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Round Stones or Full Rights

Congratulations to Kayan’s volunteer Nosayr Yassin on winning a shared third prize in the youth essay contest of the Women’s Learning Partnership on the occasion of 30 years of CEDAW!
Here is the winning essay:
Round Stones or Full Rights by Nuseir Yassin , Israel

“Never let the hand you hold, hold you down” This expression is completely true among the Arab society of women here in Israel. Though inconceivable as it may be, Arab women here in Israel, generally speaking, are facing tremendous forces trying to hold them down, yet, with great difficulty and unprecedented bravery, women that I have known are outstandingly strong before suppression by their most beloved ones.
In a generally conservative Arab community, women and young girls alike are struggling to earn their most fundamental freedoms: the freedom of speech, movement, and ideas. Starting with the most basic of all, the freedom of speech is the wish of most Arab women here in my community, for they cannot express their opinions or points of views lest they get suppressed by their own surroundings. “Family honor”, as obsolete as it may sound, is still a frequently used term that most likely serves as the reason behind an incident where a woman pays the price.
Furthermore, the condition of women is far from being equal to that of men’s. Women are destined to stay at home and men are free to go to wherever they wish. This ...

Hours before killing, Nazarenes marched against domestic violence

By Jack Khoury (Haaretz)
Hours before the the murder of Hala Faisal-Salam, at the hand of her husband Basel Salam, her father in law, Ali Salam, the deputy mayor of Nazareth, marched at a demonstration against violence toward women in the northern Arab city.
Also at the march was Sheikh Amin Kana’an of the village of Yerka. His daughter, Manar, was murdered in her home in the village three months ago.
The suspect in the murder is her husband.
“I saw it as my obligation as a father bereaved of his daughter in tragic and cruel circumstances, through no fault of her own, and as a man of religion to go to the demonstration and participate in this outcry and ...

By Jack Khoury (Haaretz)
Hours before the the murder of Hala Faisal-Salam, at the hand of her husband Basel Salam, her father in law, Ali Salam, the deputy mayor of Nazareth, marched at a demonstration against violence ...

Rape Analogies

We’ve all heard the rape analogies. Let’s set aside the truly disgusting rape apologist analogies (like the whole “you can’t leave a piece of meat/cake/substitute-any-delicious-food-here sitting out and expect no one to eat it” thing…or the “if a man walked around with a suit made of $100 bills, he’d expect to be robbed, wouldn’t he?” one). I think we can all agree on what’s wrong with those. I’d like, instead, to have a discussion on analogies used by anti-rape activists. The Rape of Mr. Smith is a pretty well-known one, for example. Marcella Chester at Abyss2Hope just posted a rape analogy today, exposing some of our society’s problematic and hypocritical assumptions about rape using the example of a ...

We’ve all heard the rape analogies. Let’s set aside the truly disgusting rape apologist analogies (like the whole “you can’t leave a piece of meat/cake/substitute-any-delicious-food-here sitting out and expect no one to eat it” thing…or the “if ...

Advice Needed: My Role as a Friend and as a Feminist

I have a couple of dear friends who’ve depended on me a lot over the last few years. Sarah and Daniel (not their real names) started dating in late 2006, and by the spring of 2007 she was pregnant. They depended on me a lot during this time, because they felt like they didn’t have anyone else they could trust. They were probably right; we were living at a university populated almost entirely by uptight, overachieving white kids, and Sarah and Daniel didn’t fit the mold. Sarah was impulsive, irresponsible, and unreliable; Daniel was Mexican, not college-educated, and unemployed. They were targets. By April of that year, they moved to California to be closer to Daniel’s family, since Sarah’s (conservative ...

I have a couple of dear friends who’ve depended on me a lot over the last few years. Sarah and Daniel (not their real names) started dating in late 2006, and by the spring of 2007 she ...

Being an American feminist in an Arab village

Let me tell you about being an American feminist in Arab villages in Israel. For the past two months, I’ve been interning with Kayan, an Arab feminist organization located in Haifa. In college, I studied women’s studies and co-founded a gender equality club that addressed gender issues on our conservative Christian campus. Women’s studies jolted me into life, and only since coming to Israel have I felt so alive again.
There are lots of things American women don’t understand about Palestinian women. Are they all Muslim? Why don’t some of them wear the veil? What are their daily lives like? I came to Israel with the same questions, and have yet to understand all the complexities of Palestinian women in ...

Let me tell you about being an American feminist in Arab villages in Israel. For the past two months, I’ve been interning with Kayan, an Arab feminist organization located in Haifa. In college, I studied women’s studies ...

The Male Gaze and the Beauty of the Female Form

The assertion that women’s bodies are inherently beautiful, while men’s bodies are strange and ugly is frequently invoked by straight, cisgendered men. It is used as a justification for the objectification of women, and as a reason for the idea that straight women should enjoy going to strip clubs with their partners. It justifies the expectation that straight women “experiment” with other women, while simultaneously excusing homophobia. Many straight men believe there is something intrinsically alluring and sensual about the female form. More importantly, they think that this sensual quality is inherently lacking from the male form. They tend to state this stance openly, and take it for granted as fact rather than as subjective preference. That this viewpoint blatantly ...

The assertion that women’s bodies are inherently beautiful, while men’s bodies are strange and ugly is frequently invoked by straight, cisgendered men. It is used as a justification for the objectification of women, and as a reason ...

An Eating Disorder — Ten Years Later

Between the spring of 1999 and that fall, I lost one third of my body weight. I became a size 0. I went from a BMI of 24 to a BMI of 16. For months, my weight hovered around 100 pounds. Those months were exactly ten years ago. This realization has given rise to some interesting reflections.

I’ve always been a nostalgic person. More than that—I’ve always been a person who likes to remember, and privately commemorate, both good and bad events and memories. Something about the passage of time is both comforting and encouraging for me. Reflecting on my ever-growing base of experiences reassures me that I am, in fact, more mature and a more “whole adult” now than I ...

Between the spring of 1999 and that fall, I lost one third of my body weight. I became a size 0. I went from a BMI of 24 to a BMI of 16. For months, my weight ...

Effortless Perfection

The term “effortless perfection” was first coined by a student at Duke University (whose name, interestingly, I have been unable to find despite scouring the internet for it). You’ve probably heard of it before. Or, if not, you’ve probably thought it. It refers to the expectation that women fit our society’s unrealistic and arbitrarily-defined standard of beauty and desirability without seeming to expend any effort to achieve it. (The conversation at Duke also included the concept of achieving academic perfection without trying too hard. It’s a great topic and worthy of discussion, but I’ll omit it in this particular post because the subject matter is already broad enough as it is. Plus it’s less personally vent-worthy for me. Eh well.)

The term “effortless perfection” was first coined by a student at Duke University (whose name, interestingly, I have been unable to find despite scouring the internet for it). You’ve probably heard of it before. Or, if not, ...

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