When I was growing up, an only child in a Pakistini Muslim family in Halifax, sex was a taboo subject. Although sex was inferred all the time through dictates about correct behaviour, it was never discussed openly. I never had the ‘birds and bees’ talk from my mother, and the only time sex came up was when girls went ‘bad’. Girls who were found to have boyfriends were quickly married off before they could do anything to dishonour the family name. And in a world where the hymen was so crucial, even tampons were suspect – a woman’s honour was quite literally located between her legs.
At first, this culture at home seemed diametrically opposed to what I was experiencing at school – many of my friends either had or wanted boyfriends. Despite this, I could see many of the same values inflected through slightly different prisms – boys wanted notches on the bed post while girls were obsessed with being fun without being ‘easy’. Double standards for the sexes were embedded in both cultures, with women being an easy target for denigration. Through school, university and in my professional life I became increasingly conscious of the wider impact of the differing narratives about men’s and women’s interactions.
In addition, as a Muslim woman, I was always struck by how Muslim women were constantly viewed in a very binary manner: either liberated (brainwashed by Western culture) or oppressed (brainwashed by Muslim men). Neither view allowed much space for female agency. However, in my experience, women everywhere – regardless of culture and religion – experience the same pressures dressed up in different narratives.
Literature has always been my route into the world around me, providing an education in walks of life I can’t experience and empathy with people I will never meet. So it was books, ranging from Fanny Hill to the Arabian Nights, that gave me the sex education which my mother didn’t and which my friends mangled. My first ideas of romance came from the brooding heroes of Mills and Boons. I devoured these books in my early teens before finding the ultimate doomed love in Heathcliff. I discovered Jeanette Winterson when I watched the BBC adaptation of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit – and to this day, hers are the books I turn to when I want to remember that love and passion are possible.
My inspiration for creating Bradford Literature Festival came from the idea that without education – without books – our options and outlook are limited. Literacy enables us to engage with the world, and change it. Books allowed me to work out how I felt about my body, my religion, my sexuality, and the interaction between these. Reading voraciously gave me confidence in my identity as a woman on the cusp of two cultures. And now that I have a teenage daughter, super-glued to social media, I am even more aware of the progress and setbacks in perceptions of female sexuality, and the need to respond to it.
Alankrita Shrivastava’s Lipstick Under My Burkha – a film we’re screening at the festival, which depicts the empowering potential of women’s sexuality and the confines of societal structures – was initially banned in India for being too “lady orientated”. When I first watched it I was angered and saddened at how a woman’s sexuality is so often exploited as a tool for public shaming in a way that men’s isn’t.
At its most extreme, this shaming can take the form of physical violence such as FGM and honour killings. Last year, Bradfordian Samia Shahidwas lured to Pakistan and raped by her first husband as her father held her down, before being brutally murdered – all for daring to marry the man of her choice. This horrendous testimony to the equation of a woman’s honour with her sexuality has been challenged publicly by Shahid’s MP Naz Shah, the first politician to attempt to change the law to allow greater prosecution of so-called ‘honour killings’. In this year’s festival Shah, along with other writers and activists, will tackle these challenging issues with a frank discussion about the invidious obsession with hymens.
I have been greatly inspired by Laura Bates’ assertion that girls must understand that they should enjoy sex instead of thinking of it as something to be endured, to submit to when their resistance is worn down. Mona Eltahawy struck an equal chord in me with her rallying cry of “Stay out of my vagina unless I want you in there”. People like this inspire me to empower and educate other women about the debates around sexual shaming and sexual violence – which are by no means confined to any one culture and religion.
What’s more, in this era of sexting, nude selfies and revenge porn, the objectification of a woman’s body can start early. With sexual shaming now a norm amongst teenagers, and sexual violence against women continuing unabated around the world, we urgently need to have these difficult conversations, so that our daughters learn that their sexuality is something to be enjoyed, not endured – or worse, exploited.