Headscarves and Hymens

by Mona Eltahawy

  At a demonstration against street sexual harassment and assault that I attended in Cairo a few days after Eid there were nearly more riot police than protesters. My sister, Nora, was twenty at the time, and she, with several of her friends, joined the protest. She had never been to a demonstration before but was incensed after she heard the state denying something that had happened to her many times. We swapped our sexual harassment stories like veterans comparing war wounds.

  That year, 2006, connected state and street violations of women’s bodies. It also finally led many women to push aside the taboo of talking about sexual harassment and assaults, to refuse the shame that too often was dumped on them instead of on the boys and men who were making their daily lives miserable.

  When the revolution began, women marched alongside men, women fought police across the country and in Cairo, and women resolutely stood their ground in Tahrir Square, refusing to leave despite Mubarak’s snipers, police, and plainclothes thugs. Those first eighteen days offered a utopian vision of what Egypt could be.

  Many female protesters spent the night outside, in the square, violating the family-imposed curfews that controlled their daily lives. Not everyone could overcome their family’s rules, but for those who did, it was an unprecedented break with a code very few had challenged until then.

  Many of my friends who spent nights out in the square told me they did not experience any kind of harassment, that men treated them with a respect and regard for their personal space and integrity that was unheard of on Egyptian streets before those eighteen days in Tahrir. One activist, however, told me he’d heard a few stories that challenged that idyllic image, but said that no one wanted to ruin the image of the revolution. I was not in Egypt during those eighteen days and cannot verify either case.

  Whatever utopia existed in Tahrir, it was upended with a series of horrific sexual assaults that began on February 11, 2011, the day Mubarak was forced to step down and the day the South African television news correspondent Lara Logan, who reports for the U.S. network CBS, was sexually assaulted by a mob. Ever more audacious assaults followed, with impunity for the predators and bewilderingly little public outrage. On March 8, 2011, there was a small but determined protest demanding that Egyptian women have a voice in building the country’s future—including the right to be president. Despite, or perhaps precisely because of, their active role in the revolution, the two hundred women who formed the protest (together with some male supporters) were optimistic. But they were met with opposition from men in Tahrir Square, according to The Christian Science Monitor, and were set upon by men from outside the square who yelled at and in some cases groped and sexually assaulted several of the women and a few of the male protesters.

  “Go home, go wash clothes,” yelled some of the men. “You are not married; go find a husband.”

  The next day, March 9, 2011, soldiers cleared Tahrir Square of those who had returned to protest the slow pace of change under the military junta that had taken over after Mubarak’s ouster. The military arrested hundreds of demonstrators and threw them in military jails where many were tortured and beaten. According to human rights groups, seventeen female demonstrators were beaten, prodded with electric shock batons, subjected to strip searches, forced to submit to “virginity tests,” and threatened with prostitution charges.

  Less than a month after Mubarak had stepped down, the military junta that replaced him, ostensibly to “protect the revolution,” had officers stick their fingers into the vaginal openings of female revolutionaries—women who should have been our heroes—ostensibly in search of a hymen, ostensibly to protect the military from accusations of rape by the detainees (because only virgins can be raped of course). In other words, the Egyptian military sexually assaulted Egyptian women so that they could not “falsely” accuse the officers of sexual assault. Samira Ibrahim, one of the women subjected to sexual assault, sued, but a military court exonerated a military doctor she had accused of conducting the tests, despite the admission by several members of the ruling military junta, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, that the tests took place. Ibrahim told an online newspaper: “The person that conducted the test was an officer, not a doctor. He had his hand stuck in me for about five minutes. He made me lose my virginity. Every time I think of this, I don’t know what to tell you, I feel awful. I know that to violate a woman in that way is considered rape. I felt like I had been raped.”

  It should’ve been our moment of reckoning. It should have sparked another revolution. Yet nothing happened. In fact, Salwa el-Hosseiny, the first woman to reveal the “virginity tests,” was called a liar and vilified for trying to turn people against the mantra “The army and the people are one hand,” which was popular when the military seemed to be siding with the people in the final days of Mubarak’s decline.

  Perhaps “The army and the people are one hand” was one of the most honest statements to come out of our revolution: one hand united and working against women, one hand that groped or beat women and tried to terrorize them out of public space, one hand that found it perfectly acceptable to force two fingers into a woman’s vagina.

  Those women had risked their lives to liberate Egypt, and yet their violation was met with silence. That silence points to a truth: the regime oppressed everybody, but society particularly oppresses women. The regime knows it can violate women because society subjects women to the same violations; it knows that society will not speak out for its own women. In return for unaccountability for its oppressions, the regime turns a blind eye to society’s abuses, tacitly condoning harassment and assault.

  Egypt’s current president, el-Sisi, approved of the March 2011 “virginity tests.” Since July 2013, when el-Sisi overthrew President Mohamed Morsi, who came from the Muslim Brotherhood movement, women who are affiliated with the Brotherhood—which has since been outlawed as a “terrorist group”—have also said they were subjected to “virginity tests” in detention. So it does not matter where you stand on Egypt’s political spectrum: if you are a woman, your body is not safe.

  In the years between Mubarak’s downfall and the inauguration of el-Sisi, street sexual harassment, after being left unchecked for years, morphed into especially vicious mob sexual assaults against women at protests and public celebrations. Egyptian human rights groups documented 250 cases of mob attacks against women in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and the vicinity between November 2012 and January 2014.

  Egypt is an important case study in how state and street work in tandem to push women out of public space. It also demonstrates how regimes, regardless of ideology, have proven unwilling or fundamentally unable to address what Human Rights Watch has described as “an epidemic of sexual violence.” One of the ways in which regimes and their supporters brushed aside and belittled concerns over women’s bodily integrity was to blame their opponents for attacking women. As each group busily defended its men against such accusations, the women, who should have been their main concern, were left out of the conversation.

  It took mob sexual assaults, including a gang rape in Tahrir Square during the inauguration of el-Sisi in June 2014, to finally force an Egyptian president to speak about sexual violence against women. El-Sisi paid a visit to the victim of that gang rape, who was recovering in a hospital, and apologized to her. He vowed to take “very decisive measures” to combat sexual violence and, addressing Egypt’s judges, said, “Our honor is being violated on the streets, and that is not right.” Yet it is women’s bodies that are being violated, not Egypt’s “honor.”

  Thanks to the tireless efforts of women’s rights groups and small but incredibly courageous initiatives launched to combat growing street sexual violence, including HarassMap, Tahrir Bodyguard, and I Saw Harassment, in 2014 the state finally acknowledged the problem and seemed to act on it, criminalizing the physical and verbal harassment of women and setting unprecedented penalties for such crimes. In July, five men were jailed for life for attacking and harassing women during celebrati
ons of el-Sisi’s inauguration in June. Reuters news agency reported that another defendant, aged sixteen, was jailed for twenty years, and a nineteen-year-old was given two twenty-year jail terms, though it was not immediately clear if these would run concurrently or consecutively. All seven were convicted of sexual harassment, under the new law, and of attempted rape, attempted murder, and torture.

  In a reminder of how our criminal justice system often raises more questions and dilemmas than it answers, one of the five men was sentenced to life on separate charges of attacking a woman as she celebrated the anniversary of the 2011 revolt that toppled autocratic president Hosni Mubarak. Are our police just rounding up the usual suspects?

  El-Sisi’s security forces must be held accountable for their assaults on female protesters. Until they are, their actions should be considered the height of hypocrisy. El-Sisi’s interior minister has promised to create a new department to combat violence, including the sexual assault and harassment of women. But how will a police force that has harassed and assaulted women combat violence against women? How will that police force know how to act and what to do in cases of sexual assault and rape when it has no training in treating such crimes? Flourishes of words and chivalry are one thing. How those translate into concrete mechanisms that protect girls and women and ensure justice is another thing altogether.

  In a dire irony, the extreme sexual violence has forced Egypt to pull ahead of other Arab nations in breaking the taboo of publicly discussing street assaults. Egypt’s brave activists have begun the difficult and necessary task of deflecting the shame from our bodies onto those who insist on violating them.

  Almost every part of my body has been groped or touched without my consent. These assaults happened in Saudi Arabia, where I lived as a teenager, and in Egypt, where I returned to live at the age of twenty-one.

  The state first forced its hands on my body on Mohamed Mahmoud Street, where in November 2011 five days of clashes occurred between demonstrators trying to protect Tahrir Square and the soldiers and police who attacked the families of revolutionaries and burned the tents of peaceful protesters.

  The details of what happened to me mattered little to the triage nurse in the emergency room of the private hospital where, about sixteen hours after riot police had broken my arms and sexually assaulted me, I was trying to get medical care.

  “How could you let them do that to you? Why didn’t you resist?”

  She might as well have asked me where my shame was. How could I “let” riot police sexually assault me, and how could I so brazenly describe what had happened to me? It had been many years since I was a virgin, but she was chiding me for my lack of moral virginity, if you will. A good virgin, a good moral virgin, would have “saved” herself from those men’s hands; a good moral virgin would have saved her breasts and her genitals; a good moral virgin would not have been there on Mohamed Mahmoud Street in the first place. Finally, a good moral virgin would not have so openly described her sexual assault.

  “When you’re surrounded by four or five men from the riot police, and they’re beating you with sticks this long, there isn’t much ‘resisting’ you can do,” I explained to the nurse.

  I’ve spoken often about my sexual assault, usually with mechanical detachment. At first, I spoke in order to expose and shame not just the men who’d assaulted me but also the regime that had trained them to do so, that had set them as attack dogs on me and at least twelve other women on Mohamed Mahmoud Street. Divide and conquer takes on a new meaning when you tug on the jacket of the supervising officer who, as he witnesses his men groping every part of your body, assures you nonetheless that you are safe because he will protect you. Then, after he says he will protect you, in the very next breath he threatens you with gang rape by another group of his men, amassed close by and gesticulating at you.

  Still, I needed a body, however imperfect and unreliable, between me and the men who were grabbing at me. I needed to believe that there was an authority figure who could protect me. I needed to pretend that the supervising officer meant what he said, even as his lie was demonstrated on my body. I have needed to say this over and over for my own reckoning with what I survived, and also because I came to learn that this pattern of assault—promises of protection as the assault is happening, alternating with threats of gang rape—was a modus operandi that had been used on other women during the battle with security forces on Mohamed Mahmoud Street.

  Women have fought alongside men in political revolutions that have toppled dictators. But once these regimes fell, women have looked around to find the same oppression, sometimes inflicted by the men they stood shoulder to shoulder with, by men who claimed to be protecting them.

  Listen to Donia and Mayada, two nineteen-year-old women from a working-class Cairo neighborhood, whom I interviewed for my radio documentary.

  “We had a revolution to improve our lives and things have gotten worse. It’s dangerous to walk the streets. We don’t feel safe at all, our lives haven’t improved, and none of the things we wanted from the revolution have been achieved,” Donia told me.

  “Men around here look like at us like we’re products in a shop. We have no rights. If you complain, no one listens to you and you could suffer the consequences of complaining. I want women to have a respected position and not be considered a product you can buy in a shop.”

  Said Mayada: “Our society by and large says your position as a woman in Eygpt is in your home, not outside. So women are not considered equal to men and a lot of men don’t give you the respect you deserve. A lot of men don’t make you feel like you belong outside with them, that your place is at home.”

  Just before I met Donia and Mayada, producer Gemma Newby and I had gone to a five-star hotel for an event called Egmadi (“toughen up”), in which women were taught the basics of self-defense and given a mood boost with dancing and Zumba exercises. The hall where the event was held was filled with mostly young women in their late teens and early twenties. Some older women had brought their daughters with them.

  All the women I spoke to for the radio documentary complained of constant verbal and physical sexual abuse on the streets and of an overall feeling that they were not safe in Cairo. Though there are many class disparities in Egypt and the rich are cushioned by several privileges, street sexual harassment spares no one, rich or poor. Once your feet are on the street, it matters little whether your can afford to attend an event at a five-star hotel or you live in a working-class neighborhood that does not have a police precinct. Being a woman anywhere is dangerous.

  The regimes that governed the Arab world before the recent revolutions were united in an utter disregard for women’s bodily integrity—a message that was not lost on the male public, who reflected back a similar disregard. Lack of accountability left both state and street misogyny to grow unchecked, producing the horrific incidents of sexual violence that recur day after day.

  Unless we draw the connection between the misogyny of the state and of the street, and unless we emphasize the need for a social and sexual revolution, our political revolutions will fail. Just as important, women will never be free to live as autonomous citizens whose bodily integrity is safe inside and outside the home.

  THE GOD OF VIRGINITY

  Arab society still considers that the fine membrane which covers the aperture of the external genital organs is the most cherished and most important part of a girl’s body, and is much more valuable than one of her eyes, or an arm, or a lower limb. An Arab family does not grieve as much at the loss of a girl’s eye as it does if she happens to lose her virginity. In fact if the girl lost her life, it would be considered less of a catastrophe than if she lost her hymen.

  —NAWAL EL SAADAWI, THE HIDDEN FACE OF EVE

  Our hymens are not ours; they belong to our families.

  This truth was brought home to me one evening in Amsterdam, after I’d taken part in an event on the rights of Muslim women. In a conversation that evening, probably the firs
t conversation about sex I had had with fellow Arab or Muslim women, a Dutch Moroccan woman told me and a group of her friends, “When I first had sex, it was as if my mother, my father, my grandparents, the entire neighborhood, God, and all the angels were there watching,” We all convulsed with laughter. It was a relief to talk to women who still understood the burden of virginity and the guilt involved in shedding it, women who did not judge. It was a relief to talk to women who would never ask, “How could you not resist?” as the nurse in the ER asked me when I told her I’d been sexually assaulted.

  I actually “resisted” for a long time—too long, I believe when I look back now. I guarded my hymen like a good virgin until I was twenty-nine. I accepted and obeyed what I was taught by my family, who in turn were taught by their parents: no sex until marriage. Now, when I think about how long I waited to have sex, I am sad for my younger self and sad that I waited so long to experience and enjoy something that gives me so much pleasure. Back then, though, during all those years that I waited and waited, it would terrify me even to consider sex before marriage. I was taught by my family, by school, by religion, by society, and I obeyed. I’d been trained well and I was a “good girl” to the end. My hymen was protected from my feminism. My feminism wrestled with my headscarf but not with my hymen. Why?

  Why did I obey? And why did I wait so long to finally disobey?

  Those questions kept coming up again and again in, of all places, Oklahoma. There, in a University of Oklahoma lecture room where I was teaching a course on gender and new media in the Middle East, in 2010, I began publicly to share my reckoning with the god of virginity.