My mother made me spend the day with her one day because she was home alone.
While we were playing together, she suddenly took off all her clothes.
“Come here,” she said.
“Take off your clothes.”
sexual violence, child molestation, sexuality, masturbation

It didn’t feel normal or spontaneous.
Between being scolded by your conservative [female] relative for doing something “immodest” and listening to your friends whispering about touching certain [private] areas on maids’ and female cousins’ bodies, you eventually learn to associate the opposite sex’s body with shame.
There has got to be something shameful about it.

I’m not a woman, right?
I’m no longer a woman, am I?
How can I be a woman,
If I don’t get my period every month?
A little thing was gone,
And with it a lot of blood was lost.
My secrets were gone with it.
Where will I keep my secrets now?

There are a lot of things I don’t have a problem with.
I’m an open-minded liberal.
But I never imagined this would happen to me or anyone I know.
With a blank look on my face, I told her/him, “No, I can’t.”
And I ran out of the room.

Everyone felt bad for her when they broke up.
“We’ll take you to a doctor for a virginity test. We need to know if he left you because you slept together,” her father said.

"No, Hatem is such a girl. He's shy and doesn't like talking about asses and boobs and stuff like that!"

For the longest time, perhaps until after highschool, I thought all girls were like me.
Then I found out that not all of them were like me.
I didn’t understand what it meant. What’s the difference?
I would always avoid thinking about the incident.
Until a black cloud formed in my mind, engulfing the memory of this incident.

My story is the story of hundreds of people.
The story is that of differences.
The difference that isn’t allowed,
Which you’re scared of and hate,
Because you know it’s haram.

We were all girls like you once.
I was a young girl just like you before marrying your father.
We all went through the same things.
We’d just play sports and take a cold shower.

My friend and I—whom my mother chose for me because he was “well-behaved”—used to frequent each other’s houses for private tutoring lessons.
He asked me one time before the lesson about masturbation—something I knew nothing about.
He insisted on doing it in front of me.
sex, sex education, sexuality, masculinity, body image