Headscarves and Hymens

by Mona Eltahawy

  When are we going to stop applauding the Saudi regime for throwing women crumbs that pass as “reforms”? The fact of the matter is that the power of women terrifies the Saudi regime. At least that’s how I like to explain its decision to delay municipal elections in 2009.

  It started with Kuwaiti women. In May 2009, four women won seats in Kuwait’s parliamentary elections. Their victory was made all the more delicious because the fundamentalists who had long opposed women’s suffrage lost several of their seats in the Kuwaiti parliament.

  The very next day, Saudi Arabia extended the mandate of municipal councils by two years to give time to “expand the participation of citizens in the management of local affairs.” By the accounts of several activists, those local councils are useless. They are the result of the kingdom’s first brief fling with democracy in 2005. At the time, five women announced their candidacy, but those first nationwide elections were deemed off limits to women by ultraconservative clerics.

  Ever since, Saudi women and their supporters continued to hope that King Abdullah would open up the 2009 poll to women. So you can imagine how nervous the royal family got at the sight of four newly minted Kuwaiti women parliamentarians. Saudi Arabia knows too well that Saudi women can learn from their Kuwaiti sisters: in the aftermath of Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, many Kuwaiti men and women fled the violence by getting into their cars and driving to neighboring Saudi Arabia, helping to inspire the driving protest of that year.

  It remains to be seen whether women will indeed be able to vote and run for office in local elections starting in 2015 or if the Saudi regime will again balk. In 2013, King Abdullah appointed thirty women to the Shura Council, an advisory quasi-parliament, where they now represent 20 percent of the previously all-male body. But the Shura is toothless, and it is unclear how much of its “advice” actually becomes policy. More indicative of the Saudi stance on women in politics is Grand Mufti Abdulaziz’s remark that letting women into politics is “opening the door to evil”—what the powers that be actually fear is opening the door to a revolution in women’s rights.

  One of King Abdullah’s recent concessions to women was the lifting of restrictions on women in some employment fields, such as lingerie shops, where women formerly had to buy bras and underpants from male sales assistants. This was an absurdity almost on par with the ban on female drivers, which results in women who are otherwise allowed to be nowhere without a male relative, having to spend hours alone in cars with male drivers unrelated to them. This contradiction gives the lie to Saudi Arabia’s gender apartheid. It is not about separating women from men, much less “protecting” women from men, but about restricting women’s mobility, and thereby their autonomy.

  Religious hard-liners are making Saudi Arabia a laughingstock. A country that in about six decades built multilane highways across the desert, and is one of the most connected on the information superhighway, keeps its women locked in a medieval bubble—and the world is shamefully silent.

  There are more Saudi women on university campuses than men, yet according to a 2013 New York Times article, the employment rate of women in the kingdom is a paltry 15 percent. Slowly, fields such as law have opened up to them. In 2013, Abdullah allowed the first women in the kingdom to be licensed to practice law, with the right to represent clients and to own and run their own law firms. Other fields remain off-limits, though—there are no women judges, ambassadors, or ministers, for example. The highest post held by a woman in government is deputy minister of education, which was attained by Norah al-Fayez in 2009.

  As Yemeni academic Elham Manea pointed out in a 2013 article, the Saudi labor code decrees that, in adherence with Sharia, “women shall work in all fields suitable to their nature.” She concluded that “Saudi women continue to be marginalized almost to the point of total exclusion from the Saudi workforce.”

  She went on to explain that “both public and private sector require female staff to obtain the permission of a male guardian to be hired, and employers can fire a woman or force her to resign ‘if her guardian decides for any reason that he no longer wants her to work outside the home.’ In jobs in clothing stores, amusement parks, food preparation, and as cashiers, guardian permission is no longer required. However, strict sex segregation in the workplace is imposed and female workers are prohibited from interacting with men.”

  Undoubtedly, that women can work in these fields at all is due not to the altruism of the royal family but to the work of “extremists” such as al-Huwaider and al-Sharif, who have fought long and hard to push the regime to make these concessions. The Saudi king and other dictators must understand that they have to catch up to their people, not the other way around. Only sixty women drove in 2013, but thousands watched and surely were changed forever. Some of those considered “out of touch” actually represent the dilemmas of so many—such as Nahed Batarfi, a fifty-year-old divorced mother of seven who holds a driver’s license from the United Kingdom and earned a PhD. She was one of the sixty women who drove in October 2013. She had waited for three months for a visa for a driver to enter Saudi Arabia, and was forced to depend on her nineteen-year-old son to drive her and his four sisters to school and work. With her son about to leave for study abroad, Batarfi decided to begin driving for herself, whatever the consequences.

  A political revolution has not begun in Saudi Arabia—unlike in Egypt or Libya or Tunisia—but a social one has. There are more Saudi women on university campuses than men. Women have embraced blogs and social media as eagerly as men. Much as young people in authoritarian countries such as Egypt create in the virtual world the space for themselves that does not exist in real life, Saudi women can express themselves online in ways unimaginable in the streets and public areas of the regime and the clerics.

  The reason women such as Wajeha al-Huwaider and Manal al-Sharif and their fellow driving activists so frighten the clerics is that they directly challenge the male guardianship system. Saudi professor and campaigner Aziza Youssef told the Associated Press that just before the October 2013 driving campaign, she and four other prominent women activists received phone calls from a top official with close links to interior minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef. The caller warned them not to drive on the day the campaign had set for the women’s driving.

  The regime’s response to the driving protests makes clear that it understands the threat these women pose. The brave work of these activists is about abolishing more than the ban on driving: it is about abolishing a system of gender apartheid upheld by the patriarchs within and without. “Until [the guardianship rule] goes, all the changes are just a show for outside,” Youssef has said. These women are sending a message to the patriarchs in government and the patriarchs at home that they do not need or want their “protection.” The social and sexual revolution is unstoppable, and these women will be remembered as its vanguard.

  SPEAK FOR YOURSELF

  What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?

  The world would split open

  —MURIEL RUKEYSER, “KÄTHE KOLLWITZ”

  I finally began to reckon with my own sexuality when I was twenty-eight. Just as it had taken me eight years to take off my hijab, it took me a long time to overcome all that I had been taught about sex and what I should and should not do with my body. Unlearning cultural and religious lessons and taboos can involve a radical turning against all that you have been taught. But it can be just as radical to slowly unchain yourself, working your way carefully through layers of guilt so that you do not completely fall apart from exhaustion and loneliness.

  I had spent most of my twenties working hard at building a journalism career. I openly identified as a feminist and wrote as many features as I could on women’s rights. In the summer of 1995, I took a month off work and flew to China to attend and report on the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women, which produced the Beijing Platform for Action, the most progressive reproductive rights agenda the world has seen. I had wa
nted independence and self-sufficiency, and there I was, traveling to China alone, dining out alone, and writing alone. I was very good at alone.

  I had learned the terminology of sex-positive feminism, I could write about reproductive rights, and I learned the term sex worker as an alternative to prostitute, yet none of this new vocabulary applied to my life. For someone who dealt with words and exposed what was usually hidden, I now realized that I was hiding behind those words, as I had once hidden behind the hijab, and that I had compartmentalized and separated my personal life from my political engagement. I used words as weapons in my working life, but I never used them to explore or explain the biggest struggles of my personal life: I couldn’t even tell people that I’d once worn the hijab. I realize now that, back then, I did not have the power.

  Channeling all my energies into work was also a convenient way to avoid marriage, which at the time was the only way I could conceive of having sex. I had avoided marriage because I feared I would not have the strength to fight the religious and cultural disadvantages with which I felt a wife must wrestle. So I shut down the personal and focused on the political—the external aspects of it at least. But, as I now realize, the political will never truly change unless it is accompanied by a parallel fight in the realm of the personal—the double revolution.

  Most of the women I knew in Egypt—highly educated, financially independent women—would invariably pay lip service to the importance of placing children and family first, but I did not want to promote the primacy of something that could hurt me or curb what little freedom I had won for myself. Why should I marry if it meant “obeying” my husband? Why should I have to pretend that, as hard as I had worked, once I had children, my family would have to come first?

  I have seen several highly accomplished women develop multiple personalities after they acquiesced to the demands society made of them. While a part of them reveled in autonomy and accomplishment, another pushed their daughters to conform to a code of behavior expected of girls and not boys, especially when it came to sexuality and bodily autonomy. This is how our society’s values are passed like a baton from mother to daughter. I’ve seen mothers push their daughters to marry regardless of the daughters’ ambivalent feelings, and push those same daughters to go off birth control and have children regardless of whether they and their husbands felt ready. In doing so, such mothers operate almost in a culturally determined maternal autopilot that is antithetical to the values implicit in their own accomplishments.

  I’m not saying that all women should forgo marriage and children. But so many women—themselves unhappily struggling against the weight of societal expectations—instill in their daughters undeserved reverence for conservative gender roles. We must remember that these mothers often do this to “protect” their girls, and that it is unfair to place the full burden of change on them unless we also dismantle the system that demands they socialize their daughters thus. Yet this does not absolve them. If these women—educated and economically independent—do not push against the system, if they do not recognize the levels of privilege that cushion them, and that this privilege obliges them to push against cultural barriers, then what chance do our societies have?

  This is all to say that at the age of twenty-eight, I reconciled with the idea that I would not marry anytime soon. I was fed up with waiting, tired of knowing about sex and its mechanics only from books and magazines. Just in time—and I took it as a sign that I should finally turn my knowledge into experience—I met a man I was attracted to and who would become my first sexual partner. I asked him out, he accepted, and we began to date. He was a few years younger than me and was not a virgin. Nonetheless, he was very patient and accepted the pace at which I explored my sexuality with him. Just after my twenty-ninth birthday, we finally had intercourse. That patience is what I wished for the thirty-five-year- old woman who asked me if she was “normal” and if she would enjoy sex despite her cutting.

  I did not bleed. It did not hurt. It was a beautiful experience that put me on a high, partly because it felt so illicit. I wanted to tell someone, anyone, how wonderful it was to feel the kind of intimacy I’d only ever read about, to experience an orgasm with another person and not just through masturbation, and to say that this love and pleasure were things that should never be tainted with that ugly word fornication.

  Still, despite the thrill I was finally experiencing, it did not take long for the guilt to push through in a drip-drip that was impossible to ignore. I was not free of my upbringing. I was not free of tradition. Like the young men and women during the protests who feared their parents’ anger more than they did Mubarak’s police force or the military junta, I was more scared to talk to anyone about my new sex life than I was of the state security officers who threatened to jail me when I didn’t reveal a source for an article.

  The Algerian French physician and author Malika Mokeddem writes of these feelings in her book My Men. Her first lover was a fellow Algerian, whose family scuttled their plans to marry so that they could arrange for him to wed someone from his tribal background. “The tyrannical forces of tradition got the upper hand in that love affair, but they also forced one certainty in me: I needed a man who was free,” Mokeddem writes.

  In my case, it was not the man I was with, an Egyptian, but rather I who was not free. The “tyrannical forces of tradition” got the upper hand over me. He wanted to get married and have children, and I would tentatively agree, only to withdraw my agreement because I could not trust that after marriage he would remain as he was. Perhaps I also did not trust that I would remain as I was. I did not have the energy or the power to fight our cultural and religious baggage surrounding marriage and family. He understood that I would never give his proposals a yes that would last beyond a week, so he ended our relationship.

  Despite all that I had achieved so far, despite all the fights and all the feminism, I was not free. I could not do with my body what I wanted without feeling the weight of guilt, culture, religion, and “fornication.” How different, really, was I from the women who I thought had developed split personalities—one that reveled in achievement, the other in being the “good girl” who obeyed upbringing and tradition?

  In search of a free man, Mokeddem embarked on love affairs with several non-Algerian men. Not long after I broke up with that first lover, the Egyptian, I married a white American. The turbulent two years we spent together taught me that marriage—to anyone, regardless of culture or religion—was not for me, and helped me to understand that a man’s personal attitude toward women is more important than his cultural background. Those two years of marriage also sealed for me the issue of children. I learned that I did not want any. I respect and honor the maternal instinct that many women heed by having children, but I was never moved by it, and I am happy to be child-free. I do wonder, sometimes, if I had had a daughter, how I would have brought her up. How—when it’s taken me so long to unlearn the things I believe are most damaging to the cause of women’s liberation and equality—would I have raised my daughter to disobey?

  Having resolved through my own trial and error the issue of marriage and children, I still had to reckon with the men of my cultural and religious background. I’m forty-seven now and have spent the past eighteen years fighting against sexual guilt. It still lingers at the edges—I have had to fight hard to keep these paragraphs in, knowing that my family will see them and disapprove, but this is my revolution. It is how I am finally reconciling my political and personal and, at last, using my words as weapons in even the most difficult and intimate areas of my life.

  When I returned to Egypt for our revolution, I wanted to inhale Egyptian men. There is no other way to describe it. I felt a visceral need to take my guilt-free self—older and better able to withstand the cultural and religious freight under which I had once keeled—and try to find a man who had undergone a similar reckoning. It was well and good to march together, to risk our lives confronting the regime, but what would happen aft
er the protest was over? How would the impeccable politics these men held toward the regime hold up where the social and sexual revolutions were concerned?

  Yet so many of the revolutionaries failed to embrace any revolution in sexual politics. I was reminded of the words the Spanish anarchist and resistance fighter Lola Iturbe wrote in 1935 in “Tierra y Libertad,” which I first encountered in Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women, by Martha A. Ackelsberg: “All those compañeros, however radical they may be in cafes, unions, and even affinity groups, seem to drop their costumes as lovers of female liberation at the doors of their homes. Inside, they behave with their compañeras just like common ‘husbands.’ ”

  Amira, a thirty-two-year-old whom I met at the Egmadi event in Cairo, echoed those words when we discussed whether the Egyptian revolution had transformed the home. I asked, is the revolution at home yet?

  “I don’t think so. Not yet,” she said. “Because some of the men who participated in the revolution who act like liberals outside the house, inside the house they are no liberals. They don’t even know what religion says. They think, I have to rule you, not, I have to take care of you, support you in your life.”

  Still, I sought out, and found, men whose love of female liberation crossed the threshold of the home, men whose gentler sides mitigated the violence women faced in public space, where so many of our bodies were hurt and violated. I found men who rejected our society’s hypocrisy and double standards over female and male sexuality. I found men who were willing to be comrades in our sexual revolution, who were willing to renounce the privilege that allows them the lazy option of sexual double standards. These men were my allies against any who would leave the revolution outside the bedroom.