A Post a Day in May #23: Sins Part I

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I have pledged to write a new post for this blog every day in May. 

It was a Sunday afternoon and I was puttering around the house, listening to the radio when, suddenly, the woman speaking stopped me in my tracks. 

“Profanity is the verbal form of civil disobedience,” she said. I stopped puttering and listened.

She went on: “Profanity is an essential tool in disrupting patriarchy and its rules…I understand how language works…I know exactly what I’m doing. And I say, ‘Fuck the patriarchy,’ because I am a woman, a woman of colour, a Muslim woman. And I am not supposed to say ‘fuck’.” 

The woman speaking was Mona Eltahawy and she gave me the theory to explain my own practice. I went out that afternoon and bought her book, The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls. 

I am a woman, not large, not tall, petite, it could be said. I do not take up much physical space in this world. But I have long understood the effect I have on my surroundings when I say the word ‘fuck’. I have a modest British, more mid-Atlantic, accent and I enunciate well. When I drop that F bomb for the first time, almost without fail, those around me are shocked. 

I, apparently, neither look nor sound like a person — a woman — who would use “such language”. And that is, precisely, why I do. 

But before I heard Mona Eltahawy, I had not equated swearing with civil disobedience — the dictionary definition of which is “the refusal to comply with certain laws…as a peaceful form of political protest”. But I can see that, as a petite woman, dropping the F bomb does precisely that. 

It’s me refusing to comply with the social and gendered conventions of “polite” society. And in that refusal, I claim my own space, in my own way, with a word that is as unexpected as it is forceful.

#mfgp  

To be continued: Sins Part II tomorrow 

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