Smash the Patriarchy with Rage and Risk: Lessons from Mona Eltahawy

Gaslit Nation

Trump, Politics, Left, Democracy, Resistance, News, Society & Culture, Progressive, Liberal, Kendzior, Chalupa, Resist

4.8 • 4K Ratings

🗓️ 13 August 2025

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you're still waiting for someone to save democracy, Mona Eltahawy has news for you: you are the one you’ve been waiting for.

A fearless Egyptian-American journalist and author of The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls and her latest book Bloody Hell!: Adventures in Menopause From Around the World, Eltahawy is no stranger to authoritarianism. While covering Arab Spring protests in Cairo, she was seized by Egyptian security forces and sexually assaulted and beaten, her arm and hand broken. Now, she warns, America is slipping toward the same strongman rule in Egypt. And too many are sleepwalking through it.

Eltahawy's prescription is feminism that terrifies, carried out by both women and men. Because anyone can be a feminist. This is feminism as revolution. As she puts it, “There is no revolution without rage, and there is no revolution without risk.”

Her work urges women to embrace power, ambition, anger, and militant self-defense, not to provoke, but to defend. And for their allies to support them. Learn to protect yourself. Teach your daughters common-sense self-defense and how to take up space.

Her hope is that more of us, especially white women in the U.S., will stop cosplaying resistance and start embodying it. “The Handmaid’s Tale is not a documentary,” she says. “Get out of the TV and into the streets.”

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Show Notes:

Journalist On Being Sexual 'Prey' In Egypt https://www.npr.org/2011/11/29/142895349/journalist-on-being-sexual-prey-in-egypt

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Gaslit Nation. I am your host, Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones, about Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine.
0:34.1	The film The Kremlin does not want you to see, so be sure to watch it.
0:38.3	We are so excited to smash the patriarchy and the oligarchy all over the world.
0:46.0	There's nowhere they can hide, and we're going to do that with the help of our guests this week,
0:52.8	Mona El Tlajave, a fearless Egyptian-American journalist
0:56.6	through her powerful newsletter, feminist giant, and her acclaimed books, including
1:03.6	the seven necessary sins for women and girls, headscarves and hymonds, and her latest book, Out Now, Bloody Hell, Adventures in Metapause from Around the World.
1:18.0	Mona champions women's liberation globally. During the Arab Spring, she returned to Cairo, where she was arrested, beaten, both of her arms broken, and sexually assaulted.
1:34.0	But that did not break her spirit. She emerged even more defiant.
1:40.1	Mona's voice is a rallying cry for rebellion, truth, and the audacity to demand freedom on our own terms.
1:47.4	And while she says that violence is not the answer, she advocates for common sense self-defense because the patriarchy is not going to smash itself.
2:02.5	Welcome to Gaslit Nation.
2:05.9	So every strong, terrifying woman in my life reads you, depends on you.
2:13.9	You are like the gynecologist of the resistance.
2:17.1	You're getting us all through pre-menopause,
2:19.8	menopause, Mona, the patron saint of vaginas. I think about all the time going to a Trump
2:26.1	rally and just doing man on the street interviews and asking these mouth breathing white men,
2:32.1	do you know what a clitoris is? And just seeing how many of them say no.
2:36.9	And I read you and I think about the fact where we're up against these Christian nationalists,
2:42.7	these Islamic nationalists, and they all want to put, they all want to bury women alive.
2:48.3	They want to chain, in prison, bury women alive. And want to chain, imprison, bury women alive.
2:52.2	And yet they all worship, you know, God, a male God.
	...

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