When I first picked up The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls, I expected a spirited feminist screed. What I found was a manual for disruption—a deliberately “impolite” book that argues that to dismantle patriarchy, women, girls, and nonbinary people must reclaim what we’re told to avoid: anger, attention, profanity, ambition, power, violence, and lust.
We don’t have a shortage of road maps for “leaning in” or negotiating better. We have a shortage of manifestos that legitimize refusal, rupture, and risk. Eltahawy’s book answers a basic question: How do you stop asking patriarchy for permission—and start building the muscle to defy, disobey, and disrupt it?
Be “bad” on purpose: embrace the seven “sins” patriarchy punishes—anger, attention, profanity, ambition, power, violence, lust—to reclaim your body, voice, time, and future.
Evidence snapshot
- Global prevalence of violence: 1 in 3 women worldwide experience physical/sexual violence in their lifetime, a figure stubbornly unchanged over a decade—clear proof “civility” hasn’t kept women safe.
- Gender gap progress is slow: In 2025, the world is 68.8% toward gender parity—gains remain incremental and uneven; political empowerment lags badly.
- Gender norms harden early: The Global Early Adolescent Study (15,000+ youth across five continents) documents how restrictive gender rules crystallize by age 10–14, shrinking girls’ worlds and inflating male entitlement. (Johns Hopkins Public Health, Global Early Adolescent Study, PMC, TIME)
- Femicide remains endemic: A recent UN analysis estimates ~140 women and girls killed daily by partners/family; “home” is too often the danger zone.
- Public discourse & reception: Reviews and public talks underline the book’s impact as a “call to arms” and a structured toolkit, not just catharsis.
Best for / Not for
- Best for: Readers who want a usable, unapologetic feminist toolkit; activists, students, educators, and anyone feeling that “being nice” hasn’t made life safer or freer.
- Not for: Those looking for a conciliatory or “civility-first” approach, or a step-by-step professional-ladder guide. Eltahawy isn’t writing peace treaties with patriarchy; she’s writing exit plans.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
Title & author information
- Title: The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls
- Author: Mona Eltahawy
- Publication: Beacon Press (US hardcover, Sept 17, 2019); PRH paperback, Sept 15, 2020.
This is a feminist manifesto written by a journalist-activist who’s spent decades documenting misogyny, state violence, and resistance—from Cairo to New York. The book is structured as seven essays—Anger, Attention, Profanity, Ambition, Power, Violence, Lust—each framing a forbidden behavior as necessary for liberation.
Eltahawy’s authority is not abstract. She is a journalist who has reported globally, survived political detention and sexual assault in Egypt, and helped spark #MosqueMeToo—a wave of testimony about sexual abuse in religious spaces (covered by BBC and others).
The book’s thesis is blunt: “Feminism should terrify the patriarchy.” It is not about perfect politeness or patience; it’s about seizing the traits we were socialized to renounce and using them to disrupt patriarchal norms and structures.
A note on tone & method. Eltahawy writes with what she calls “enough rage to fuel a rocket,” rejecting the respectability politics that have often narrowed feminist discourse.
2. Background
Even as laws improve in many regions, violence persists at household, institutional, and state levels. WHO’s figure—30%—is sobering; progress on the global gender gap inches forward at <1 percentage point per year, implying decades to full parity. (World Health Organization, World Economic Forum)
Most crucially, gender norms are baked in early. The Global Early Adolescent Study shows striking cross-cultural consistency: by roughly age 10, girls internalize vulnerability and limits, while boys are pushed toward toughness and authority. That early “straitjacketing” has consequences across health, education, and civic life. (Global Early Adolescent Study, PMC, TIME)
In this landscape, a manifesto that says stop asking, start seizing isn’t edgy for its own sake—it’s appropriately scaled to the problem.
3. Summary
How the book is organized. The book is thematic—seven essays, each reclaiming a tabooed behavior and turning it into a tactic. The arc moves from inner ignition (Anger) to public presence (Attention, Profanity), then to trajectory and leverage (Ambition, Power), and culminates in risk and reclamation (Violence, Lust).
The throughline: patriarchy controls women by criminalizing our emotions, muting our visibility, policing our language, capping our horizons, monopolizing authority, moralizing our resistance, and shaming our desire. Eltahawy flips every one of those script lines.
2.1 Anger — treat it as information and ignition
Eltahawy opens with a thesis many women feel in their bones: politeness hasn’t kept us safe. Patriarchy frames female anger as hysteria; the response, she argues, is to weaponize it into clarity and action. She writes that angry women are volcanic—pressure is there whether or not we acknowledge it. The choice is between internal damage and directed eruption (paraphrased).
Takeaways:
- Anger is data about boundaries crossed; suppressing it subsidizes abusers.
- Righteous anger creates solidarity; it names patterns (harassment, underpayment, erasure) that perfectionist self-blame obscures.
- Anger must be shared (speak, write, assemble), not swallowed.
Why this matters now: When 1 in 3 women worldwide experience violence, “calm down” isn’t safety advice; it’s a control script. (World Health Organization)
2.2 Attention — visibility is a defense and a lever
Patriarchy punishes women who take up space—calling us narcissistic, unserious, or “asking for it.” Eltahawy reframes attention as strategic: if abuse thrives in shadows, visibility is both shield and pressure. She calls attention a “dangerous and cunning teacher,” because learning to claim it means surviving the backlash (paraphrased).
Tactics:
- Set public boundaries (bios, signatures, out-of-office policies) that assert value.
- Use platforms (classrooms, panels, timelines) to center marginalized voices—and say you’re doing so.
- Treat “don’t make a fuss” as a red flag, not etiquette.
Research tie-in: Girls’ worlds shrink in early adolescence as they’re told to be cautious and quiet—self-erasure is learned young. Attention reverses that shrinkage.
2.3 Profanity — language that refuses to apologize
This chapter is the book’s most controversial—and revealing. Eltahawy embraces profanity as a refusal of respectability politics. “Polite” speech has rarely protected the vulnerable; it has mostly protected power. She argues profanity is a demand to be taken seriously in a culture that hears women as noise. (Paraphrasing her core point and selectively quoting here.)
“Feminism should terrify the patriarchy.”
Why profanity, strategically:
- It signals boundaries and short-circuits tone policing.
- It names harm without euphemism, forcing accountability.
- It reaches audiences the academy or bureaucratese won’t.
(For context on this stance, see public interviews and essays highlighting how Eltahawy links profanity to visibility and survival.)
2.4 Ambition — want more without apology
Patriarchy often reframes women’s ambition as greed or betrayal (of family, of femininity). Eltahawy insists ambition is permission you give yourself—a right to “want more,” not a crime. (Paraphrased from the chapter’s core line.)
Practical moves:
- Name what you want (funding, position, time, recognition).
- Quantify your goals (salaries, budgets, author order) and negotiate before the work begins.
- Normalize ambition for girls early—countering those age-10 stereotypes the GEAS documents.
2.5 Power — stop waiting to be granted what you can seize
Power is not just seats on boards; it’s control over one’s time, body, and narrative. Eltahawy argues power “is something we must seize,” not something meted out as a favor to the well-behaved (paraphrased).
Everyday shifts:
- Calendar power: time blocks, “no-meeting” days, “no” as a full sentence.
- Money power: transparent pay bands; say numbers aloud.
- Institutional power: quotas, term limits, and pipeline disruption—because parity rarely “trickles down.”
Macro context: At the current rate, global parity is decades away; power hoarded is never given back without pressure. (World Economic Forum)
2.6 Violence — the most misread chapter
Eltahawy’s “violence” is about refusing moral scripts that demand one-sided nonviolence from those who are already targets of violence. She writes, “My violence is not a metaphor”—a provocation designed to expose how often the status quo’s violence is normalized while women’s rage is criminalized. (Paraphrased with a fragment quoted.)
Read it carefully: She isn’t telling readers to harm strangers; she’s indicting systems that already harm women and nonbinary people—and insisting that self-defense, organized resistance, and law-changing confrontation are legitimate. The moral: stop demanding that the oppressed be more peaceful than their oppressors.
Evidence lens: Femicide statistics and household violence rates show why “niceness” hasn’t worked; structural threats require structural pushback. (The Guardian, World Health Organization)
2.7 Lust — desire as autonomy
Finally, Eltahawy insists lust is a bounty, not a shame; sexual self-determination is a political demand. (Paraphrased from the chapter’s central sentence.) This is where her broader record matters: #MosqueMeToo exposed sexual abuse in sacred spaces—exactly where silence is most demanded. According to BBC reporting, the hashtag gathered testimony from women across countries who had long been told such harms were unspeakable.
Practice:
- Treat consent and pleasure as skills, not taboos.
- Protect queer and trans lust as core feminist terrain—because patriarchy’s control of desire is foundational to its control of bodies.
2.8 A manifesto, not a manual of manners
Eltahawy warns this is “not a road map for making peace with patriarchy”—it’s a demand to destroy it. (Paraphrased with a fragment quoted.) She closes with a vision of rage birthing another Earth—a world where our unruly energies build institutions worthy of us (paraphrased).
4. Critical analysis
4.1 Does the book support its claims?
Yes—by design, through three layers of evidence:
- Lived evidence. Eltahawy grounds arguments in first-person experience of assault, detention, and organizing; this is not performative fury but historically and bodily informed testimony. (See her discussion of being assaulted as a teen, later activism, and arrests documented in public records.)
- Movement evidence. The book curates stories from South Africa, China, Nigeria, India, Bosnia, Egypt and beyond—underscoring global patterns of control and resistance.
- External data. While not a social-science monograph, its claims map cleanly to WHO prevalence data, WEF gender gap figures, and GEAS norm formation findings (cited above). (World Health Organization, World Economic Forum, Johns Hopkins Public Health)
3.2 Does it fulfill its purpose?
If the purpose is a manifesto to energize practice, the answer is unequivocally yes. The book gives readers permission structures (“it’s okay to be angry”), language tools (profane refusal of tone policing), and strategic frames (seizing power vs. waiting). It is not etiquette; it is strategy.
4.3 Style & accessibility
The style is deliberately incendiary—short declaratives, repetition, and rallying lines. For readers expecting academic hedging, this can feel abrupt; for readers suffocated by euphemism, it’s oxygen. The prose is “feverishly enthusiastic and laser-focused” (as one review put it), which matches the book’s goal.
4.4 Themes & relevance
- Refusal of civility politics: a clear throughline across movements, from #MeToo to racial justice.
- Embodiment & sovereignty: anger, profanity, and lust are not “vices” but autonomy signals.
- Global feminist coalitioning: the sins translate across contexts because control scripts are global, even as local forms vary.
4.5 Author’s authority
Eltahawy is not simply a commentator; she is a participant with stakes. Her journalism, arrests, and organizing history provide credibility and risk-tested perspective—corroborated by public records and mainstream coverage (NYT, BBC, etc.).
5. Strengths & weaknesses (my experience)
What worked (pleasant/positive)
- Usable anger. The book gave me ways to convert that “quiet upset” into boundary-setting, collective action, and clear asks.
- Language liberation. The profanity chapter made me examine how often I dilute a truth to make it palatable.
- Global lens. Examples across continents stop readers from dismissing misogyny as “over there.”
What didn’t (unpleasant/negative)
- Interpretation risk. The “violence” chapter can be misread out of context by bad-faith critics; it requires careful, whole-chapter reading to appreciate its ethical frame.
- Scaffolding. Readers wanting granular “how-to” policies (e.g., workplace checklists) won’t find them here; this is principle and posture, not policy.
6. Reception, criticism, influence
- Trade & media: Frequently described as a “call to arms”—Booklist (starred) and Kirkus emphasize its kinetic, motivational style.
- Scholarly & movement spaces: Journals and talks (e.g., Signs, Intelligence Squared) frame it as a bridge between memoir and movement strategy.
- Public readers: Many reviews highlight exactly what I felt—eye-opening, rage-clarifying, and action-prompting.
7. Quotations
“…rage to fuel a rocket.”
“Feminism should terrify the patriarchy.”
“I want to be free.”
8. Comparison with similar works
- Soraya Chemaly, Rage Becomes Her (2018). A data-rich tour of women’s anger as health, social, and political matter; excellent on the physiology and socialization layers that make anger look “unfeminine.” Use it to deepen the Anger and Power chapters’ arguments.
- Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad (2018). A historical-political mapping of women’s anger as movement fuel, particularly in the U.S. post-2016 landscape. Pair with Eltahawy to understand collective ignition across timelines.
What sets Eltahawy apart is her global, unapologetically profane register and the explicit permission to embrace attention, profanity, violence, lust alongside anger and ambition—a fuller palette for revolt.
9. Conclusion
The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls is a manifesto that refuses domestication. It doesn’t teach you to be liked; it teaches you to be free. Strengths include its global lens, rhetorical clarity, and unapologetic demands; weaknesses include potential misreadings of “violence” and a lack of policy checklists (by design).
Who should read this?
- General audiences who feel stuck between safety talk and the facts of persistent harm.
- Students & organizers building feminist practice beyond civility.
- Educators, health workers, lawyers who need a language for boundaries and bodily autonomy.
If you want soothing, this isn’t it. If you want stamina, strategy, and solidarity, start here.
