When you are intelligent and beautiful you face a lot of problems.
If you are beautiful and stupid, then it’s easy. – Nawal El Saadawi
I came across the above quote in my travels on the interweb, and it struck me, as a once good looking gal, as absolutely true. Beauty and intelligence together made mediocre men’s balls shrivel up into their pelvic cavities, and oh, how they hated me for it. They (mediocre men, and some not so mediocre) hated me for not being interested in them or dateable, without ever asking me on a date. They hated me for anticipated rejection, while never hitting on me. They hated me for actual rejection, after hitting on me. They hated me for using $5 words in my regular, every day speech. They hated my competence, my work ethic, my strength.
They hated me and my beauty and intelligence because they had been taught to question, deny or fear it as unacceptable, as an affront to their manhoods: “aren’t I supposed to be master/smarter one here?!” They believed that they should desire it (not me, precisely, but rather ‘it’), conquer it, and possess it; they believed that once having possessed it, they then owned it, and could control or dismiss it as sullied, used, worth less. Again ‘it’ is me, as if I were a thing, a tool for their use, their pleasure.
I will never forget that guy, on our 2nd date, doing the thing women are supposedly doing all the time (and maybe some do, but) going on and on about what value added I would be on his arm, as his attractive wife and the smart-as-a-whip mother of his smart, attractive, accomplished children. Ick.
All of which is and was ridiculous. All of which were and are unnecessary problems I faced on top of near constant sexual harassment and objectification while in my teens, 20s, 30s, 40s and even my 50s. So glad to be old, even if, at times, it sucks so bad.
How many were the years of my life that went by before my body, and my self became really mine, to do with them as I wished? How many were the years of my life that were lost before I tore my body and my self away from the people who held me in their grasp since the very first day? – Nawal El Saadawi
But who or what the hell is Nawal? She is one of those women whose lives – she had at least 9 – and accomplishments put me in touch with just how unaccomplished I am, and how easy I have had it. Full name: Nawal El Saadawi. Born in Egypt in 1931, she was an Egyptian feminist writer, activist and physician. She wrote numerous books on Islam and women, as well as others pertaining to sexuality, patriarchy, social class and colonialism. She was raised Muslim, and was educated yet, despite having relatively progressive and educated parents for the time, she underwent FMG – female genital mutilation – at age 6.
Her time as a physician helped to both solidify and amplify el Saadawi’s activism and feminism, as her patients lives – particularly when working in rural Egypt – opened her eyes as to the often dire conditions in which they lived; these women were trapped in marriages (her own “progressive” father tried to marry Nawal off at 10 years old) where they faced intense physical and psychological damage, including domestic violence, sexual abuse, coercion and marital rape.
American Interviewer: What would you say to a woman in this country who assumes she is no longer oppressed, who believes women’s liberation has been achieved?
El Saadawi: Well I would think she is blind. Like many people who are blind to gender problems, to class problems, to international problems. She’s blind to what’s happening to her.
For her activism and written as well as spoken views, Saadawi was imprisoned throughout the early 80s, fleeing Egypt due to further threats and intimidation in 1993, only to return in 1996. One reason Saadawi became such a prolific writer was because powerful men in both government and religious circles in Egypt were upset enough by her earliest writings as a physician to push her out of her job in public health. Y’don’t want me over there, practicing medicine? Ok, more time to make trouble, and write, speak, shout my views over here, y’sexist dopes.
From her memoir of the time she spent in prison, and now you know who she is (her wiki is additionally linked below:
Writing: such has been my crime ever since I was a small child. To this day writing remains my crime. Now, although I am out of prison, I continue to live inside a prison of another sort, one without steel bars. For the technology of oppression and might without justice has become more advanced, and the fetters imposed on mind and body have become invisible. The most dangerous shackles are the invisible ones, because they deceive people into believing they are free. This delusion is the new prison that people inhabit today, north and south, east and west…We inhabit the age of the technology of false consciousness, the technology of hiding truths behind amiable humanistic slogans that may change from one era to another…Democracy is not just freedom to criticize the government or head of state, or to hold parliamentary elections. True democracy obtains only when the people – women, men, young people, children – have the ability to change the system of industrial capitalism that has oppressed them since the earliest days of slavery: a system based on class division, patriarchy, and military might, a hierarchical system that subjugates people merely because they are born poor, or female, or dark-skinned.