Something that hurts so many girls and women is kept silent and taboo because it has to do with our vaginas and with sex

I first learned what female genital mutilation (FGM) was as a university student in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. My family is Egyptian and my parents, both doctors, were teaching medicine there.

I was worried sick that I’d been cut and had somehow buried the memory Mona Eltahawy

My friends and I had been reading a news magazine in the library when we came across an article about it. We read in silence and terror. I had never heard of it before. When I later learned that some women in my extended family in Egypt had been subjected to it as young girls, my world came apart. I became obsessed.

It’s difficult to admit this now, but I remember being worried sick that I’d been cut and had somehow buried the memory. I checked my genitals in panic, not really knowing what would have been missing had I been cut, but worried nonetheless.

FGM rate in Egypt is 87%

I have not been cut. I am among the lucky minority in Egypt. According to the most recent figures, taken from a Unicef and Unfpa report, 87% of girls and women aged 15 to 49 years in Egypt have undergone FGM.

Something that hurts so many girls and women is kept silent and taboo because it has to do with our vaginas and with sex. The biggest obstacle in the global fight against FGM is the reluctance to talk about the practice.

As a journalist in Cairo I met Dr Nahid Toubia, the first woman to qualify as a surgeon in her native Sudan and an anti-FGM activist. Her mother underwent FGM. She told me never to make the women we love feel like “freaks” for having been subjected to cutting.

But other than Toubia, the veteran Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi was the only other woman who at that time wrote and spoke openly about her own experiences.



In the late 90s Waris Dirie, the former model, wrote a memoir about surviving FGM which I am sure has given a lot of other survivors strength and a sense of solidarity.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Supermodel Waris Dirie was just five when she became a victim of FGM. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

One of the best things that has happened since I began to research and write about FGM is seeing women across the world breaking that taboo and helping others to speak out.

These include my friend Leyla Hussein, a Somali-British psychotherapist and activist, who co-founded Daughters of Eve and the Dahlia Project; Masooma Ranalvi, who launched a Change.org petition urging the Indian government to ban FGM; and Ifrah Ahmed who persuaded Somalia’s prime minister to call for a comprehensive ban on FGM.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Why did you cut me? Survivors speak out

I believe at the heart of any revolution for social justice and human dignity are consent and agency, the unequivocal belief that I own my body – not the state, not the church/mosque/temple, not the street and not the family. It is from that belief that we can all help in the fight against FGM by talking openly and unashamedly about sex and our bodies.

Some people ask me the most ridiculous things like: “The Middle East is falling apart, why are you talking about sex?” – as if sex is not an important thing. My answer to them is sex is about consent and agency, and what is a revolution without consent and agency?

When I say “I own my body”, fighting FGM becomes a revolutionary act.

Eltahawy’s first book, Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution is available to buy from bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.