own ugly, ungovernable impulses and appetites, and they clearly hate it themselves. If women are to seize equality, might the root causes of men’s violence and rage be addressed in a new way?

Eltahawy's is a vital voice for this moment because the firestorm unleashed on the world by the patriarchy is literal and real; it’s burning down the Amazon and Australia and California; it’s also a four-alarm political fire, and it’s global, and it’s spreading fast.

And, as she writes, "This must fucking stop."

I was already an extremely angry old lady, and this book made me catch my breath on nearly every page. It’s not enough to say that we have a right to our anger, given where humanity finds itself, or even that our anger can be put to good use. Elhatawy’s undeniable message is this: The anger of women against injustice is essential to the survival of humanity and the world.

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Jaclyn Friedman (photo by Nolwen Cifuentes)

Given our current political moment, it's no surprise that the past two years has ushered in a welcome flourishing of discourse about women's anger. You could teach an entire course on the subject based just on the excellent books that have been recently published on the subject.

The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls would be a great addition to that syllabus. It could even give the course a name, a phrase Eltahawy coins to close her chapter on the subject: “Angry women are free women.” But the magic of this book is in the way it connects our revitalized anger discourse with a larger context, naming it as one of many urgently needed forms of women’s disobedience to patriarchy.

At the heart of Seven Necessary Sins is the concept of power. Though “power” is structurally treated like just one of seven titular sins, it's no accident that the chapter on the subject is the longest of all seven and contains some of the strongest writing in the book. “The woman allowed power by patriarchy,” she writes in one section about high-profile handmaidens to men in power, “must essentially be a blank slate on which patriarchy paints what it wants.” Each of the other sins is a type of power: power over our bodies and desires, power to express our anger, attention as a form of power, the power to harm and terrify, license to use powerful words, and the freedom to pursue and accrue power as we see fit. Ultimately each of the “sins” Eltahawy calls us to embrace is a sturdy brush with which we can draw, indelibly, on our own slates.

There are a couple of moments where Eltahawy loses me. Her defense of retaliative violence—far beyond self-defense—makes me cheer on a theoretical level. After all, if men feared us en masse, it would definitely shake up the balance of power.  But I never got what I needed from her to believe it ought to be a legitimate tactic in reality. She makes a strong case for rejecting male definitions of power and redefining it for ourselves but also argues that if violence is the language of the patriarchy, we should use it to our own advantage. Both approaches have their logic, but it is not at all clear when each logic should prevail. And one moment—in which she claims a queer identity because she practices polyamory—pisses me, an actually queer woman, off entirely.

But ultimately even these moments contribute to the strength of Eltahawy’s message, because this is a manifesto about female transgression. The entire point is to reject the caution and good behavior that has kept us alienated from our personal and collective power (there’s that word again) for too long. The liberatory action is the transgression itself—the act of seeing the sociopolitical lines that are meant to hem us in as invitations to trample boundaries entirely. We should love both the sinner and the sinning. And so I do.

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Kaitlynn Mendes

Mona Eltahawy is mad—mad as hell. Mad as fucking hell. Alongside other recent publications on feminist anger and profanity, this is one angry—and exciting—book. A book about the patriarchy. A book not only demonstrating how angry we should be about the patriarchy and its enmeshment with other forms of oppression but how we can and should use feminist rage and anger to “defy, disobey and disrupt” them. Throughout eight chapters, Eltahawy paints a vivid picture of what girls and women around the globe have to be angry about. But, more than that, this book is a call to arms. And the battle isn’t waged by waiting patiently, or hoping patriarchy will come to its senses and finally relinquish its power. It’s waged by unlearning what patriarchy teaches, expects, and rewards for “good girls” and embracing what Eltahawy calls the seven necessary sins that all women and girls must adopt in this revolutionary battle. These include anger, attention, profanity, ambition, power, violence, and lust.

With a chapter devoted to each sin, Eltahawy, at times through eloquence and at times through vulgarity and profanity, demonstrates how patriarchy functions across the globe to silence, make invisible, diminish, dismiss, disempower, and all too often kill women and girls. These sins, Eltahawy argues, are necessary not only to make patriarchy fearful but to smash, dismantle, and “fuck it up.”

Part of what makes this book necessary in our current moment of “popular feminism” is its clear demonstration of the intersectional nature of oppression – or what Eltahawy calls the “Venn diagram of oppressions that color your life.” Drawing on recent and relevant examples from Bosnia, Brazil, India, Egypt, Uganda, Canada, the US, the UK, and more, this book vividly demonstrates how misogyny, sexism, classism, racism, ableism, ageism, bigotry, and xenophobia work together to make life harder, more dangerous, more oppressive, and more deadly for some than for others. What’s more, Eltahawy does the work of connecting patriarchy’s dots—demonstrating how it operates at a global level, albeit in culturally and geographically specific ways—through the state, the street, and the home—to wage its war on women and girls. She demonstrates why we should not view the systematic rape of women during conflict as separate from more mundane or ubiquitous forms of violence such as cat-calling, street harassment, or other forms of domestic abuse that have long been used to terrorize, colonize, and control women.

While the #MeToo movement has captured much mainstream media attention, particularly in the global North, Eltahawy demonstrates that there is so much more to contemporary feminist activism—namely activism led by the “nonwhite and queer, who don’t have the luxury of fighting only misogyny.” Instead, the book is made more relevant by showcasing activism around freedom of speech and demonstrating how ‘“incivility” can be used as a weapon against authoritarian regimes, how feminists are combatting taboos around menstruation, are fighting for the right to worship or pray, are using violence to defend themselves against abusers, and are coming out in the millions to protest the election of populist leaders or senior officials.

In writing The Seven Necessary Sins for Girls and Women, it’s clear Eltahawy hasn’t written a book to play nice. Instead, she has written a call to arms meant to “fuck the global patriarchy,” one that I believe girls and women have been urgently waiting for. If there is one message to take away from this book, it is that through these seven necessary sins, “we must make patriarchy fear us.”

Although an exciting and dynamic book, it is also a discomforting one. As it should be. As Eltahawy writes, “discomfort is a reminder that privilege is being questioned” and that if one is not actively dismantling the patriarchy, one is benefiting from and upholding it. So, for those who are brave enough to be made uncomfortable—particularly those with white, middle-class, cis, hetero privileges—this is the book to read this year, to learn how we can become foot soldiers in the fight against the patriarchy.

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