Eltahawy’s description—and it is merely a description, not an analysis—disappoints many Arab, Muslim, and non-Western feminists because it thrives on cultural essentialism: They, Arab men, hate us because this is how our culture is, because something is inherently wrong about the culture itself that they have created. Instead of moving the discussion beyond essentialist claims—the sort that Christian fundamentalists, racist Islamophobes, neoconservatives, LePen supporters in France, and Rick Santorum, to name a few propagate—Eltahawy as a native speaker and herself a victim of Arab misogyny, provides fodder for such misconstrued claims that Arab feminists have been desperately trying to deconstruct. The disappointment lies not in the fact that Eltahawy made us look bad in public—as she claimed in a television appearance on MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry show—but in the failure to perform the very task her article title promised: Providing an answer. The result is a tautological piece, that starts with the conclusion and misidentifies the who and the what of that hate.
▻http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/5355/politics-at-the-tip-of-the-clitoris_why-in-fact-do
