#Occupyyourbody: Liberate Your Vagina
When I thought about what I would like to occupy in Beirut, what first came to my mind was my vagina, my body in general. As a woman, to society – my family, my surrounding and everybody else – my body does not belong to me. How can you not occupy back your vagina, your propriety and a part of your body, while according to society, there are rules and taboos that stand between you and operating it, as you please? It’s like owning a car and yet you cannot drive it. Our society put so much pressure on our vaginae and body that it amazes me how such an organ, a simple vagina, can carry that much oppression so as to even link the honor of our families to it.
#Occupyyourvagina because as a woman, you can get killed for losing your virginity, which simply consists of barely a layer of tissues, yet your whole life and safety are linked to it. Your hymen is what makes you a good person or a bad person. This tissue layer defines you as a human being, and allows society – your father, your brother or your husband – to decide whether you deserve to live or not.
#Occupyyouvagina because as a woman, you are not allowed to masturbate, to orgasm. It’s a taboo, it’s a shame. Your vagina is a part of your body, but you are not allowed to touch it, to give it an orgasm or simply to play with it. They feed our heads with myths about masturbation, but the most hilarious and dangerous one, is that they convince us that if we masturbate (which is a very healthy thing to do), we will not be able to enjoy sex with our “husbands”, while in fact masturbation is a healthy process in which you get to know your body better, your pleasure spots. Moreover, they expect you to stay untouched, not even by yourself, until the ownership of your body moves from your father to your husband, whereby this one, him and only him, can touch it.
#Occupyyourvagina because you menstruate, you bleed, and this is a fact which oppression contributes to. When you first get your period, the first thing your mum tells you is that you
should not tell anyone about it, that it’s your little shameful secret. You are now dirty and bloody, you go to the shop to buy pads or tampons, and they wrap them in 10 black bags (as if they are trying to wrap your shame away). If you go to the toilette while you’re in your period and you’re in a public place, you should take your whole bag with you instead of just getting a pad out and walking with it. Have you ever wondered what the whole shame is about? Periods are so beautiful in a way that our mother nature decided that even the moon get a 28-days cycle like ours; and we are even linked to nature in that way. Society is scared from our periods. They say our menstrual blood is bad for plants; it’s a myth. We are not allowed to touch the holy books or fasten if we have our periods. We are not allowed to nag about our painful cramps. We are not allowed to mention it, discuss it, or even think that it exists with ourselves.
#Occupyyourvagina because you cannot have sex with whomever you chose, when it’s your full human right to orgasm. Because again your body along with all its pleasures doesn’t belong to you. Because if you have sex, you are a bad person, while in fact it’s a healthy human need, just as eating, drinking, sleeping and peeing. Because as a woman, you are not allowed to have sex except with your husband, which renders the act property propaganda, i.e., the moving of ownership of your body again, from your father to your husband. I know women in their 30’s who are married for more than 10 years, and who have never orgasmed in their
whole life, not even once. They take from us our pleasure, and they tell us that the only holy purpose of sex is becoming pregnant and breeding. Our clits have over thousands of sensory tissues, but yet again many of us have never touched it.
#Occupyyourvagina because they want to judge its appearance and smell (tightness is sexy, looseness is not sexy, pubic hair, smell… all these fucked-up judgments), because they think one type of sex is good – vaginal reproductive purposes with a man only –, because they think my vagina deserves only my husband’s penis and not any other penis or vagina.
#Occupyyourvagina a because if you happened to have sex, even if you were married, and you got pregnant, you cannot get an abortion, because your vagina is not yours, your body is not yours. The whole society condemns you, religions condemn you if you get an abortion, while in fact you are free to decide to do whatever you please with your body.
#Occupyyourvagina because if someone rapes you, you become a property to the extent that if they offered to marry you, they will drop charges against him. Your body is so oppressed that they make you marry your rapist, to fix you, to fix your honor, which is again linked to your hymen.
#Occupyyourvagina because it’s the first step in the thousand miles of reclaiming the ownership of your body, your right to walk in the streets without being sexually harassed just because you have a vagina and boobs, just because you are a woman.
#Occupyyourvagina, in order to take back your right to exist properly in this world, as a free and equal human being with a free will.
Category: #occupybeirut, إحتلال بيروت#
Are you serious!? I thought you’re talking about Egypt!
THUMBS UP!
Great! great ya ret yenkatab bel 3arabe
LOVED IT ♥
everything you said, just amazing
Finally some-one said it all, all out loud! Thank you for your courage..
Hi Maya,
Sit back and have your coffee with you as I am about to embark on a very lengthy elaboration
While I cannot identify with the term occupyyourvagina, being a male myself, I do understand the societal frustration from which your cry arises.
Allow me though to draw your attention to a severe misconception and that is the idea that we are allowed to do whatever we want with our bodies. A notion that stems from the abstract valuation of freedom as an entity in itself, rather than it being a state one experiences; as such, saying, I am free to do what I want with my body becomes trivial and over time meaningless, compared to the statement, I do xyz because xyz is right, and so I become free.
Building on the above, yes, living in a jungle, in isolation of other men and women, man and woman can do whatever they want with their bodies, their property, land and air surrounding them, since ties of dependence and interaction do not exist and no one is held accountable for their actions. It is the law of the jungle as they say, “man” in the state of nature.
This is where the difference comes in civilized societies. In such societies, “man” exist with other “men”, “man” develops because of other “men”, a dynamic, interactive and absolutely dependent relationship is born. Though this is nothing new since the dawn of history, it is the nature of this relationship that thrusts “man” forward or holds “him” stagnant.
To make things simple and concrete, consider the civilized nations of Western and Northern Europe, where man’s work is understood to be not entirely his, that this work is a product of duties and responsibilities shared and caused and influencing others; and hence the justification for social taxes that serve the purpose to propel society as a whole forward (free education, better services, healthcare) and thus, propel every individual member of this society forward.
This is in relation to your statement, in which, if I follow your logic of, I am free to do what I want with my body, then you are taking your body out of the boundaries of society, though with the things that you mention, you are never alone, and another person is also dependent on you: sex, which you mention, but whatever else comes as a consequence (child-baring, , abortion, child-raising, etc…)
As a woman who can do whatever she wants with her body, you can have sex as much as you want, produce babies as many as you want, dump them, abort them, consume drugs and alcohol as much as you want, be a careless woman, it’s your body, you are free to do what you want with it.
It is possible that you, as Maya el Helou, put some boundaries because use your common sense, judgement, religion, etc… to stay responsible, but it is because not every individual’s moral judgement can be deemed sane, nor positive, nor forward-thinking, that some rules, whether legal, religious, moral or societal, must exist to prevent people from harming themselves, and by extension society as a whole.
I understand that because of strong past (and possibly present) collective narratives, one becomes impatient with breaking all shackles inherited from regressive societies and religions, but I think we, students, intellectuals, bloggers, thinkers, conscious human beings, have the duty to discuss which rules that move us forward, and not be obstinate with the idea of breaking free from everything, I think this damages more than it helps.
Nino,
Thank you very much for your comment, but your debate applies to both sexes, men and women.
it’s true that people, and not women only can abuse the freedom they are given, so this is not a matter of gender. but by saying liberate your body, i am asking for the minimum given, which is the freedom to do with your body anything you wish to do, therefore you and your conscience is the judge, that doesn’t mean on any level i am telling women to mis-abuse this freedom as much as the definition of abusing freedom is relative from one person to another.
Men do have this privilege of owning their bodies, yet have you ever heard of an honor crime that has been committed against a man who had pre-marital sex? It is something personal really, boundaries of your to do-s and don’t-s, but all i am asking for is a minimum of rights as a human being.
One of the best blog posts I’ve ever read – almost poetry.
“Our clits have over thousands of sensory tissues,..but yet again many of us have never touched it.” and yet again many of us have had theirs severed at such a young age!
it pisses me off the audacity that some parents have to think they have the right to sever a functioning part of their daughters’ bodies. who says i don’t have the right to sue my parents if they have subjected me to this ridiculous stone age practice!
Dear Maya,
I understand your point and respect it. However, as a woman I am bothered by one sentence: “It’s like owning a car and yet you cannot drive it.”. No Maya, my body is not something I own that I use (or not), my body is just me; therefore I cannot compare it to a car, I cannot “occupy my body” (or a part of it – my vagina) all I can do is to continue to be me – no more no less. If you understand sensations of your body and emotions from your brain/heart are all the same, then you’ll never feel the gap between what you want to be and what you are.
As long as you see your own body as a tool, an object that you own or not, that you can occupy or not instead of being just you , it continues to be not fully you, it continues to be an unknown land to conquer. Just be yourself without making of your body a façade or a barricade.
Dear Maya & Nino,
Being a male & a medical doctor by education & a journalist by profession i say that Maya’s subject of discussion is fascinating.Here in India, though womenfolk liberated long back, feminists/writers/activists like Mrs.Shobhaa De & Mrs. Shabana Azmi-Akhtar have not spoken like this.
Shobhaa has depicted free sex ,intercourse & rape in her novels. #OccupyVagina is a new subject for her.
Shabana is a hypocrite ,projectionist ,wrecker of a woman’s life to marry a hypocrite Javed Akhtar.Both Azmi-Akhtar are often a great nuisance to Indian readers. Given a fat reward,Shobhaa can write an ad piece on any subject as she did for Mukesh Ambani’s Antilia!
A writer in a conservative society has to go uphill while writing a piece like this. i do appreciate the courage, boldness,in depth grip over the subject. Nino is democratic in his writing.
Best wishes,
Yours truly,
Dr. Bankimchandra M. Desai
Hi, I do agree wit Nino, the same goes for men as well.Nevertheless, I believe you have a point and
vagina liberation in the Arab world must come sooner or later. Be patient huh
Very well put. As a man, I’ve never understood the obsession with virginity. I spent most of my adolescence lamenting the fact that women were not having sex with me, rather than the other way round.
I suspect it’s to do with an insecurity about comparison. A virgin, by definition, has nobody else to make potentially unfavourable comparisons with you, whether performance-related, anatomical, or otherwise. And of course religion, being not only obviously man-made but obviously male-made, too, has done the rest of the work.
What an idiotic piece. Where in the cultural handbook of the Mid East does it say women can’t have an orgasm? And you fail to mention this moral compass applies to men in the culture as well. Men aren’t supposed to sleep around before marriage either, and its frowned upon.
Abortions are also not forbidden in many cases in Mid East culture. Basically, I can go on and on about each point you make, but it’s pointless. This useless puddle of drivel reeks to high heaven of baseless bitterness and “I’m mad at my culture so I’m going to lash out with things that aren’t true but outsiders that don’t know any better might believe.” Why don’t you go do all the things you’re complaining you can’t instead of spreading bullshit? Just don’t come back and start a blog about the STDs and abortions you get and how you now understand the relationship between sexual dignity and Mid East culture. #GetALife
it’s a pretty nice article, bt for me to occupying has a negative connotation: it is to have something that doesn’t belong to the self, for example when the colonisers occupy countries. But a woman’s vagina belongs to her, others try to occupy it when they try to control it or rather control her through it. And it’s not a void to be occupied too, it’s an entity that breathes and feels.
Great article! in Italy there are a lot of sexual and sexist taboos. For example, a woman who has sex with a man who is not her husband / boyfriend is seen as a prostitute, while a man is considered a playboy. Men often complain that women are not sexually available to them and the numbers of rapes is high.
Our television is full of naked women, sexy, beautiful next to old men who lead any program. People often think that being naked on TV is a form of female freedom, but in the Occident we are prisoners of our bodies, we must make us beautiful with cosmetic surgery but we can’t express our sexuality, we are told to make us beautiful to respond to the desire the male.
Great article! Also in Italy there are a lot of sexual and sexist taboos. For example, a woman who has sex with a man who is not her husband / boyfriend is seen as a prostitute, while a man is considered a playboy. Men often complain that women are not sexually available to them and the numbers of rapes is high.
Our television is full of naked women, sexy, beautiful next to old men who lead any program. People often think that being naked on TV is a form of female freedom, but in the Occident we are prisoners of our bodies, we must make us beautiful with cosmetic surgery but we can’t express our sexuality, we are told to make us beautiful to respond to the desire the male.
Sorry but in my first comment i have made some grammatical mistakes. I don’t speak English very well!:(
Hi,
I just wanted to say that, as Western woman, I feel this is the most marvelous, audacious and innotive statement on women`s freedom I have read in a long time.
Thank you very much!