My Feminism or: Why Your Body Hair Won't Change the World (pt.2)

If a boxing match took place between a man and a woman, who would you side with?

Amid pulling hair, breaking bones, swinging left and right and turning black and blue, who do you assume would throw a hell of a right punch, kick the hardest or get knocked out first?
Regardless of who you’d bet your buck on, the winner of such a fight would ultimately prove one thing: Who had the upper hand in that particular contest and nowhere else.

Knowing that each confrontation has its own premise, whoever walks out alive from any brawl, may it be man, woman, child or animal, says nothing about the group it represents. Thinking that the particular (a certain individual) would offer insight regarding the majority (a gender) and can thus be stereotyped is a serious generalization. Me losing a Judo contest to a male competitor does not make women inapt anymore than guys should be considered clumsy if I beat one of them at a round of Pool. Therefore, the virtual battle of the sexes is impossible; which man VS which woman? A trained soldier? An obese couch-potato? Who are we talking about?
Ultimately, winning comes down to the individuals themselves and their personal merit as opposed to their gender.

However, this by no means justifies the allegation and the use of terms such as “weaker sex”, simply because weakness is not a classification (as no classification can ever be made), it is an accusation. One woman is enough to debunk the theory that females cannot fight as ferociously as men or become high-ranking officials. For this reason, this appellation is discriminatory towards half of the earth’s population as it relies solely on unfounded claims to attribute certain characteristics to women. The worst part is, it is acceptable in our language.

Assuming that this discriminating speech is a rare occurrence nowadays gravely misses the point. A society’s language and colloquial terms are its mirror, they project its “un-thought” and the collective consciousness which binds it together; there’s more to it than what meets the ear, so to speak. Knowing that our reflections are encoded in the expressions we use and having these trait associated to women, testifies to this segregation, especially in the Arab World. The worst part is that these thoughts get transmitted via communication without being second-guessed and saying that women are “nawa3em” or “al Jens al Latif “denote a certain attitude which individuals may not have or want to have.

The tool in the hands of each and every one of us is the conscious step to challenge the baggage of words that we received from the generation before us and better monitor the adjectives we associate to one another. A word is never just a word. It almost always reveals more than we mean or want it to, regardless of who uses it.

Written by Haneen H / Edited by Mazen Zahreddine

My Feminism or: Why Your Body Hair Won't Change the World (pt. 1)

Sexist fucks and radical feminists are just a couple of the many stereotypes we run into nowadays, and although both seem to share just about the same level of testosterone, they stand on opposing ends of the spectrum of women's perception. The emancipation of the latter has become an important topic addressed by many sociologists, religious figures and economists. Although in Europe and the States, the “weaker sex” enjoys a relatively larger freedom margin and acceptance, the Arab World still struggles to let that “soft sex” perform even the most petty trivialities, such as driving a vehicle and voting.

Feminist waves flourished abroad some time back (19^th and early 20^th century for first-wave feminism, 60s and 70s for second-wave feminism, and finally the contemporary third wave) and many must-reads have been published by the likes of Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood, and others to provide us with substantial food for the mind. Also, feminist claims have indeed done their best to enhance the situation in the Middle-East and bring media attention to it, for example: Hoda Shaarawi’s participation in the first women’s street demonstration in 1914, and Nawal El Saadawi’s writings about female genital mutilation to name a few. However, the work that should be maintained by the public on a regular basis has proved to be highly lacking and insufficient.

In fact, far from deified ideologies, imported ideas, and leaders put up on a pedestal, the pragmatic aspect of what any feminist collectivity in Lebanon believes in and most importantly knows, should stay the main focal point. My point is, what do you as a contemporary woman fighting for her rights know about feminist authors, filmmakers, female painters and theorists?

How do you, as a feminist individual or collective, go about changing the world? And even more so, how do you alter people’s (men and women alike) preconceived ideas?

The dilemma of today is not so much identifying the problem and its origin, but our very approach to the predicament itself. Knowing that our education is biased and lacking, the figures with which we identify are questionable and our very frame of mind has been wrought, shaped and conditioned by the male gaze, how can we go about reversing all of that before committing ourselves to causes, beliefs and world change?

A current trend that is easily noticeable in Lebanon is reducing feminism to a symbol. As is common with all "ideologies", or let's call them "isms", a distinct trait more often than not gets associated to an ism, and in this case, it’s body hair. Not that such a symbol is by definition irrelevant, but it IS futile. All action is stopping there, and by action, I do not mean street marches but cerebral, intellectual stimulation. The danger of hiding behind, or putting in the forefront this body hair symbol, is the fact that body hair never changed the world - and never will. Flaunting your unshaved armpits or Amazonian bush rarely got people to reconsider their views or shed light on the lack our pedagogy suffers from.

Written by Haneen H / Edited by Jay Feghali