I remember when I, and anyone else I considered worth having a conversation with, was reading Mary Daly. It was the late eighties, and we passed around a hard copy of Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, reveling in a new language and arming ourselves against the omnipresent forcefield of male privilege.
Daly offered us a prickly lexicon, bristling with hyphens and slashes providing purchase along the worn-smooth paths of patriarchal discourse: “[F]eminist no-saying is more than a substantial removal (re-direction, re-allocation) of goods and services . . . . It has also the form and full portent of assumption of power,” she wrote. “Spinsters,” she added, “must melt these masses of ‘knowledge’ with the fire of Female Fury.”
I also remember the confusion—from some—at her language: Hag-ocracy? Fembot? Phallocracy? Really?!
Really. Those words generated space and power. They were an in-their-face warning: Step away or risk third-degree burns. The take-no-prisoners language created the mental clearance to fight off societal expectations and work toward authentic self-definition.
So it is Mary Daly I thought of as I read Mona Eltahawy’s The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls, with an erect middle finger gracing the cover. The book was written, she says in her introduction, “with enough rage to fuel a rocket.”
But where Daly’s goal was an academic wrangling with patriarchal language to birth a feminist ethics, Eltaway’s is a call to arms, a “manifesto,” arming women and girls with “tools to fight back.” Those tools—the “seven necessary sins,” each of which is a chapter in the book—are anger, attention, profanity, ambition, power, violence, and lust. Her creative approach exposes the rules that shape women as nice, giving, well-behaved, patient, content, submissive, and always the object, never the instigator, of desire. She sees the sins as ammunition to blow up those rules, which submit women to a position of permanent disadvantage.
Eltahawy builds on the momentum of #MeToo and #MosqueMeToo and #IBeatMyAssaulter: “This is a revolutionary moment in which we are connecting and exposing the ways patriarchy has enabled and protected so many . . . ” she writes. “This is a revolutionary moment in which women . . . across the world are reading, sharing, and echoing stories of abuse, survival, and resilience. It is a revolutionary moment of women’s rage.”
Hag-ocracy? Fembot? Phallocracy? Really?! Really.
Eltahawy’s writing is peppered with “musts” and “shoulds,” a declarative style tempered by moving stories about women fighting for their lives. She shares stories from “women and queer people [who] yell a big fuck-you to the patriarchy.” We read of her own work as a warrior, including protesting the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak in Tahrir Square in 2011, where she was beaten and had her left arm and right hand broken by police.
We read of her experience fighting the abuse of women in sacred spaces with her #MosqueMeToo campaign. “Feminism must aim a Molotov cocktail at the powers that uphold patriarchy and obliterate them,” she writes.
Eltahawy’s book is an enormously valuable accounting of the work of patriarchy-smashers who are not white or rich or famous. We are introduced to Amina Wadud, who in 2005 became the first Muslim woman to lead a mixed-gender Friday prayer in Manhattan, and the Ugandan scholar and activist Stella Nyanzi, who teaches menstrual health in a country where at least 30 percent of girls miss school when they start their period. Nyanzi, who describes herself as a “queer laughist,” is a defender of LGTBQ rights in a country where homosexuality is illegal.
Eltahawy tells of the 2019 “women’s wall” in the Indian state of Kerala, a human chain of 385 miles and five million women formed in support of two women, Bindu Ammini and Kanaka Durga, who rebelled against a ban barring women of “menstruating age” from entering certain temples. We meet Zheng Churan (Datu), one of China’s “Feminist Five,” detained for thirty-seven days for planning to hand out stickers against sexual harassment on public transport.
Sharing these stories and many others, Eltahawy illuminates a global army of feminists, working in diverse ways to say “fuck you” to their oppressors. It’s uplifting, but also appalling—women’s lives are so hideously constrained.
The chapter “Ambition” layers a discussion of how women’s aspirations are continuously shaped and thwarted by patriarchy. In the chapter titled “Violence,” Eltahawy concentrates her volcanic rage into a frightening image: “Imagine if we fuck-this-shit snapped, en masse, and systematically killed men, for no reason at all other than for being men,” she writes. She indulges the fantasy for six astonishing paragraphs before stepping back: “This is an intentionally disturbing scenario. I know. But we are long overdue a fuck-this-shit snapping. It is as if men have hoarded the operating manual for violence . . . . Patriarchy’s copyright over violence has terrorized us into fear and submission.”
I don’t remember Daly telling me to shoot men, but maybe I missed it. Anyway, as the mother of sons, I’m not going there. And my reaction reveals, perhaps, one of the real gaps in Eltahawy’s manifesto: Who exactly holds the keys to patriarchy? How would we know when “they” really, truly gave it up? Here Eltahawy is murky—more focused on generating battle cries, and girding for war, than on conceptual frameworks or incremental strategies. In the age of #MeToo, who has the time for that anyway? Shoot first.
Readers will have to look elsewhere for more insight into the resilience of patriarchy. One place might be Carol Gilligan’s recent book, Why Does Patriarchy Persist?, co-authored with her student Naomi Snider.
This is the latest in Gilligan’s long career exploring the psychological landscape that defines, and unevenly situates, men and women. For her, the challenge is not to make those in power give it up, but to illuminate how patriarchy works as an internalized system: “forces outside our awareness may be driving a politics that otherwise appear inexplicable.”
In their introduction, the authors describe through the lens of personal experiences how patriarchy can act as a “ghostlike” set of codes for masculine and feminine behavior. We hear women and men grappling with why they shut down emotions, and forewent relationships in order to fit in. They voice feeling bereft about what could have been, and puzzle with why they followed rules. What to do?
Picking up a handgun and screaming “Fuck the Patriarchy!” might feel good as a first step, but Gilligan and Snider have another route in mind. They suggest that, since the problem lies within each of us, what’s needed is a forgiving kind of reckoning that will topple the internal panopticons that police us from embracing our true, whole selves.
“Any dismantling of patriarchy poses a threat not simply to status and power,” they write, “but to psychological defenses that protect us from what have become some of our deepest fears and most shameful desires.” With a sympathetic analysis of why so many perpetuate the oppression, we can better understand why men turn to rage and violence, and why “some women shun women who speak from a place of their own desire and agency.”
First, they suggest that humans, as rational beings, are born with an enormous capacity for empathy, mutual understanding, and cooperation. But such compassion makes it difficult to maintain and justify hierarchy and the inequality it engenders. Thus it becomes critical for each of us to constrain our sensitivities, in order “to maintain an order of living contingent on dividing people into the superior and the inferior, the touchables and the untouchables, whether on the basis of race, gender, class, caste, religion, sexuality, you name it.”
Here we get a glimpse of the thorniness of the patriarchal problem, hooked in and sustaining, as it does, multiple ways societies have created us-es and them-s. Struggling to adjust to the inequities that sustain us, we react with what psychologist John Bowlby identifies as pathological responses to loss: compulsive caregiving (on the part of women) and emotional detachment (on the part of men).
The authors hold up for us the paradox in action: “patriarchy persists in part by forcing a loss of relationship and then rendering the loss irreparable. Without the possibility for repair, love, a force of nature that has the power to uproot patriarchy, becomes sacrificed to protect us from the pain of [further] loss.” They say the “internal” gains from patriarchy (protection from further emotional loss) can help explain why so many men and women unthinkingly and willingly perpetuate a system which does them such damage.
The rage celebrated by Eltahawy is real, and an exciting force to help women and girls resist “compulsive caregiving” and other patriarchal demands. Gilligan and Snider offer a potentially complementary perspective—one less likely to involve bloodshed. They believe that by understanding “the psychology driving patriarchy . . . we can avoid becoming like Oedipus and walking blindly into what otherwise may seem our fate.”
As a feminist who read Mary Daly with great hope, and then thirty years later watched with great pain as an admitted perpetrator of sexual assault was elected President, I hope they’re right.