Free Headscarves and Hymens by Mona Eltahawy Page B

in Cairo in 2009 and was attended by representatives from seventeen Arab countries, concluded that harassment was unchecked across the region because laws don’t punish it, women don’t report it, and the authorities ignore it. Sexual harassment of girls and women at work, in schools, and on the streets was driving them to cover up and confine themselves to their homes, said the activists.
    According to the Associated Press, participants at the Cairo conference said men are threatened by an increasingly active female labor force, with conservatives laying the blame for harassment on women’s dress and behavior. Activists said that some women had told them they had either taken on the face veil to try to escape the constant harassment or were considering dropping out of school or work altogether.
    Levels of street sexual harassment have soared throughout the Arab world, and everyone asks why. One answer—always met with howls of denial from conservatives—is that the more women cover up, the more it lets men off the hook. The “purity culture” that exists across the Middle East and North Africa burdens girls and women with the responsibility for their own safety from sexual violence, and for ensuring they don’t “tempt” boys and men. “Purity culture” is a term I first came across in the United States, where it is used to describe the religious right’s rhetoric that stresses virginity and modesty as the way for women to attain “purity.” I find it very appropriate as a way to describe the pressures women in the Middle East and North Africa are subjected to, and it reminds us how much the global religious right wing has in common.
    Nesma el-Khattab, twenty-four, a lawyer at Cairo’s Shehab Center, which advocates for girls and women, told me of the hurdles girls and women face in fighting back against street sexual harassment: “Their mother tells them cover up so you don’t face harassment. Thegrandma tells them you’re a girl, don’t fight back, just shut up and take it. Their father tells them don’t speak out against harassment because those boys you spoke out against will go and beat up your brother.”
    Remember the conversation I had with the woman in the niqab on the Cairo metro? Take that kind of thinking to an absurd and dangerous extreme and you end up with the leaflets that the feminist activist Shahrazad Magrabi found being distributed outside girls’ schools in the Libyan cities of Tripoli and Benghazi in 2014. She spoke to me for the BBC World Service documentary.
    They begin with two bizarre monologues juxtaposed. First, a rose describes how it is easily found on every street corner, it is cheap to buy, etc. Next, a pearl talks about how special it is because it is nestled within a shell and deep under the ocean so no one can see it. In other words, the rose is not special because everyone can see it and has access to it, while the pearl is precious because it is hidden away.
    “They’re doing great harm, they’re using Islam as a weapon, as a tool. They say if you’re a woman and you go out you’re going to hell,” Magrabi said.
    “What I’m worried about is the way they’re feeding the people that it’s haram [a sin]; you see girls six years old wearing headscarves; you go to school and if a teacher has [boy pupils over the age of six], the teacher must cover her face to teach. I am Libyan. I was born here. I never left. What the hell are they talking about?”
    This purity culture leads both men and women to unjustly blame women for the harassment they suffer. Women are criticized, and they criticize and police one another, for wearing clothes that are too tight, or the wrong color, the wrong length, the wrong style—it’s always the woman’s fault. Anything a woman does to alter her own appearance is taken as an incentive to abuse. According to a survey conducted by the Riyadh-based King Abdul Aziz Center for National Dialogue, 86.5 percent of Saudi men blame