The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls

Mona Eltahawy

• Publisher: Tramp Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781916291454
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Essays in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls identifies seven sins women and girls are socialised to avoid anger, attention, profanity, ambition, power, violence and lust. With essays on each, Mona Eltahawy creates a stunning manifesto encouraging women worldwide to defy, disobey and disrupt the patriarchy. Drawing on her own life and the work of intersectional activists from around the world, #MeToo and the Arab Spring, Eltahawys work defines what it is to be a feminist now.

153

— FIVE —

POWER

Like a LOT of Black women, I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires: All my life I’ve been studying revolution. I’ve been looking for it, pushing at the possibilities and waiting for that moment, when there’s no room for rhetoric, for research or reason: when there’s only my life or death to act upon. Here in the United States you do get weary, after a while; you could spend your best energies forever writing letters to the New York Times. But you know, in your gut, that writing back is not the same as fighting back.

—june jordan, On Call: Political Essays, 19851

What is a powerful woman?

In 2014, my father and I went to a Cairo cafe to watch the final match of the World Cup, which is held every four years and that year was being hosted by Brazil. The match ended with Germany beating Argentina to once again clinch the cup. Despite our national team’s failure to qualify for that year’s 154 tournament, the cafe was full because Egypt is a country that loves football or, as you may know it, soccer. The men’s World Cup is the most-watched sporting tournament in the world, and by the time the final match was on, because of the time difference between Egypt and Brazil, Muslims who observe the holy month of Ramadan, which coincided with the 2014 tournament, had ended their fast and had flocked to cafés for coffee, tea, and water pipes.

During the ceremony to hand out the cup to the winners, a boy sitting with his family at the table next to ours pointed at the television screen where a woman was standing at a podium, awaiting the players.

‘Who is that woman, Baba?’ the boy asked.

‘That is the president of Brazil,’ his father replied.

‘A woman can be president?’ the boy asked.

I could not have orchestrated the moment better myself. I live for moments like that – when, for a brief moment, what seems impossible is right there in front of you. And after the World Cup final, when the entire world had tuned in to watch the most popular sporting event. I turned to the boy and launched into my teaching moment.

‘The World Cup this year is hosted by Brazil, which has a woman president. The two teams who just played in the final – Germany and Argentina – also have women leaders. Look, see that second woman on the stage? That’s the woman who is the leader of Germany,’ I said, pointing to German chancellor Angela Merkel, who stood next to then Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff as the players shook hands and hugged 155 the leaders who awarded them medals. Only then Argentinian president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was absent. ‘One of these days, Egypt will have a president who is a woman,’ I said. Who knew that a men’s sporting event would provide me with one of my feminist moments in my hometown!

I wanted the boy and the two girls sitting with his family to know that women could be presidents and leaders. You need to see what you want to become. There was a time when women were powerful in Egypt. We had a god-king called Hatshepsut, who gained power during Dynasty 18 (1550–1295 BC) and for more than twenty years was the most powerful person in the ancient world.2 But in our modern era? I wanted to be able to point to someone who was still alive as a reminder to those three children that women could be powerful.

If we had had more time than just the trophy ceremony of the World Cup, I would have told those children that power is more complicated than who serves as presidents and chancellors. Power lives in more places than the presidential office, and there are other ways besides politics to be powerful. I would have launched into a longer feminist teaching moment in which I insist we must differentiate between power that dismantles patriarchy from power that is used in the service of patriarchy.

In the intervening years, two of the countries that were led by women during the 2014 World Cup have since served as reminders that when it comes to appreciating the impact of patriarchy on power, we must ask a much bigger and more complicated question than simply ‘Can a woman be president?’ 156 We must ask equally pertinent questions: Is that woman feminist? Is she invested in dismantling patriarchy? Will she use her power to uphold or diminish patriarchy? Both Brazil and Germany have given us complicated answers.

Brazil might have once elected a female president, but it remains solidly patriarchal. Just 15 per cent of Brazil’s federal and state legislators are women – an all-time high, according to Adriana Carranca in the Atlantic magazine.3 Rousseff, a former Marxist guerrilla who became Brazil’s first female president, was impeached by a corruption-tainted senate in 2016 for breaking budget rules.4 She was succeeded for an interim period by her vice president, a centre -right man who named an all-male, all-white cabinet and who lost three ministers accused of corruption in his first month in office. In October 2018, the far-right Jair Bolsonaro, an unabashedly misogynist, racist, and homophobic former army captain defeated the left-wing Workers’ Party candidate to become the president of Latin America’s largest democracy, which only ended twenty years of military rule in 1985.5

To appreciate how patriarchy works, and how it benefits from the very things it claims to fight, witness some of the men who set in motion Rousseff’s fall.

‘In late 2015, the then-leader of the evangelical bloc and speaker of the lower house, Eduardo Cunha (now serving a 15-year sentence in prison for graft), led impeachment proceedings against Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s first female president; she was removed from office a year later. One of the congressmen who voted to oust her was Bolsonaro. He dedicated his vote 157 to Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, the head of the military dictatorship’s torture unit. Rousseff was among those tortured,’ writes Carranca.

There is a reason Bolsonaro, a character straight out of Misogyny Central, has been dubbed the ‘Trump of the Tropics’. He has used offensive language against women, gay people, Afro-Brazilians, and indigenous people. Chayenne Polimédio writes in Foreign Affairs that Bolsonaro ‘told a female member of congress that he wouldn’t rape her because “she wasn’t worthy of it,” explained that his sons would never love black women because his sons were “properly raised,” and claimed that a particular secretary of women’s issues shouldn’t have been appointed because “she was a dyke.”’6 A father of five, Bolsonaro has said that his only daughter was born due to his wife’s ‘weakness’.

If Bolsonaro reminds you of a certain American president, it is no wonder that on the day Bolsonaro was inaugurated, Trump tweeted the new Brazilian president gushing congratulations, telling him ‘the U.S.A. is with you!’ to which Bolsonaro’s Twitter account replied: ‘Dear Mr. President @realDonaldTrump, I truly appreciate your words of encouragement. Together, under God’s protection, we shall bring prosperity and progress to our people!’7

Similarly, interviews with female supporters of Bolsonaro echo much of the hatred and dismissal of feminism shared by Trump’s female supporters. From the idea that Brazilian women don’t need feminism because they’re not victims to vehement assertions that men and women are equal to boasts 158 that if they could do it – ‘it’ being anything from being wealthy, to juggling work and family, to a host of other privileges – then all women should be able to with enough effort. Nearly always forgotten is that no matter how hard people from disadvantaged or marginalised backgrounds try, a host of inequalities bars them from getting the same opportunities as more privileged people. And much like their American counterparts who support Trump, female Bolsonaro supporters want the right to bear arms rather than the right to dismantle patriarchy – the root of misogynist violence – to protect themselves and their loved ones, the Guardian reported.8

Brazil is one of the most violent countries in the world for women. In 2017 there were 606 registered domestic violence cases and 164 rapes per day.9 The numbers could be higher. Those were just the ones that authorities registered.

I call women who vote for unabashedly misogynist candidates like Bolsonaro, especially knowing how dangerous Brazil is for women, foot soldiers of patriarchy. It is especially ironic that patriarchy enables and protects violence against women and yet at the same time presents itself as the great protector of women. That is what Bolsonaro did, presenting himself as a ‘family values’ and ‘law and order’ candidate. The man who told a female member of Brazil’s congress – Maria do Rosário – ’I would never rape you because you don’t deserve it,’ said during his campaign that he was the only candidate who was truly worried about violence against women because he proposed chemical castration for rapists, the Guardian newspaper reported.10

159 When the man elected to lead a country is so openly misogynist, it gives a green light to other men that they too can behave as if women’s bodies are fair game. And in a country where violence against women is so high, Bolsonaro is a reminder that when patriarchy offers to ‘protect you’ it comes at a cost. According to the Guardian, a recent study found that 58 per cent of Brazilians agreed partially or fully with this statement: ‘If women knew how to behave, there would be less rape.’11 Bolsonaro voted against a 2015 ‘femicide’ law – sponsored by do Rosário – which gave harsher sentences for homicides motivated by gender. In an interview on International Women’s Day in 2017, he said that Brazilian women should ‘stop whining; stop with this story of femicide’, the Atlantic reported.12 According to the BBC, in a 2016 television interview, he said that he wouldn’t give a woman employee ‘the same salary as a man’ because women get pregnant.13

The Guardian reports that in 2013, Bolsonaro coauthored a bill proposing to revoke the right for rape victims to get legal abortions – this in a country remember where 164 rapes were registered every day in 2017.14 Several days before his election, Bolsonaro signed a ‘term of commitment’ with the Catholic Church, pledging to defend the ‘right to life, starting from conception’. After his election, Bolsonaro said he would abolish Brazil’s human rights ministry and named the conservative evangelical pastor Damares Alves to run a newly created ministry of women, family, and human rights, as well indigenous people, estimated to number 900,000.15 Alves has said she wants ...