Mona Eltahawy’s article “Why do they hate us?,” published in Foreign Policy Magazine’s special issue on women, has a catchy title. When I first saw it, I honestly thought it was referring to the Egyptian military’s violations of women’s rights by performing “virginity tests” — especially as the military’s aim seemed to be to exclude women from taking part in political life by brutalizing them and showing them as fragile and vulnerable.
But it was not.