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A review by emmalemonnz
Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution by Mona Eltahawy
5.0
I had this book out of the library for about seven weeks before actually reading it. When I saw it on the shelf I thought, "That looks great!" But at home I started to doubt my choice. As a white atheist in "the West", what right do I have to even have opinions on whether "the Middle East needs a sexual revolution" as the title says, let alone cast judgement on women whose lives I know nothing about?
I am so glad I finally opened it and started reading. The author, Mona Eltahawy, addresses exactly that issue by saying, "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." She tells her own personal stories, and shares the stories of others, and that helps me (the reader, white and atheist or not) to understand at least a little of what women's lives in the Middle East and Arabic-speaking Africa are really like. And now that I no longer know nothing of their lives (although I won't pretend I suddenly know what it's like to be them), I feel confident in agreeing with Eltahawy. She makes a compelling argument.
Her style of writing, weaving personal stories together with quotes from other feminist writers, is arresting and not only demands attention, but compels the reader to action. Live out loud, she tells us, exhorting at the end of one chapter, "the most subversive thing a woman can do is talk about her life as if it matters. It does." (These are actually Eltahawy's words, unlike many of the quotes attributed to her here on Goodreads, which are actually by others, but which she has included in her book - with proper attribution.)
I especially related to the idea, entwined throughout, that being exposed to feminist thought or writing, and knowing the right words makes a difference. "Words help us find each other and overcome the isolation that threatens to overwhelm and to break us. Words say we are here." She writes about how she discovered feminism in books, as I discovered it online. It was not part of her upbringing, just as it wasn't part of mine. Growing up in middle class New Zealand in the 1990s and entering adulthood in the 2000s, there was a silence surrounding feminism that, I now realise, paid a real disservice to the radical work undertaken by many in the 70s and 80s (as well as the earlier "waves"), so that when I "discovered" feminism in the 2010s, I felt at first as though I had found something new, and then as though I had been cheated of a childhood, teen years and early adulthood that should have been rich with the language and ideas of the women who had come before me. Instead, there was a void tinged with a vague echo of contempt, where the word "feminism" felt a bit dirty if it was ever said out loud, and most girls, including me, would have told you 'we don't need feminism anymore' in an oddly smug way, even though, somewhere deep in my body (which I had learned to ignore), I knew that wasn't true.
To me, a white atheist in "the West", Mona Eltahawy's words are so vitally important. This book about Middle Eastern Muslims has resonated with me in a way I never imagined when I picked it off the library shelf. Highly recommended.
I am so glad I finally opened it and started reading. The author, Mona Eltahawy, addresses exactly that issue by saying, "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." She tells her own personal stories, and shares the stories of others, and that helps me (the reader, white and atheist or not) to understand at least a little of what women's lives in the Middle East and Arabic-speaking Africa are really like. And now that I no longer know nothing of their lives (although I won't pretend I suddenly know what it's like to be them), I feel confident in agreeing with Eltahawy. She makes a compelling argument.
Her style of writing, weaving personal stories together with quotes from other feminist writers, is arresting and not only demands attention, but compels the reader to action. Live out loud, she tells us, exhorting at the end of one chapter, "the most subversive thing a woman can do is talk about her life as if it matters. It does." (These are actually Eltahawy's words, unlike many of the quotes attributed to her here on Goodreads, which are actually by others, but which she has included in her book - with proper attribution.)
I especially related to the idea, entwined throughout, that being exposed to feminist thought or writing, and knowing the right words makes a difference. "Words help us find each other and overcome the isolation that threatens to overwhelm and to break us. Words say we are here." She writes about how she discovered feminism in books, as I discovered it online. It was not part of her upbringing, just as it wasn't part of mine. Growing up in middle class New Zealand in the 1990s and entering adulthood in the 2000s, there was a silence surrounding feminism that, I now realise, paid a real disservice to the radical work undertaken by many in the 70s and 80s (as well as the earlier "waves"), so that when I "discovered" feminism in the 2010s, I felt at first as though I had found something new, and then as though I had been cheated of a childhood, teen years and early adulthood that should have been rich with the language and ideas of the women who had come before me. Instead, there was a void tinged with a vague echo of contempt, where the word "feminism" felt a bit dirty if it was ever said out loud, and most girls, including me, would have told you 'we don't need feminism anymore' in an oddly smug way, even though, somewhere deep in my body (which I had learned to ignore), I knew that wasn't true.
To me, a white atheist in "the West", Mona Eltahawy's words are so vitally important. This book about Middle Eastern Muslims has resonated with me in a way I never imagined when I picked it off the library shelf. Highly recommended.